April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

Methods
Before the experiment, a mobile communication experience survey was used to assess learners’ ML experience.
According to the results, about 80% of learners did not have relevant mobile device experience in using mobile
communication. It implies most learners had insufficient knowledge with regard to the ability and experience
operating mobile devices. Thus, before the experiment, learners had to study how to use mobile device to correctly
operate each tool in the proposed ML environment.
Additionally, to know whether the participants have basic knowledge of traffic violations, a driving license
automobile or motorcycle survey was used to assess learner’s traffic violation understanding. This result revealed all
participants have at least one driving license and implied they have basic knowledge of traffic violations. In the
following, the experiment was designed to answer the research questions.
Participants
This study recruited 32 volunteer participants, consisting of 17 males and 15 females, who were attending the
Department of Information Management, Taiwan. Seventeen learners were graduate students and fifteen were
college students. The mean ages of college and graduate students were 18 and 23, respectively. There were two
learners’ characteristics to be considered in designing this study. One was gender, and the other was age. In addition,
each characteristic had two groups divided according to the learners who were the same gender or similar age level.
Therefore, there were four groups (conditions) in this study (see Table 1).
Before the experiment, all participants indicated they were highly interested in using mobile devices to enhance their
learning experiences. Additionally, to ensure that all participants seriously take the learning activities, all participants
were asked to read and understand the instructions and the procedure of the experiment as well as to post reflection
content according to the design of the learning activity and share comments with their peers.
Table 1. Distribution of the participants for each group
Conditions Gender Age N Group
1 Male High age 9 M-H Group
2 Male Low age 8 M-L Group
3 Female High age 8 F-H Group
4 Female Low age 7 F-L Group
Design of the learning activity
In this study, the learning activities were designed based on social constructivist theory and co-reflection learning
strategy. These learning activities stress a need to place learners in a mobile reflective learning environment in which
they can engage in effortful interactions with real-life context, the proposed system, and peers to improve the
reflection. With learning devices, wireless connections, and the MTVRS, the reflective learning activities are
executable without constraints of time or location. More detailed reflective learning activities are described as
follows.
The learning topic of this study was “what situations may cause a traffic violation for a person or a car? And how can
we avoid such violation?” In the beginning of the learning activity, with regard to the same characteristics of gender
and similar age level, the participants were assigned to four different groups. After grouping, each learner then read
through the pretest traffic violations article and co-reflection with peers in their group to respond to all questions
based on which condition he or she was allocated. During the experimental period, each group was asked to
contribute the learning resources and helpful reflection content. Thus, the learners used a Smart Phone to photograph
local subjects, including traffic violation events and situations from their real-life surroundings. After finishing a
subject creation, the learners had to reflect the event they had constructed. Additionally, learners were asked to share
their comments or suggestions with their peers in their group. More specifically, during the learning process, each
participant was guided by the following steps to complete the reflective learning activities with the proposed system:
(1) to read the instructions, (2) to explore the real-life situations related to the learning topic, (3) to post reflection
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