Abstract
Location-based services (LBSs) are impacting different aspects of human’s life. To date, different LBSs have been emerged, each supporting a specific application or service. While some LBSs have aimed at addressing the needs of general populations, such as navigation systems, others have been focused on addressing the needs of specific populations, including kids, youths, elderly, and people with special needs. In recent years, interest in taking a LBS approach in education and learning has grown. The main purpose of such educational LBSs is facilitating a means for learners to be more efficient and effective in their learning activities using their location as the underlying information in decision making. In this chapter, we present a novel LBS, called CampusLocator, whose main goal is to assist students in locating and accessing learning resources including libraries, seminars, and tutorials that are available on a campus.
Top2. Background
Mobile location-based learning is a recent application of LBS. Currently there are few research projects that are focused on developing LBSs with education purposes. In this section, an overview of such location-based education and learning projects is provided.
(Griswold, et al., 2002) developed ActiveCampus, a guide service for a university campus. The objective of ActiveCampus is to provide learners with location-based information on campus and locating nearby friends. ActiveCampus provides students with location-specific links to web pages, replies to students’ inquiries, and allows annotation where students can leave comments for specific locations. ActiveCampus also enables students to find nearby friends, school buildings, labs, and interesting events. The advantages of ActiveCampus are simplicity, sustainability, and adaptability to different user interfaces. However, ActiveCampus is limited in terms of scalability and local control in that it does not explore information on servers of different campus units.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN): is a LBS for Social Networking (SN) in that members of the network share information based on their current location with one another.
Learning resources: are those resources on a university’s campus that are routinely requested by students to assist them in their studies.
CampusLocator: is a LBS that assists students on a campus to request, recommend, and be reminded of learning resources available on a campus.
Reminder: is a system that reminds user of specific tasks or information based on preferences that include location, date, and time.
Recommender: is any system that provides recommendation based upon user’s preferences.
Location-Based Services (LBSs): prepare location-centric information and deliver information to user’s current location. Geo-positioning sensors, to determine user’s current location, and wireless communications, to deliver information, are the most important components of LBSs.
Mobile Computing: refers to the development on and utilization of mobile devices.
Navigation: is the process of moving from one location to another.