<p>Recent development in modern computing has led to a more diverse use of devices within the field of mobility. Many mobile devices of today can, for instance, surf the web and connect to wireless networks, thus gradually merging the wired Internet with the mobile Internet. As mobile devices by design usually have built-in means for creating rich media content, along with the ability to upload these to the Internet, these devices are potential contributors to the already overwhelming content collection residing on the World Wide Web. While interesting initiatives for structuring and filtering content on the World Wide Web exist – often based on various forms of metadata – a unified understanding of individual content is more or less restricted to technical metadata values, such as file size and file format. These kinds of metadata make it impossible to incorporate the purpose of the content when designing applications. Answers to questions such as "why was this content created?" or "in which context was the content created?" would allow for a more specified content filtering tailored to fit the end-users cause. In the opinion of the authors, this kind of understanding would be ideal for content created with mobile devices which purposely are brought into various environments. This is why we in this thesis have investigated in which way descriptions of contexts could be caught, structured and expressed as machine-readable semantics.</p><p>In order to limit the scope of our work we developed a system which mirrored the context of ubiquitous learning activities to a database. Whenever rich media content was created within these activities, the system associated that particular content to its context. The system was tested during live trials in order to gather reliable and “real” contextual data leading to the transition to semantics by generating Rich Document Format documents from the contents of the database. The outcome of our efforts was a fully-functional system able to capture contexts of pre-defined ubiquitous learning activities and transforming these into machine-readable semantics. We would like to believe that our contribution has some innovative aspects – one being that the system can output contexts of activities as semantics in real-time, allowing monitoring of activities as they are performed.</p>

<p>Recent developments in modern computing and wireless networks allow mobile devices to be connected to the Internet regardless of their physical location. These mobile devices, such as smart phones and PDAs, have turned into powerful multimedia units allowing users to become producers of rich media content. This latest development contributes to the ever-growing amount of digital material existing on the World Wide Web, and at the same time creates a new information landscape that combines content coming from both, the wired and mobile Internet. Thus, it is important to understand the context or settings in which mobile devices are used, and what is the digital content produced by the different users. In order to gain more knowledge about this domain, we have investigated how to extend the standard metadata related to content with a metadata domain describing the context, or settings in which the content has been created.</p><p>In order to limit the scope of our work, we have focused our efforts in a specific case taking place in a project called AMULETS. The AMULETS-project contains all of the elements we need in order to resemble the contextual setting in a metadata model. Combined with the technical metadata associated to the digital content, we try to display the benefits of capturing the different attributes of the context that were present when the content was generated. Additionally, we have created a proof-of-concept Entity Relation (ER)-diagram which proposes how the metadata models can be implemented in a relational database. As the nature of the thesis is design-oriented, a model has been developed and it will be illustrated throughout this report. The aim of the thesis is to show how it is possible to design new metadata models that combine both relevant attributes of the context and content in order to develop new educational activities supported by location-based services.</p>

In recent years, mobile devices have become an integral part of our everyday life in various fields. The technology that powers them is used in various devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and PDAs. These devices hold extensive computation capabilities, along with advanced communication abilities, which are supported by an internet connection and diverse types of motion and location sensors. Mobile devices have changed the way people communicate with each other, for example by providing options to send instant text messages, perform live video calls with others in addition to voice conversations. These capabilities have encouraged educators to exploit mobile technology and promote new types of learning options. There are several new learning possibilities based on tools such as mobile dedicated applications, location-based learning activities, and interactive social related tasks. These new uses require adjustments to educational programs to allow support for this type of learning. The uniqueness of mobile learning, in contrast with the classic learning paradigm, is the ability to connect the learner through enhanced learning materials to the outside environment. This breaks the physical borders that exist in the traditional classroom and creates new learning possibilities, but it has its drawbacks. One of the difficulties that arise from this type of learning is the loss of contact in real time between teacher and student, especially when performing outdoor activities. The Treasure-HIT platform was conceived to create outdoor Treasure Hunt-based games, mainly for educational purposes, by introducing an authoring web platform and a supporting mobile application. The platform includes communication capabilities based on social interactions and cooperative learning with the integration of social networks, and yet real-time educator and student communication is still lacking. Adding real-time communication features provides a way to better support ongoing learning activities, and can take pressure off the learning process for the students, by providing them with a more personal experience and immediate support when needed. This thesis follows the process of addressing this concern in TreasureHIT, including the rationale, the background, the possible options and gradual development of a prototype solution to the problem under the existing Treasure-HIT infrastructure. In the thesis, the advantages of two features are explored: (1) the Realtime Group Tracking Map, which provides a way to monitor the movement and action of groups of players during game time, and (2) Instant Text Messaging service, which allows the game instructor to send custom text messages to the different game groups. The research findings indicate that the new monitoring options provide a solid tool for real-time analysis of the progress of the game and the ability to inform about various issues and solve them in real time. ii Furthermore, the instant message service feature received positive responses from the game-manager and players alike, on the grounds of major improvements to the general game flow and problem solving in real-time.

