| 31563 |
abstract |
Two recent emerging trends are that of Web 2.0, where users actively create content
and publish it on the Web and also location awareness, where a digital device utilises
a person’s physical location as the context to provide specific services and/or information.
This paper examines how these two phenomena can be brought together, so that user-generated
content on mobile devices are used to provide informal learning opportunities relevant
to a person’s location. However, the generative process of such media does not always
have much guidance on how or what to create, so the quality of such information can
be highly variable. To overcome this, a framework has been designed to guide the authoring
of user-generated content so that it can be used for informal learning about one’s
immediate surroundings (particularly in an outdoor setting), combining pedagogical
aspects with those from human-computer interaction and environmental aesthetics. The
framework consists of six dimensions that include aspects such as curriculum area
(e.g. science; art); type of communication; use of language/media related to the landscape;
knowledge level of content; contextual aspects and types of interaction. In order
to test the framework before it could be used to scaffold new content, it was first
used to analyse and evaluate over 200 items of existing user-generated content, to
investigate the appropriateness of the proposed dimensions and the items contained
therein or if any were missing. This paper presents the findings of this initial testing
phase, together with a discussion of how the framework can be improved, in order to
help scaffold the creation of new user-generated content in the future. |