Endnotes
3.4 Benefits for parents
p
There is increased involvement in education for parents and, in some cases, improved self-esteem.p
There is increased knowledge of their children’s learning and capabilities, owing to an increase in learning activity which is situated in the home.4
Wenger and communities of practice
Etienne Wenger (1998) poses the question:
‘What if the key to complex knowledge challenges faced by most organisations today lies in the age old, utterly familiar, and largely informal social structures known today as communities of practice.
Wenger (2001) further developed the concept and related it to the role of technology in supporting communities in practice, and while the main thrust of this work was the exploration of appropriate technological platforms, some of the key principles resonate with the activities of the Toshiba Ambassadors.
According to Wenger, not every community is a community of practice. The fans who come together in the City Of Manchester Stadium to support the Manchester City football team can be described as a community, but not a community of practice. He asserts that three characteristics are essential:
The domain: since a community of practice is focused on a domain of shared interest, it is not merely a club of friends or a network of
connections between people. Membership implies a minimum level of knowledge of that domain – a shared competence that
distinguishes members from other people.
The community: in pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other and share
information. That is how they form a community around their domain and build relationships.
Having the same job or the same title does not make a community of practice unless the members interact and learn together.
The practice: a community of practice is not merely a community of interest or people who like certain kinds of film, for example. Members of a community of practice develop a shared repertoire of resources, experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short, a shared practice.
Wenger goes on to say that communities of practice are not a novelty. They are not a new solution to existing problems: in fact, they are just as likely to have been involved in the development of these problems. In particular, they are not a design fad, a new kind of organisational unit or a pedagogical device to be implemented. They are about content, learning and a living experience of negotiating meaning, they are not about form. They cannot be legislated into existence or defined by decree.
They can be recognised, supported, encouraged and nurtured, but they are not reified designable units. Practice itself is not amenable to design.
Harrison 103
5
Conclusion and future work
There are currently 12 members of the Toshiba Ambassadors (UK). There is strong evidence that they have the potential to mature into a
community of practice, as Wenger (1998, 2001) defines it. They have formed a symbiotic relationship that has resulted in organisational and individual development. Most importantly, they have had a significant impact on teaching and learning within their own schools and colleges and shared best practice at local, national and international levels.
Further work will focus on the maturation of the community and the addition of new members as well as an evaluation of the impact of the
Ambassador programme.
References
Becta (2004). What the research says about portable ICT devices in teaching and learning.
Coventry: British Educational Communications and Technology Agency.
ICT (2005). ICT school portraits.
At http://schoolportraits.eur.org, accessed 10 September 2005.
Ofsted (2004). ICT in schools – the impact of government initiatives five years on. London:
Office for Standards in Education.
Perry D (2002). Wireless networking in schools.
Coventry: Becta/DfES/Technology College Trust.
Seale J (2004). The development of accessibility practices in e learning: an exploration of
communities of practice. ALT Journal of Research in Learning Technology, 12(1).
Toshiba (2005). Toshiba Ambassadors programme. At www.freedomlearning.co.uk, accessed 10 September 2005.
Wenger E (1998). Communities of practice:
learning, meaning and identity. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Wenger E (2001). Supporting communities of practice – a survey of community oriented technologies. A shareware report.
At www.ewenger.com/tech, accessed 14 September 2005.
104 Mobile learning anytime everywhere
Abstract
Consuming learning material via mobile devices is deemed to be much more tiring and
significantly less efficient than learning from printed material. In the likely scenario that users of online learning environments will escape them by printing out the content, they will typically lose didactically relevant features like interactivity, hyperlinks, colour, video and audio. The PaperLinks approach tries to overcome this dilemma by supporting the learner in accessing such computer-based features while they are reading the corresponding printed material.
PaperLinks are systematic augmentations of printed versions of hypermedia content that work in such a way that accessing online features is still only one ‘click’ away, provided that a mobile device is kept handy.