Recent developments in modern computing and wireless networks allow mobile devices to be connected to the Internet regardless of their physical location. These mobile devices, such as smart phones and PDAs, have turned into powerful multimedia units allowing users to become producers of rich media content. This latest development contributes to the ever-growing amount of digital material existing on the World Wide Web, and at the same time creates a new information landscape that combines content coming from both, the wired and mobile Internet. Thus, it is important to understand the context or settings in which mobile devices are used, and what is the digital content produced by the different users. In order to gain more knowledge about this domain, we have investigated how to extend the standard metadata related to content with a metadata domain describing the context, or settings in which the content has been created. In order to limit the scope of our work, we have focused our efforts in a specific case taking place in a project called AMULETS. The AMULETS-project contains all of the elements we need in order to resemble the contextual setting in a metadata model. Combined with the technical metadata associated to the digital content, we try to display the benefits of capturing the different attributes of the context that were present when the content was generated. Additionally, we have created a proof-of-concept Entity Relation (ER)-diagram which proposes how the metadata models can be implemented in a relational database. As the nature of the thesis is design-oriented, a model has been developed and it will be illustrated throughout this report. The aim of the thesis is to show how it is possible to design new metadata models that combine both relevant attributes of the context and content in order to develop new educational activities supported by location-based services.

Recent development in modern computing has led to a more diverse use of devices within the field of mobility. Many mobile devices of today can, for instance, surf the web and connect to wireless networks, thus gradually merging the wired Internet with the mobile Internet. As mobile devices by design usually have built-in means for creating rich media content, along with the ability to upload these to the Internet, these devices are potential contributors to the already overwhelming content collection residing on the World Wide Web. While interesting initiatives for structuring and filtering content on the World Wide Web exist – often based on various forms of metadata – a unified understanding of individual content is more or less restricted to technical metadata values, such as file size and file format. These kinds of metadata make it impossible to incorporate the purpose of the content when designing applications. Answers to questions such as "why was this content created?" or "in which context was the content created?" would allow for a more specified content filtering tailored to fit the end-users cause. In the opinion of the authors, this kind of understanding would be ideal for content created with mobile devices which purposely are brought into various environments. This is why we in this thesis have investigated in which way descriptions of contexts could be caught, structured and expressed as machine-readable semantics. In order to limit the scope of our work we developed a system which mirrored the context of ubiquitous learning activities to a database. Whenever rich media content was created within these activities, the system associated that particular content to its context. The system was tested during live trials in order to gather reliable and “real” contextual data leading to the transition to semantics by generating Rich Document Format documents from the contents of the database. The outcome of our efforts was a fully-functional system able to capture contexts of pre-defined ubiquitous learning activities and transforming these into machine-readable semantics. We would like to believe that our contribution has some innovative aspects – one being that the system can output contexts of activities as semantics in real-time, allowing monitoring of activities as they are performed.

In this thesis we are presenting a design-based research aimed to extend an existing mobile-based environment named “Treasure-HIT”. “Treasure-HIT” is an environment which uses the available mobile technology to enable teachers to conduct pedagogical “Treasure Hunt” games for their students. At baseline (January 2013), “Treasure-HIT” was at its early stages and has not yet been officially released; only a few teachers were granted access to it. The goal of this thesis was to test the system with teachres in order to understand the actual needs to detect difficulties and usabily limitations and to improve the system accordingy.The sudy was conducted as a design-based research that included three iterations. Within each iteration we have identified needs expressed by teachers and improved the relevant system features. The outcome of this thesis was the design, development and implementation of 7 different features that increased the usability of the “Treasure-HIT” environment and its potential to effectievy support the creation and enactment of pedagogical location based activities.

