MobilED audio wiki in classroom
From Shareideas
With MobilED audio wiki students and teachers may use wiki and wiki content, such as Wikipedia, with their standard mobile phones. MobilED audio wiki works as follows:
- A user can search for a term by sending a SMS-message to the server,
- The server then calls the user, and
- A speech synthesizer will read the article found in the wiki (e.g. in Wikipedia).
- If the term is not found in the wiki, then the user can contribute his/her story by dictating it to the system.
In 2006 the application was tested and results compared between a poor, rural school environment and an affluent private school environment in South Africa.
Contents |
Story
The design of the MobilED audio wiki was started with the scenario of offering Wikipedia’s Encyclopedia content for mobile users. The primary user group have been teachers and pupils in schools in places with little access to learning materials. On the other hand we have considered the MobilED system with Wikipedia content to be a public service in areas with no public libraries or other easy ways to access reference materials.
The first field test of testing the MobilED audio wiki was conducted in one school in South Africa in March 2006. The system was used by three classes of grade 11 (15- 16 years) students. The aim was to try out the audio wiki in a relative formal school community as a part of study project related to HIV/AIDS.
Before the field test was started the teachers planned the study project and the use of the MobilED audio wiki with the researchers of the project. In an early stage of the planning it was already decided that students will use mobile phones in small groups and that as the main source of ready-made information the English Wikipedia content will be used.
To access the MobilED audio wiki service, each student group were given a Nokia 3230 smartphone and Nokia Music Stands MD-1 (speaker for the Nokia 3230).
The study project followed the principles of Jigsaw cooperative learning technique (Aronson et. al 1978), where each student is a member in two groups. The first kind of group is "home group"; in our case we called them "audiocasting groups", referring to the idea of podcasting or radio show. The second group is "thematic expert groups". Each thematic group consists of one member from each home group.
The thematic group discussed different aspects of HIV and used the MobilED server with the English Wikipedia content to search information related to their theme. Student groups were free to choose search terms and navigate the system according to their own choice. The content – delivered for them as an audio where a speech synthesiser was reading it – they listen together from a speaker attached to the mobile phone. The results of the information seeking and discussions about the themes were then reported back to each students’home/audiocasting groups.
The home groups then discussed the most relevant issues of HIV/AIDS for their own age groups and started to write a script for an audiocast or radio show of their own. The audiocast shows made by the student groups were then made available for the whole school community including all the students, teachers and parents. They where able to listen them with their own mobile phones by sending the group name to the MobilED audio wiki which then made a call back for the sender and played the audio found.
The aim of the field test was to gather experience how people will accept the concept of audio wiki and how they will learn to use it. This way we are looking the finding and analyses in the larger framework, even that the school pilot was only one experiment of using self-managed information system in rather specific and framed context.
How it was done
For the experiment we developed a MobilED platform. The platform offers an access to Audio Wiki - a collaborative information system. The server makes it possible to use MediaWiki server as the Content Management System of audio information system. Mediawiki is a feature-rich Open Source wiki engine written primarily for Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. According to Wikipedia, "wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration".
The MobilED platform was build from the following Open Source components:
- Kannel SMS-gateway;
- the Asterisk telephone system for audio telephony communications;
- Text to speech software, such as Flite;
- MediaWiki server with suitable content, such as en.wikipedia.org.
The MobilED platform is also Open Source and developed in the development site of the project at:
