=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-280/paper-1 |storemode=property |title=Mobile Sensemaking: Exploring Proximity and Mobile Applications in the Classroom |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-280/p18.pdf |volume=Vol-280 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ectel/AntunesBZB07 }} ==Mobile Sensemaking: Exploring Proximity and Mobile Applications in the Classroom== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-280/p18.pdf
   Mobile Sensemaking: Exploring Proximity and Mobile
             Applications in the Classroom




       Abstract. We propose mobile sensemaking as a collaborative mechanism to
       explore and understand information in highly mobile and fluid situations, where
       people engage in multiple parallel, rapid and ad-hoc interactions, rather than
       participating in large highly-structured decision processes. Mobile sensemaking
       is explored in the classroom context, where it has been recognized that the
       traditional lectures should be reconstructed as active processes centered on
       collaborative activities. Mobile sensemaking relies on mobile computing
       devices and a proximity model, both organizing collaborative activities
       according to the domain context and physical proximity. The paper describes in
       detail the proposed proximity model and the developed mobile application.




1 Introduction

Over the last recent years many systems based on mobile computing technology have
been developed for supporting collaborative learning of students in the classroom.
The goal of these systems has been to improve the quality, effectiveness and
satisfaction of teaching, leveraging the synergies found in small collaborative groups.
    With the help of appropriate mobile technology and applications, teaching and
learning procedures are expected to achieve higher levels of engagement, better
adjustment to individual and group learning needs, higher learning rates, and better
quality of time utilization and a better flexibility of teaching for the instructors.
    However, in spite of such new technology, the basic learning processes have
remained largely unchanged throughout this time. Furthermore, to date, researchers
have mostly focused on bringing technological innovation to the classroom, while
giving relatively little attention to the more broad aspect of improving the in-class
instruction using technology in order to enrich the existing “best practices” or create
new ones.
    Many educators agree that the main disadvantage of the traditional classroom
lecture – the one placing teachers as the major focus of attention and most critical
resources – is the reduced level of interactivity between teachers and students, and
among the students themselves. The limited interaction possibilities in classroom
lectures originates a set of problems regarding students’ attention and motivation,
reduced teachers’ awareness of the actual learning accomplishments, and lack of
flexibility for handling the necessary adjustments regarding the teacher’s and
students’ goals.
    From a pedagogic-psychological point of view, it has been considered that
learning in the classroom should be reconstructed and redefined as an active process
with more involvement of the student in meaningful learning activities [4], [7]. This
reconstruction would include [9]: a) promoting students’ engagement in stimulating
collaborative activities; b) increasing teachers’ awareness of students’ progresses; and
c) enriching the learning process with more sophisticated activities such as
brainstorming, creative thinking, decision making, planning, and critical evaluation of
the outcomes [14].
    Interacting with their peers by being engaged in collaborative learning activities
also represents an opportunity for the learner to take hand in shaping the
informational, communicational and learning process, rather than remaining a passive
and individual recipient. As far as the success of interactivity in the classroom is
concerned, empirical results indicate that: a) lectures are not generally ineffective, but
are unsuitable to a global knowledge transfer [5]; and b) the diverse learner-centered
measures positively affect learning success [6].
    Nevertheless, the classroom lecture remains as the most frequent teaching-learning
scenario, since it has also important advantages compared to other settings. Especially
important is the economic aspect regarding the teachers’ cognitive effort: only in a
classroom lecture a teacher can economically deliver knowledge to a large number of
students, regarding the resources involved and the time invested.
    Our endeavor is to improve interactivity in the classroom while still keeping the
learning process efficient in terms of resources and time. We have strong reasons to
believe that mobile technology provides a technological platform capable to support
the levels of interactivity required by the active learning process, and we are building
software mechanisms to conserve the teachers’ effort in this process.
    In this paper we show how wirelessly interconnected handheld computing devices
may improve interactivity in the classroom involving university students in more
sophisticated interactions than those expected in classic lectures, which in turn will
foster collaborative learning. The focus of this technology is to improve sensemaking
in the classroom, i.e. the students’ ability to collectively explore and understand
information [16] while shifting the teacher’s role to the backstage, performing
supporting activities but not coordinating the assigned tasks.
    The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the scenario we want to
support. Section 3 defines the context and proximity concepts in this scenario. Section
4 describes our proposed proximity model for mobile sensemaking. Section 5 presents
the application implementing a sensemaking activity in the classroom. Section 6
discusses this solution and concludes the paper.
2 Scenario

