With their widespread use and their features such as mobility, localization, and personalization, mobile phones offer a great potential for out-of-class learning. Yet, there is scarce research on the use of mobile phones in language learning contexts nor any on using multimedia messages via mobile phones to improve learners&#039 / vocabulary acquisition. The major aim of this study was to investigate the potentials and effectiveness of using mobile phones in foreign language education. In particular, the effects of using multimedia messages via mobile phones for improving language learners&rsquo / acquisition of words were explored. A mixed method approach involving both quantitative and qualitative components was employed in this study. The quantitative part of the study followed a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design. The qualitative part of the study included post-study semi-structured interviews with the students, and a questionnaire involving open ended items. The participants of this study were a group of students attending the English Preparatory School of an English-medium university in Turkey. Three different groups were formed in order to investigate the comparative effectiveness of supplementary materials delivered through 3 different means: mobile phones, web pages, and printed. Analyses of the quantitative data showed that using mobile phones had positive effects on students&rsquo / vocabulary learning. The qualitative data collected through the questionnaire and the interviews supported this finding. All participants provided positive feedback about the mobile learning application used in this study.

This thesis studies the usability issues of the mobile phone in informal Swedish language learning. The concept of usability is defined by expanding the technical usability attributes of Jakob Nielsen with other recent attributes derived from considering the technical aspects of mobile learning (m-learning). Thus, the ultimate structure of the usability factors that are discussed in this study consists of: accessibility, easy-to-learn, technical design, efficiency and satisfaction. With the support of the relevant previous literature and interview, we research this topic by considering the mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), informal language-learning and usability elements, in order to explore and identify the usability of mobile phone. The goal of this study is to contribute to detailed understanding of mobile phone usage, further identify the usability issues of mobile phones by obtaining both critical and commendatory feedbacks and reflections from the users. For final results, through qualitative research approach, we offered several findings regarding the mobile phone usability with specified reasons.

This study focuses on the theme of technology-based Indigenous language revitalization and maintenance efforts by looking at new developments in mobile technology and how they are used within Indigenous communities for language learning and teaching. I assessed four mobile apps through the use of an evaluation rubric, online user reviews, and developer consultations. The findings from the assessments were then used to determine what essential themes are important when developing an effective and successful language application model (Appendix C), with the intention of developing a user-friendly template for use by other Indigenous communities. Three essential elements were found to be common among the four language applications assessed: (1) successful integration of interactive and digital media that provides a purposeful learning environment for the user; (2) accuracy and testing of both media and the user-interface, and; (3) successful usability and functionality of the mobile platform.

In this research, a context-aware mobile role playing game is developed to provide users with a series of story decorated quests and allows them to interact with specific real and virtual objects in the real world. The game is designed based on multi-agent architecture, which allows reusable and modular agents and makes the game much more flexible and scalable. The usefulness of the CAM-RPG is evaluated with a comprehensive experiment. The interesting findings are: (1) generated story in CAM-RPG positively influences users' attitude toward game use and increases users' perceived game usefulness; (2) users' game-playing confidence, degree of liking computer games, and attitude toward computer games significantly influence attitudes toward CAM-RPG; and (3) there is no gender difference for users' game acceptance, but users' computer game attitude, time spent playing computer games, and voluntariness of use do significantly influence users' acceptance. / 2012-02

This study examined how users interact with a smartphone while in a learning situation based on videos via smartphones as a learning tool, and how this interaction and phenomena is experienced. The five test subject were separately given the same task that they were to solve using video instructions that were picked out and given to them. After finishing the task the subjects were observed while they demonstrated how they completed the task. After the observation the subject were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The results show that the user experience of this phenomena is based on more pragmatic values than we could find in earlier studies, i.e. simplicity and functionality. We found that people in an older generation, age 50-60, had a more positive experience and view on mobile learning as a whole than what was stated in earlier studies. It also shows that the actual interaction with the smartphone during the task was minimal and only used to solve problems with the interaction such as bad image, bad sound or instructions going to fast. We believe that these results can be used in further studies on user experience and mobile learning and also for the designing of new products.

The educational landscape is changing and a variety of technologies and techniques are blurring the lines between traditional and non-traditional learning. This change is substantial in low-income countries: individuals in developing countries have a great desire to educate themselves and improve their quality of life. Kenyans are adequately literate and accustomed to mobile technology despite being a largely impoverished, poorly educated populace. Kenya represents an optimal setting in which to research the use and feasibility of modern mobile and educational technologies. The broad aim of this dissertation is to explore how mobile devices can catalyze and enhance both informal and non-formal learning. In particular, this dissertation explores how technologies and concepts such as mobile web apps, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and learning incentives via a smartphone specifically affect informal and non-formal learning in Kenya. The primary research question is how can learning efforts that utilize mobile learning, MOOCs, and learning incentives combine non-formal and informal learning to develop and contribute to a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to learning in Kenya? The primary method is action research. The first contribution of this dissertation is the finding that mobile web apps are currently better suited for data exchange than producing new content. The second contribution is the finding that a smartphone can enhance informal learning in a developing country with little or no scaffolding. The third contribution is the finding that non-formal learning efforts as a MOOC are shown to be a viable means of delivering non-formal learning in a developing country via a smartphone. The fourth contribution is the finding that the use of incentives such as digital badges provide a means by which to validate non-formal learning and contribute to a DIY attitude towards learning creation, where individuals can freely complement or replace a traditional curriculum.

