The Integration of Aspects of Geo-Tagging and Microblogging in m-Learning

Abstract

The recent years have shown the remarkable potential use of Web 2.0 technologies in education, especially within the context of informal learning. The use of Wikis for collaborative work is one example for the application of this theory. Further, the support of learning in fields of education, which are strongly based on location-dependent information, may also benefit from Web 2.0 techniques, such as Geo-Tagging and m-Learning, allowing in turn learning in-the-field. This chapter presents first developments on the combination of these three concepts into a geospatial Wiki for higher education, TUGeoWiki. Our solution proposal supports mobile scenarios where textual data and images are managed and retrieved in-the-field as well as some desktop scenarios in the context of collaborative e-Learning. Within this scope, technical restrictions might arise while adding and updating textual data via the collaborative interface, and this can be cumbersome in mobile scenarios. To solve this bottleneck, we integrated another popular Web 2.0 technique into our solution approach, Microblogging. Thus, the information pushed via short messages from mobile clients or microblogging tools to our m-Learning environment enables the creation of Wiki-Micropages as basis for subsequent collaborative learning scenarios.