Our working scenario considers a common classroom situation where a teacher
assigns to a large group of students the task of analyzing a large collection of papers.
These papers are related in some way, but the relationships must be found out by the
students through exploration and collaboration. When the task is successfully
accomplished, the students should have built a coherent list of topics and identified
their most significant relationships, thus defining a strategic view over the proposed
research topic, without having every student to read all the papers.
    The task enfolds as follows. Each student receives one or two papers from the
teacher and is encouraged to find out the main topics addressed by those papers. This
individual task should then contribute to the collaborative effort. Students are
expected to share their findings with others, identifying common topics, establishing
relationships, and avoiding misjudgments. This should enfold in a paced and informal
way, avoiding loosing time waiting for individual students to deliver their
contributions, and in particular avoiding loosing too much time discussing their
divergences as a group. Instead, students are encouraged to engage in parallel
negotiations with multiple parties to resolve their differences and reach consensus.
Overall, the students assume the central role in the decision process, while the teacher
is sent to backstage, coaching and encouraging students, assessing their
accomplishments, although not coordinating the assigned task.
    The fundamental aim of this task is to engage students in the sensemaking process.
The sensemaking process was proposed by Weick [17] as a primary mechanism for
organizations to explore and understand information. Sensemaking is an ongoing
process aiming to create order and make retrospective sense about some event or
collection of events. It has also been associated to preliminary decision-making
activities like “understanding the situation” or “getting the picture” [6]. Sensemaking
is also inherently collaborative [12], meaning that the several mechanisms defined by
sensemaking (ecological change, enactment, selection, retention) rely on the
capabilities of a community of people to identify cues, update and share information,
identify possible actions and provide feedback on those actions.
    We argue sensemaking precisely captures the decision process defined by our
working scenario. When students identify new main topics, they contribute to an
ecological change. These new events may be sensed by other students, who enact
their responses, looking for similarities, relationships, or even misjudgments. Then,
collaboratively, they may try to make sense out of such events and construct a shared
and coherent view. In summary, this scenario involves students exchanging
information, moving around the classroom to engage in discussions with the other
parties, negotiating common interests, and ultimately making sense of information.


3 Context and Proximity in the Proposed Scenario

According to Dey [2], context is defined as any information that can be used to
characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is anything relevant to the interaction
between a user and an application, such as a person, a place or an object, including the
user and the application themselves. In general terms, context is typically the location,
identity and state of people, groups, and computational and physical objects.
    Dix et al. [3] describe four generic forms of context that influence interaction with
mobile devices: infrastructure, system, domain and physical context. The
infrastructure context addresses issues like the variability of services, user awareness
of available services, or liveness of data. The system context is related to the
management of feedback and feedthrough, support to distribution, and support to
emergent behavior. The domain context considers the semantics of the application
domain, e.g. the definition of the relationships between the mobile devices and their
users, and how these relationships can be used to determine the application behavior.
Finally, the physical context is related with the possibility that mobile devices are
likely to be aware of their physical surroundings. For instance, the mobile devices
may know that they are proximate to other devices (if some network connectivity is
available) or in a specific classroom (e.g. if the classroom has a router installed).
   Our approach explores two forms of context defined by Dix [3]: the domain and
physical contexts. The domain context in our scenario is relatively complex because it
combines individual and group work in a very fluid way. Students serendipitously
move around the classroom forming temporary groups and holding ad-hoc
interactions. The information about when groups were set up, who belonged to those
groups and what interactions occurred characterizes the domain context in our
scenario. This domain context should be maintained by technology to facilitate
sensemaking, since it improves the retrospective understanding of the situation. The
absence of domain context would represent an additional effort from the participants,
who would have to search endlessly for hints about previous interactions with other
students, the common topics that were found and decisions made.
    We thus believe that the combination of proximity and context is a key aspect for
supporting sensemaking in the classroom using handheld computing devices. We
define two fundamental types of proximity contexts:

  •    Environmental proximity - The students perform their activities in the
       classroom. Environmental proximity contributes to define them as a group and
       to consolidate their expected behavior as group. Environmental proximity is
       thus associated to the production, sharing and sensing of topics in the
       classroom.
  •    Close proximity - The students engage together in very proximate face-to-
       face interactions, to avoid disturbing other students who may be engaged in
       their own interactions. Close proximity is associated to a face-to-face
       collaborative workspace, where two or more students share information and
       discuss about specific topics, their relevance and possible relationships.

   Let us now discuss these matters in the physical context. According to [16],
proximity is relevant when users are close to each other and, according to their
location handheld computing devices may support a differentiated set of services.
Physical proximity is based on the communications networks established by handheld
computing devices, which are formed dynamically by juxtaposition of wireless
networks created on demand. Physical proximity defines a context identifying who
was physically close to each other and what information was exchanged between
them. Based on these notions, we may complete our definitions of environmental and
close proximity:

    •     Environmental proximity - The students perform their activities in a
          confined physical space, the classroom, allowing establishing a
          communications network between all students’ handheld devices. This allows
          sensing topics in the classroom.
    •     Close proximity – When the students engage together in very proximate face-
          to-face interactions, their handheld devices will establish a communications
          network. This network is distinct from the one associated to environmental
          proximity, and allows sharing a workspace between proximate students.


4       Proximity Model for Mobile Sensemaking

We will first consider the implications of the physical context in our model, as it has
direct implications on the automatic management of contextual information. When
two or more students are close to each other and wish to collaborate, the handheld
computing devices will automatically activate a Close Proximity Context (CPC). The
following rules apply to CPC management:

    •     The CPC is automatically activated when two or more handheld devices are
          connected together at the very proximate physical level (e.g. using IRDA).
    •     The CPC will be active as long as there is physical connection between at
          least two devices.
    •     The students engaged in the same CPC automatically share their workspace
          and the information belonging to the shared workspace is also part of the
          CPC.
    •     The CPC evolves according to the participants and shared information. This
          allow for several students to get anytime in and out of the discussion.
    •     The CPC is automatically deactivated when physical connectivity is lost.
    •     The deactivated CPC will remain in the handheld devices for search and
          navigational purposes. This functionality supports retrospective sensemaking.
Fig. 1. The figure shows a possible configuration of the collaborative learning activity
  in a whole-classroom. The node labeled with T represents the teacher, the rest are
 students. All participants can move freely across the entire classroom. Hot-spots are
  known locations in the room where students can meet face-to-face in a previously
                                 agreed appointment.

Focusing on the whole classroom, we also define an Environmental Proximity
Context (EPC):

    •    The EPC is automatically activated when several handheld devices are
         interconnected at the physical level (e.g. using WiFi).
    •    The students engaged in the EPC automatically receive indications about the
         topics generated by other students that may be of interest to them. This
         functionality uses similarity text matching.
    •    The students might interact with their devices to request becoming proximate
         to students for which some similarity has been indicated to them.

   The handheld are responsible for getting the interested parties together. The
proximity model for mobile sensemaking is illustrated in Figure 1 and further
discussed below according to several situations.