Augmented Reality (AR) has become a popular interactive technique in the last few years. One of the critical challenges is to identify the real-life objects. Further, how to fully exert the advantages of the AR technique under the limited resources available on the mobile devices is another critical challenge. To resolve the above issue, firstly this thesis reviewed the real-life object tagging and identification techniques. Secondly this thesis studied the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Interface and the environmental sensors on the mobile phones. Lastly this thesis implemented a Multiple Real-life Object Identification Algorithm along with the development of the Multi Object Identification Augmented Reality (MOIAR) application. Subsequently, the MOIAR application has been implemented in the location-based mobile learning environment, where the Legislative Assembly of Alberta is included as an example real-life learning object. This MOIAR implementation has applied the tagging and identification technique review as well as the HCI and sensors study, to prove the usability and practicability of the MOIAR application. / 2012-01

People unconsciously learn spatial information about places they encounter frequently, leading them to search through familiar scenes faster than for unfamiliar scenes. We explored this phenomenon—the contextual cueing effect—in scenes containing images of different human faces. Participants searched through a series of scenes for a target among distractors, characterized as a letter T among letter L’s with each letter positioned on top of a face image (Experiment 1) or as a female face among male faces (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that when the binding of identity and location was manipulated during learning, slightly greater (but not statistically significant) contextual cueing effects were found for repeated scenes with constant identity-to-location binding than those repeated scenes with constant spatial configurations but shuffled identity-to-location binding. Experiment 2 showed that if the binding of identity-to-location changed after the learning of a set of identity-to-location binding, small (but not statistically significant) costs of contextual cueing were found. The results suggest that in the contextual cueing paradigm, repeated identity-to-location binding might be learned but the learning of repeated spatial configurations alone account for a major portion of the learning. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

L’essor des périphériques mobiles (ex. tablettes, smartphones) ainsi que leurs applications pédagogiques et ludiques ont contribué à la naissance des Jeux Éducatifs Mobiles (JEM). De nombreux chercheurs ont prouvé les effets positifs de ces JEM sur la motivation des apprenants et même sur certains apprentissages. Cependant, l’utilisation de JEM en contexte scolaire reste très limitée. En effet, les JEM existants, parfois assez coûteux, sont souvent conçus pour un domaine très spécifique, et n’offrent donc pas de possibilités de réutilisation. De plus, les outils auteur existants sont, soit riches en fonctionnalités mais nécessitent un investissement important des enseignants pour être pris en main, soit simples à utiliser mais ne permettent pas de concevoir des JEM qui répondent aux besoins pédagogiques. Pour s’attaquer à ces problématiques, nous proposons JEM iNVENTOR, un outil auteur de JEM, fondé sur une approche de conception gigogne, destiné aux enseignants, conservateurs de musée, ou toute personne non-informaticienne, qui souhaitent scénariser leurs propres JEM et les déployer sur les systèmes mobiles.Le modèle de conception gigogne a été validé par une série d’expérimentations auprès d’une vingtaine d’enseignants ayant des niveaux d’expertises et des domaines d’enseignement très variés. Nous avons également mené des expérimentations de terrain, auprès d’environ 1500 étudiants et élèves, afin d’évaluer la qualité des JEM créés avec JEM iNVENTOR ainsi que leur impact sur les apprenants. / The rise of mobile devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones) and their educational and recreational applications have contributed to the emergence of Mobile Learning Games (MLGs). Indeed, MLGs show great potential for increasing engagement, creativity and authentic learning. Yet, despite their great potential for education, the use of MLGs by teachers, remains very limited. This is partly due to the fact that MLGs are often designed to match a specific learning context, and thus cannot be directly reusable for other contexts. In addition, existing authoring tools are either feature-rich but require a significant investment by teachers to be used, or simple to use but do not offer enough features for the design of MLGs that meet pedagogical needs. To tackle these problems, we propose JEM iNVENTOR, a MLG authoring tool, based on a nested design approach, intended for teachers, museum curators, or any person without computer skills, wishing to script their own MLG and deploy them on mobile systems.The nested design model was approved through a series of experimentations with some twenty teachers from a wide range of expertise levels and teaching fields. We also conducted field experimentations with about 1500 students and pupils in order to evaluate the quality of MLGs created with JEM iNVENTOR as well as their impact on learners.

