Location-Aware Technology

Schools and universities teach fundamental principles, universal facts, and generalized skills. But some fields also require students to gain knowledge that’s bound to locations or artifacts. Becoming an expert in, for example, geology, medicine, civil engineering, art, or history requires linking situated and generalized knowledge. In this way, general principles are applied in various specific settings, while localized practices, such as recognizing specific disease symptoms or appreciating art, form abstract knowledge. Seamless learning is a new concept proposing that previously distinct learning experiences (inside and outside classrooms; on and off campus) should be linked to appear continuous.1 Personal location–aware technologies, such as mobile devices, can assist this flow by allowing students to collect learning experiences at home, outdoors, and in enriched locations such as museums or field trips, and then examine these experiences in the classroom.2 In a 2014 IEEE Transactions on Learning Technology article, Yael Kali and her colleagues at the University of Haifa described their two-year study in which location-aware technology supported art history students’ learning in three locations.3 In the classroom, instructors demonstrated relevant artappreciation skills using paintings from the course website. The students then visited an art gallery equipped with a Tumblr mobile phone app as well as a custom app that detected the students’ locations and offered a short multi media presentation about the artwork. While in the gallery, student teams, which could still access the course website, used the Tumblr app to document their ideas. They continued this collabo rative activity at home through a shared Google document. Lastly, the students submitted their group assignments to the instructor for feedback. Kali and colleagues reviewed student assignments, observed lessons within classrooms, interviewed instructors and students, and administered a student questionnaire. In using a design-research approach to developing and evaluating technologyenhanced learning, Kali and her team had dual objectives: to improve the learning system’s design and to observe how the learning was enacted in practice. As the activity progressed from the classroom to the museum to the students’ homes, the instructor’s contributions decreased, supporting both independent and collaborative learning. Data analyses showed that the course website was key to connecting the students’ learning across locations. However, the students perceived the app and museum guide as having low usability. Future work should focus on developing location-aware mobile applications that enhance learning and enable smooth activity transitions across the various settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting electronic sharing (E-sharing) behaviour, with a particular focus on location-aware technology. Based on an extensive literature rev iew, a structural model consisting of seven factors was proposed to model the E-sharing behaviour of location-based knowledge (LBK). The main constructs were: reward expectancy (WE), reputation expectancy (RE), perceived benefits (PB), perceived trust (PT), attitudes towards LBK, attitudes toward knowledge sharing incentives (KSI) and intention to share knowledge (ISK). The model was examined by empirical data gathered from four hundred and ninety (n=490) respondents. Results herein indicate that attitude toward KSI can be determined by the RE and WE, while attitude toward LBK E-sharing can be predicted by the PB and PT. The two attitude constructs (KSI and LBK) can determine the behavioural ISK. All of the proposed relationships within the model were statistically significant.

Abstract Every day on Tokyo's Yamanote line, over a million people come face to face. For some, this can be a source of anxiety and discomfort, because they are expected to obey the social etiquette of maintaining one's distance from strangers, despite the train cars being filled beyond capacity. To make the train ride bearable, passengers have adopted a wide range of practices aimed at creating and maintaining personal space, and these practices increasingly involve the use of technology. This article focuses on surechigai tsūshin, a location-aware technology installed in Nintendo's portable gaming devices, which allows users to engage in quasi-anonymous encounters with digital strangers while ‘passing by’ on the street or on the train. Such technologies and encounters show how train cars serve as spaces where estrangement is negotiated and mediated in Japan today. Surechigai tsūshin offers a means to control how one comes to know others, acting as a digitized form of civil inattention. The sociality of surechigai is maintained as smooth ‘passing by’ among strangers who are virtually and actually co-present, familiar and distant faces on the train. The volume of human traffic on the Yamanote line compounds the social effects of surechigai tsūshin, showing how a variety of technologies articulate with one another to create distinct forms of sociality. In this sense, the significance of the Yamanote line rests not only in its characteristic ‘intimate alienation’ (Fujii 1999), but also in the sociocultural negotiation of technologies that mediate experience on the urban railway.