   Environmental proximity situation. The students are identified with letters from
A to Z, while T represents the teacher. They all share the same classroom, and their
handheld devices share the same (Wi-Fi) network. Therefore they are potentially
engaged in the same EPC. However, not all students are effectively engaged in the
EPC at a specific time, because they may be engaged in a close proximity situation
(these are the cases of, e.g., RL, GO and KD). Within the EPC, when a student
produces a topic, it is distributed to the other students’ handheld devices. The devices
compare their current list of topics with the distributed topic and, if there is some
similarity matching, the student will be notified. Note that unrelated topics are filtered
out, but they may become related later on, when students change their list of topics. If
a student wishes to discuss with the student that produced the topic, she will invoke
an engagement protocol, which is described next.
   EPC is useful when the student considers that the face-to-face interactions she
made so far are not enough and whishes to find out possible relations between her
topics and those from other students present in the same classroom. Those students
may also include those with whom she already had a CPC interaction. This may occur
when after a while the students may incorporate more characterization topics to the
initial list proposed by the teacher, which can be used again. The cases in which such
a situation may occur are the following:

•   Case EPS1. Using the WiFi network, a student X (see Fig. 1.) searches for the
    topics other students have defined for the articles they have read. Once the
    student has found the topics she is interested in decides it is not necessary to try a
    face-to-face meeting. Nevertheless, the following situations may occur: a) student
    V has more detailed information about topics X is interested which V is willing
    to share, b) X can send information to V about the topic both are interested in, c)
    X and V are only interested in exchanging information about the topic but not on
    discussing about why they use them to characterize the article, and finally d)
    there is no interest in sharing information.
•   Case EPS2. A student Q finds using the WiFi network that Z is willing to share
    information with him. In this case, it is necessary to activate the engaging process
    (request, accept, software defines hot-spot) in order to enable Q and Z find each
    other in the Hot-Spot Y. After that a CP1 situation may arise.

Engagement protocol. First, the protocol requires acceptance from the invoked party.
In case of acceptance, the parties must become face-to-face. Since the technology
does not identify the students, the engagement protocol must utilize a scheme that
does not require identification. The adopted solution involves Hot-Spots (two Hot-
Spots are shown in Figure 1): the handhelds requests both parties to move towards a
specific Hot-Spots (see Q and Z). Hot-Spots are a specific location in the environment
(e.g. corners like Hot-Spot X and Y). The Hot-Spot selection may depend on load
balancing. When students come face-to-face, we have a close proximity situation.

Close proximity situation. The students in this situation are face-to-face and share a
CPC. Their handheld devices automatically establish a temporal ad-hoc network
connection (IRDA). Furthermore, their devices will provide a shared workspace,
where topics may be collaboratively edited and linked with other topics present in any
one of the participants’ handheld devices. This allows effectively exchanging and
sharing topics and links across multiple devices in an epidemic way, whenever
students engage in new close proximity situations. We shall consider several possible
scenarios within the close proximity situation:

•   Case CPS1. Students R and L engage in a social face-to-face interaction in order
    to share, discuss, understand and relate the topics the application context has
    found they share. After this interaction following situation may occur: a) that R
    and L could define adequate relationships between some topics specified by each
    one for the articles they have read, b) that they found no relations between the
    common topics.
•   Case CPS2. Students K and D are informed by their handhelds that they have
    topics in common for the articles they have read. However, they decide that a
    social interaction is not necessary and that is enough that: a) K sends information
    to D, b) D sends information to K or c) both exchange their information. This
    information is sent over the WiFi network and may correspond to the detail
    generated by each student for a certain topic and Hill be available only if there is
    mutual consent.
•   Case CPS3. Students C and J are informed by their handhelds that they have not
    common topics on their lists so there is no need to engage in a social interaction.
    However, it is still possible that: a) The information J has is somehow relevant to
    C, who is willing to share it, b) the information C has is relevant for J, who is
    willing to share it, c) the information J and C have is relevant for each other and
    both are willing to share it, and d) the information J and C have is not relevant for
    the other so there is no transfer of information between them.

Disengagement protocol. The disengagement protocol occurs when one student
considers that the face-to-face interaction is completed, and perhaps other students
could be contacted. The disengagement occurs when the student moves away from the
face-to-face interaction and the (IRDA) network connection is lost. Then, the student
is again in the environmental proximity situation. As mentioned, the contextual
information associated to the face-to-face interaction is preserved in the CPC.