Keywords
digitally augmented paper, hypermedia, Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSLT)
1
Introduction
While there seems to be a unanimous trend towards e-learning environments, the fact that reading text from computer screens is
considered much more fatiguing and significantly less efficient than reading paper text cannot be ignored, especially in the domain of mobile computing with small screen sizes, and
particularly in the context of learning, where text is being read over and over (Mills and Weldon 1987; Learn and Mirski 2003). Thus, it is very likely that users will be printing out the content provided by their learning environment, thereby typically losing didactically relevant features like interactivity, hyperlinks, colour, video and audio.
PaperLinks – linking printouts to mobile devices
Martin Hitz Stefan Plattner
[email protected] [email protected]
Department of Informatics Systems University of Klagenfurt
Universitätsstrasse 65–67 A–9020 Klagenfurt Austria
To save the ‘didactic power’ of such features, it is essential that the reader of paper text is offered immediate access to those computer-based teaching elements when necessary. The efficiency of the access method is absolutely crucial – entering a complete URL via a PDA is certainly not a realistic option.
In section 2, we give an overview of our approach to solving the problem, based on the concept of digitally augmented paper
(Guimbretière 2003). In sections 3 and 4 respectively, the architecture of an implementation and specific input modes supported are discussed. An overview of future work concludes the paper (section 5).
2
The PaperLink approach
The concept of PaperLinks is a straightforward attempt to combine the advantages of two very different but complementary media – traditional paper and hypermedia. The challenge is to bridge the gap between the two in a technically sound and usable way. In the first step of the
transformation of a hypermedia document to a paper printout, all information which would normally get lost is identified and encoded in the printout as so-called PaperLinks. This
augmentation step is totally transparent for the user and will be explained in section 3.
PaperLinks are realised as short numerical identifiers (IDs) associated to objects exclusively available in hypermedia. The crucial part of the concept is to provide a simple and usable way to input such IDs into a mobile device in the course of reading the printed material.
Hitz Plattner 105
To achieve this, several approaches exist, determining the final representation of the PaperLinks in the printout.
Key: += pros; –= cons
p
Direct inputof a short number (eg 2–4 digits) (see also section 4.1)+ No special hardware needed
+ Easy to understand and implement; reliable – Requires manual user input over keyboard
or similar
– Only valid in a restricted scope
p
Input via barcode-scanner(pencil) + Fast and convenient– Requires additional (relatively exotic) hardware – Less reliable than direct input
p
Input via voice recognition+ Fast and convenient (numbers represent a small, closed domain)
+ No exotic hardware needed – Less reliable than direct input – Implementation can be complex on
mobile devices
3
Architecture
This description of the general architecture is based on a prototypical implementation in an ongoing national e-learning project [part of the international MOBIlearn initiative (2005)], where the content is organised in small building blocks called ‘learning units’ (LUs). LUs are available for three different platforms (PC, PDA and
Smartphone). Such an LU is the starting point of the augmentation process shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1
PaperLink processing
FOP Formatting Object Processor LU Learning Unit
ML MOBILearn
URI Universal Resource Identifier Xerces Apache XML parser
XSL Extensible Stylesheet Language XSL–FO XSL-Formatting Objects
XSLT XSL Transformations
An LU is an XML document, which is the basic input for the ‘Augmentor’ process, in which all objects of interest (interactions, videos, images, external hyperlinks, links to glossary entries, etc) are identified and unique identifiers (IDs) are generated, constituting their corresponding PaperLinks. These IDs, in combination with an object-discriminating Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), are stored in a database (content
metadata). The IDs are embedded into the LU document as XML processing instructions (PI) – thus, the document remains valid with respect to a given Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML Schema. Finally, the augmented document is transformed into a printable PDF document.
The resulting printout – which now contains a specific representation of the PaperLinks (seeFigure 2opposite) – is ‘processed’ by the user who has a device with an active
‘ID–Listener’ nearby. The ID–Listener is a platform-specific process that waits for the user to input PaperLinks, resolving the associated objects and triggering the appropriate rendering processes (eg video player, web browser).
106 Mobile learning anytime everywhere
Figure 2 PaperLink representation in printout
4
ID–Listeners implemented
Two ID–Listeners have been implemented in the project so far and are presented in the following sub-sections.