20101108 - Trifonova, ..Hoarding Content in Mobile Learning..

Trifonova, A. (2006). Toward Hoarding Content in M-Learning Context. University of Trento, Italy. My Interest: 1) Hoarding the learning content. 2) Offline access of learning content. 3) Mobile learning. 4) MobileELDIT. 5) Developing the prototype of mobile learning. Action: To read the entire Dissertation in future. Introduction M-learning is a very new but rapidly expanding domain. Provoked by the fast advances of mobile technologies different applications and systems are developed continuously. Many new re-search topics are emerging in various areas, including technological issues, pedagogical and methodological ones, problems related to content, context, user interfaces, adaptation, etc. Research Goal The main goal of this thesis is to address the hoarding problem, which has been previously weakly explored but is a particularly important issue in the mobile domain and whose solution should be included in every system with a large quantity of data. Problem For e-learning systems which are being converted/adapted for accessing the content through mobile devices it is generally the case – the learning material is often of big size, especially compared with the locally available memory of the device. Comments: I concur with Anna Trifonova. For mobile learning to be truly ubiquitous, it is important for learning content to be accessed online as well as offline. Hence, hoarding learning content and pre-downloading learning content is crucial to enable offline, ubiquitous learning. Solution Hoarding is the process of automatically selecting learning content which has to be prepared and pre-fetched on the mobile device's local memory for the following offline-session. Hoarding is highly needed in the m-learning context for two main reasons. On the first place is the demand to support what is called "any-time, any-place" education. This means that on the mobile device (e.g. a PDA – the kind of device often used in m-learning), which might be often disconnected from the Internet, the needed learning content should be available locally for allowing access during the offline periods. On the second place comes the desire to hide from the student the technologies that lie behind this ubiquitous learning. We would like to free the user from tedious operations of manual preparation and planning his/her next study session. Moreover often we cannot even count on the student's own judgment for his/her knowledge and future needs. In order to attack the main problem the full context around the hoarding had to be constructed and is described throughout the thesis. In this sense the thesis appears to be multidisciplinary as it treats also important questions about the construction and evaluation of an m-learning application. Methodology We have started with the choice of a concrete area for experimenting in mobile learning and hoarding. The chosen field was language learning and a prototype of a mobile language learning system was built. We discuss the general and concrete approaches to develop and build it. Motivations for our choices are given on every step. We describe in details the hoarding problem and the strategy to solve it with the goal to provide an efficient hoarding solution. Experimental results are presented, together with the practical experiences gathered from the interactions with the users. Finally suggestions for improvements and further research issues are given. 2. MOBILE LEARNING STATE OF THE ART 2.1. DEFINING M-LEARNING 2.2. M-LEARNING RESEARCH 2.2.1 Infrastructural Research 2.2.2 Accessing Content 2.2.3 Communicating and Interacting with People 2.3. GUIDELINES FOR M-LEARNING APPLICATIONS 3. THE RESEARCH CONTEXT 3.1. SURVEY ON THE READINESS FOR MOBILE LEARNING 3.1.1 General Information 3.1.2 Availability of devices, their usage and attitude to prices 3.1.3 Ways of usage and attitude to e-learning platforms 3.1.4 What about m-learning? 3.1.5 Deductions 3.1.6 Related Work 3.1.7 Conclusions 3.2. GENERAL MOBILE LEARNING ARCHITECTURE 3.2.1 E-learning 3.2.2 M-Learning 3.2.3 The Architecture 3.2.4 Related Work 3.3. MOBILE ELDIT - A REAL-WORLD SYSTEM 3.3.1 What? /Description of ELDIT/ 3.3.2 Why? /Motivations for the Mobile ELDIT/ 3.3.3 How? /Details on Mobile ELDIT development/ 4. HOARDING: OUTLINE OF THE SOLUTION 4.1. MEASURING THE QUALITY 4.2. DEFINITION OF SESSION IN THE MOBILE LEARNING CONTEXT 4.3. HOARDING ON THE FIRST ACCESS TO THE SYSTEM 4.4. PREDICT THE STARTING POINT 4.5. GENERATE 'CANDIDATE' SET 4.6. PRUNING 4.7. PRIORITIZING 4.8. USER MODELING 5. CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE SOLUTION AND EXPERIMENTAL OUTCOMES 5.1. METHODOLOGY FOR LOOKING AT THE OUTCOMES 5.2. AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE USER 5.2.1 Approach 1: using the online desktop system 5.2.2 Approach 2: using the mobile system 5.3. HOARDING RESULTS 5.3.1 One User Hoarding 5.3.2 User behaviour observations 5.3.3 Hoarding with 'Critical Set' 5.3.4 Combined Hoarding 5.3.5 Association Rules 5.4. OTHER OUTCOMES FROM THE MOBILE LEARNING SYSTEM 5.4.1 Positive Outcomes 5.4.2 Problems Found