In order to leverage the use of various modalities such as audio-visual-touch in instilling learning behaviour, we present an intuitive approach of annotation based hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials such as eBooks. By integrating the traditional home entertainment system and respective media in the user's reading experience combined with haptic interfaces, we examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the user's reading experience in terms of attention, entertainment and retention. The proposed Haptic E-Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating audio-video based augmentation in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience in the popular eBook platform. We have designed and developed desktop, mobile/tablet based HE-Book system as well as a semi-automated annotation authoring tool. Our system also supports multimedia based diverse quiz augmentations, which can help in learning tracking. We have conducted quantitative and qualitative tests using the developed prototype systems. We have adopted the indirect objective based performance analysis methodology, which is commonly used for multimedia based learning investigation. The user study shows that, there is a positive tendency of accepting multimodal interactions including haptics with traditional eBook reading experience. Though our limited number of laboratory tests reveal, that haptics can be an influencing media in eBook reading experience, but it requires large scale real life tests to provide a concluding remarks.

As digital books begin to take center stage in our lives the importance of the old printed book still lingers on. A large number of the books printed on the paper media still have much to offer to readers for various reasons (e.g. less famous authors of prose, old books with interesting and original problems). To help individuals in digitizing and reusing their physical and digital books we decided to build a framework that will help people convert physical and digital books to other formats taking into consideration four dimensions: learning outcomes or methodology, target device characteristics, representation and the user. Our focus is on textbooks in history. Consequently, we do not consider some problems like math formulas. This work has the potential of helping people deal with the huge backlog of physical books that can become invisible as the digital books take off. To show that our platform can help in repurposing books for student study activities, we have developed some transformations. The transformations we have implemented shows that the framework can be used to add study aids to books, optimize books for a target platform (e-reader device and application combination), and supplement available features of a target platform and maintain consistency across various audio/visual devices and e-book formats. One of the important steps in the thesis was determining the study activities that we would support as examples in our implementation. We have chosen to implement support for the survey, question, read and review activities of the SQ3R reading technique. We have also implemented support for additional activities like search. The chosen activities and the support implemented for these activities are examples and are not meant to be complete. Another important decision point was to decide which target platforms (e-reader device and application combination) we need to support. We decided to choose a few representatives and leave the rest as future work. The target devices were selected so as to have a variety of device capabilities like screen size, display technology (e.g. e-ink, VGA), and user interaction styles (e.g. touch-based, button based) combined with application capabilities (e.g. audio only, visual only, audio visual, grayscale, and color). The devices selected were: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Kindle 3rd generation, Kindle Fire, Sony PRS and a laptop. The e-reader applications are the ones that are available for these devices.

This thesis investigates the perceptions of students about using mobile communication tools in web-based instruction. A mobile learning portal that can be used by different mobile devices was designed for this purpose. This portal included a mobile discussion forum and a course information system. Sixty undergraduate and five graduate students from METU/CEIT department used this portal as a supportive learning activity in three different courses throughout two-three, and four-week periods. The discussion subjects related to course content were created by instructors in these courses and students used this portal by sending messages or creating new subjects. Assignment results and announcements were inserted into the system by the instructors of these courses. A user evaluation instrument was developed by the researcher and validated by field experts. At the end of the study, perceptions of students were collected about mobile learning, mobile learning technologies and mobile discussion forums by using this instrument. Descriptive statistics were calculated according to the responses of students. The study results show that most of the students enjoyed using mobile technologies in education and they want to use mobile technologies in other courses. Although they like using mobile technologies, they did not increase the level of learning and motivation of the students much. Furthermore, mobile technologies did not increase the communication between students and between students and teachers despite their highly developed communication capabilities. Students could easily use the mobile technologies but small screen sizes and limited keypads hindered them from performing the operations. According to students, the cost of using mobile technologies is quite important whereas the data communication security is not important.

Das Projekt „Entwicklung eines elektronischen Informations- und Lernprogramms zum Arbeitsschutz für Berufskraftfahrerinnen und -fahrer im Fernverkehr“ befasst sich mit Fragen der Lernwirksamkeit und der beruflichen Integrationsfähigkeit von mobilen Lernangeboten für Berufskraftfahrer. Ausgehend von der Problematik der zunehmend älter werdenden Arbeitnehmer und der Notwendigkeit deren Arbeitskraft langfristig zu erhalten, werden Lerninhalte zum Arbeits- und Gesundheitsschutz mediendidaktisch aufbereitet und den Berufskraftfahrern auf einer Lernplattform zur Verfügung gestellt. Per Netbook und UMTS-Verbindung greifen die Fahrer zeit- und ortsunabhängig auf die Lerneinheiten zu und beantworten entsprechende Wissensfragen. Erste Ergebnisse konnten bereits im Rahmen eines Lernmaterialtests gewonnen werden, wohingegen der Usability-Test sich derzeit noch in der Auswertung befindet.