Upplevelser med hjälp av kroppen och användningen av olika sinnen är betydelsefullt för människans lärande. Inlärningsprocessen kan implementeras och förstärkas genom utomhuspedagogik. Trots lärares medvetenhet av effekter av utomhuspedagogiken är detta inte något som används allt för flitigt i dagens skola och frågan är varför? Hur kommer det sig att lärare väljer att stanna innanför klassrummets fyra väggar och undervisa? Vad är det som hindrar lärare att ta sig utanför klassrummet och undervisa i en utomhusmiljö? Syftet med studien är att bidra med ökad kunskap om utomhuspedagogikens svårigheter, möjligheter och effekter. Studien riktar sig mot mellanstadielärare i en mindre kommun i södra Sverige som undervisar i SO-ämnen. Två forskningsfrågor besvaras i resultatet som är följande; Vilka möjligheter och svårigheter kan So-lärare uppleva i arbetet med utomhuspedagogik? och Vad anser SO-lärare underlättar användningen av utomhuspedagogik? Studien utgår från Szczepanskis (2007) teori som belyser platsbaserat lärande där en människa lär i samband med kroppen och alla sina sinnen. Att få undervisning utomhus kan bidra till goda effekter på elevers lärande, bland annat handlar det om att elever får aktivera sig fysiskt och vara i en miljö som bidrar till en god hälsa. Genom att lämna en strukturerad klassrumsmiljö och få möta en ostrukturerad utemiljö lär eleven sig genom helhetsupplevelser. För att besvara studiens forskningsfrågor har sex mellanstadielärare med inriktning på SO-ämnena intervjuats genom semistrukturerad intervju. Med utgångspunkt i studiens syfte och frågeställningar formulerades resultatets huvudrubriker; utomhuspedagogikens svårigheter, utomhuspedagogikens möjligheter och främjande arbete. I resultatet framkom det att placering av skola, planering, tid, kompetens och läroplan har en stor betydelse för användandet av utomhuspedagogik i SO-ämnena. Det framkom även att skolledning och kollegialt arbete har en betydelse för att utomhuspedagogik ska vara genomförbart. / To physically experience and use different senses is valuable for the learning process. The learning process can be implemented and enhanced through outdoor pedagogy. Despite the awareness of the teacher regarding the positive effects of outdoor pedagogy, the method is not used extensively, which is questionable. Why do teachers decide to solely stay inside the classroom and teach? What is hindering the teachers to utilize the many advantages that comes with implementation of outdoor pedagogy? The purpose of this study is to contribute to the knowledge concerning the outdoor pedagogy and its possibilities, difficulties and effects. The study is delimited to intermediate stage teachers in a smaller municipality in the southern of Sweden teaching within the social science subjects. Two research questions are answered in the result which is as follows; What possibilities and difficulties does social science teachers experience when working with outdoor pedagogy? and Which aspects is considered to ease the implementation of outdoor pedagogy? These research questions are answered and discussed in the result section. The study has its base in the theory by Szczepanski (2007) which highlights the benefits of location-based learning where the cognitive and physical aspects interplay. Outdoor pedagogy contributes positive effects of the students learning, especially in environments where the learning is combined with physical activities learning to enhanced health. By adapting a more unstructured learning experience, which is in contrast to the traditional classroom-based learning, students can facilitate their environment in a holistic experience. To be able to answer the research questions, six social science teachers in intermediate stage teaching has been interviewed on behalf of their experiences and insight on outdoor pedagogy. The interviews were conducted through semistructured interviews. Based on the purpose and research questions of the study, the main headings of the result were formulated; the difficulties of outdoor pedagogy, the possibilities of outdoor pedagogy and promotional work. The results indicated the location of the school, planning, time, competence and curriculum to be of great importance for the implementation of outdoor pedagogy within the field of the social science subjects. Further, it was highlighted that school management and collegial cooperation was of importance to be able to implement outdoor pedagogy.