5 Implementation of the Mobile Sensemaking Application

The application delineated in the previous sections has been implemented using a
rapid development platform for mobile applications. This platform offers generic
support for sketching, pen-based graphical objects manipulation, automatic ad-hoc
network establishment, and object distribution and replication. The framework has
been used to develop several mobile applications, such as MCSketcher [19], Nomad
[20] and Participatory Simulations [21].
   Also, as described in [21], the framework is able to recognize when to users engage
in a face-to-face encounter, aligning their handheld devices. In this section we
describe how these features were used to build the mobile sensemaking application.
The application offers several User Interfaces (UIs) allowing the teacher to assess the
classroom activity, and giving the students the ability to write topics associated with
their assigned papers, link these topics with other topics, and engaging in
collaborations with other students. Most interaction with these UIs is done with pen
gestures, because it is the natural way for a user to control a handheld device.
5.1 Papers distribution.

The initial UI allows the teacher to assign papers to each student. On the left part of
the screen, a list with student-icons represents all students attending to the activity.
This list is populated automatically by recognizing which devices are running the
application within the wireless network range. On the right part, a list with document-
icons represents all papers available for reading. In order to fill up this list, the teacher
may click on the “add document” icon or the “add folder icon,” both located at the
beginning of the file list. Clicking opens a file browser dialog or a directory browser
dialog, loading a single selected file or all documents within selected directory into
the list. Figure 2 shows this UI.




Fig. 2. The teacher UI displays the list of students and available papers. On the left
side the list of students is displayed (which were found by the participant discovery
mechanism of the application based on multicasting messages). On the right side, the
list of the papers (identified by the author’s name and publication year) is displayed.
A paper is assigned to a certain student by drawing a line with the stylus from a
paper’s bullet to a student’s bullet (or vice-versa).

   To assign a paper to a student, the teacher must drag its document-icon over the
student-icon. Dragging a student over a document-icon would also assign a paper to a
student. These actions may be repeated several times, assigning multiple papers to a
student and multiple students to a paper. Every time this is done, both icons will show
an updated count of links over their icons: the document-icon will show how many
students have been assigned to work with that paper, and the student-icon will show
how many papers have been assigned to him/her (figure 2). The teacher can also
randomly assign one paper to each student by clicking on the dice-icon, at the upper
bound of the UI. Clicking this icon repeatedly assigns multiple papers to each student,
ensuring every paper has a similar number of students assigned.
5.2 Paper reviewing and topics linking.

Once a paper has been assigned, its icon appears in the students’ handheld UI. The
student may double click any document-icon to trigger the document reader
application and view the assigned paper. Document-icons appear in the lower part of
the UI, so the rest of the UI is empty and available for writing or drawing topics
related to the assigned papers. Once a topic is typed or sketched, the student may link
it to one of the assigned papers by drawing a connecting line. When this happens, the
system recognizes the gesture and establishes a link between the topic and the paper,
represented by an arrow. A topic may be linked to several papers, and a paper may be
linked to multiple topics (figure 3). Repeating the “link gesture” unlinks the topic
from the paper, allowing the student to correct links created accidentally. Also,
drawing a “cross gesture” can delete topics generated by the student.




 Fig. 3. Topics definition and linking UI. Using the stylus, students can link papers
 with related topics. Icons show the user current links’ configuration, which may be
public, private or available only during face-to-face encounters. Topics created by the
                     teacher are displayed with a different border.

