January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

To provide personalized (e-)learning, researchers have proposed several personalization mechanisms, such as
adaptive presentation, adaptive navigation support, adaptive instruction and adaptive assessment (Chiou et al., 2010;
Hwang, Chu et al., 2010; Hwang, Tsai et al., 2008; Hwang, Tseng et al., 2008; Martín & Carro, 2009). Among these
personalization mechanisms, adaptive support has become popular in developing context-aware ubiquitous learning
environment (Hwang, Tsai et al., 2008; Martín & Carro, 2009).
The project “Mudlarking in Deptford” in the UK (Sprake, 2009) bears a number of similarities to what we have
done. It is a kind of guided tour that enables students to interact with the environment and other people using mobile
devices. However, the purpose of this paper is to provide a tool that enables learners to experience a poem using
surrounding contextual information. The difference is that students use surrounding context information to enrich
Chinese poetry learning experience in a situated learning environment.
Chinese Poetry Learning
Chinese language learning has attracted world-wide attention in the recent decade (Bai & Li, 1999; Cai, 2003; Hung,
2007; Zhu, 2007). However, the flexible expression of Chinese makes it difficult to learn advanced features of
Chinese, such as the poetry of the Tang Dynasty which is characterized by a lot of information embedded in a limited
number of Chinese characters (Cai, 2008). Based on the theories of Situated Learning and Experiential Learning
(Vince, 1998), outdoor instruction emerges as a promising way to enhance children’s Chinese poetry learning. When
the learner is situated in an environment similar to that which the poem describes, it will be easier for the learner to
understand what the poet meant, thus enhancing the learning performance. Applying u-learning to Chinese poetry
learning is more challenging than applying u-learning to subjects with well-structured knowledge. As indicated by
previous research, personalized guidance in u-learning activities is based on pre-defined knowledge structures, which
are constructed by experts or machine-learning approaches in advance. For Chinese poetry learning, the primary goal
is to inspire students’ feelings, affection and creativity, instead of memorization. Therefore, the knowledge to be
conveyed to students cannot be defined in advance.
Folksonomy
Previous researchers have shown the benefits of applying annotation mechanisms to collaborative learning (Robert,
2009; Su et al., 2010; Yang, 2006; Yang et al., 2004; Yeh & Lo, 2009). In general, the annotation mechanisms can be
classified into two types: taxonomic or non-taxonomic ones. Among these, non-taxonomic annotation mechanisms
(i.e. arbitrary annotations) have become popular in Web 2.0-based annotation and tagging in collaborative learning
environments. Through collaborative learning, folksonomic annotations can be built up into a taxonomy of
annotations.
Folksonomy-based Guidance Mechanism
In this work, a folksonomy-based guidance mechanism is proposed to develop an outdoor learning environment for
Chinese poetry instruction. With this mechanism, the learning system can guide the students to create experiences
related to the poem by sensing their locations.
Learning guidance design and system framework
In this work we develop a learning flow for ubiquitous Chinese poetry instruction. To guide the students to
appreciate poems during the situated learning process, we propose a folksonomy-based guidance mechanism. The
learning flow consists of 4 stages.
Stage 1: Poem Recommendation
The system recommends to a student a list of poems, which are selected according to the student’s location, learning
portfolio, etc. The location context is acquired by GPS. In this study the location of outdoor learning is by a lake, and
there are two poems related to this location can be chosen by students: “Watching Fish” and “On Pond”, as shown in
Figure 5. In this study we focus on reporting the results of “Watching Fish”. After the poem is selected by the
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