   The teacher’s UI for topics definition is normally empty. However, it allows the
teacher to type or draw generic topics that may help students recognize what kind of
sentences are meant to be considered as topics. When the teacher creates such topics,
they appear in the students’ devices along with his/her own written topics. The topics
created by the teacher are displayed using different colors and borders than those
created by the students. Figure 3 shows topics created by the teacher and the student.
5.3 Sharing privileges and information sharing

The objective or this application is to support a highly active pedagogic activity,
allowing the students to build common knowledge in a collaborative way. Hence,
participants will eventually share their ideas with others. In this application, when a
student links a topic to certain paper, he or she may not me confident about their
relation. Therefore, he or she may not be willing to share this idea he or she is not
convinced with.
   The system allows students to choose in which way they want to share generated
knowledge. In this case, each link may be configured as “public”, “face-to-face only”
or “private”. When a connection between a paper and a topic is configured as public,
all students in the activity may access such information through the “Topic search
screen” or “face-to-face discussion”, both described next. If it is configured as face-
to-face only, such information will be revealed when two students engage into a face-
to-face discussion, allowing the unconfident student to talk about the idea with
another participant. When a topic link is configured as private it won’t be available to
other students under any interaction mode until the student changes its configuration.
Students may configure a link access by double clicking it on the screen using the
handheld stylus. When this occurs, a small floating palette will offer the three
available states that the user can click. Each link between papers and topics displays a
small icon representing its sharing configuration, as shown in Figure 2. Links are
created with “face-to-face only” privileges by default.


5.4 Related topic search and environmental sharing

As described in section 4, the activity encourages students to interact either in close
proximity or environmentally. Students may access all knowledge generated by others
configured as “public” by their authors. The “topics map” screen (figure 4) displays a
diagram where every student is represented by his/her icon, including the current user
centered in the middle of the screen. Each student icon is surrounded by its public
topics, in a star diagram fashion.
Fig. 4. The topics map UI. Other students’ similar topics are displayed in bold and
darker color. Double clicking another student’s icon displays the interaction UI.

   Smart text matching algorithms simplify the search process by organizing the
topics map according to the student’s interests. Topics similar to the current student’s
ones are displayed closer to the center, drawn in darker color if their similarity
reaches a high level. The participant distribution in the screen depends on overall
topics likeness: other students may be located near the center when they have a high
number of coincidences between his/her topics and current student’s ones.
   Originally, the screen is zoomed in order to display the closest participants only.
The user can drag the screen to navigate through the entire list of participant holding
and dragging the stylus. Also, the user may zoom in or out clicking the magnifier
icons or dragging the zoom slider at the right of the screen. Finally, the user can
double click another student’s icon when he/she is interested in this particular
student’s topics or wants to invite him/her to a face-to-face encounter. Based on these
simple pen-based gestures each student may browse all public topics.


5.5 Interacting with other students

Students enter the interaction screen by double clicking another participant icon in the
“topics map” screen or engaging in a proximity face-to-face interaction. The first
alternative allows a user to interact in an independent and one-way only, and the
second one establishes a two-way interaction. In the interaction screen, the lower
region of the screen belongs to the current student, while the upper region
corresponds to the other user. The icons of papers assigned to both students are
displayed beside the students’ icons. These files icons may be double clicked
triggering a secondary reader application, as mention before. Also, such icons are
surrounded with their topics and their links to the documents. In case the interaction is
triggered by a face-to-face encounter, all links configured as public and as available in
face-to-face interactions are shown. When the interaction is activated from the “topics
map” screen and the other student is not in front of the current user, only public topic
links will be displayed.
   The bottom and the top of the interaction screen display both students’ topics
collection. Topics from each student are horizontally sorted in order to be vertically
aligned with topics from the other student based on text similitude. If their texts match
exactly or above a certain peak, an automatic link between them is displayed. A
student may manually link his/her topics with the other students’. To create a link
between two topics he/she has to draw a line connecting their labels, in the same way
as he/she linked the topics with the papers in the topics definition screen. Topic to
topic links show an arrowhead according to which student created it. In case both
students agree on such relation, having the two of them drawn the same link, the line
will have arrowheads in both ends and get highlighted. Automatically created links
always display as a two-way link. Finally, students may link their papers directly to
the other users’ topics. Topic-paper’s links are created using the same link gesture
available in the “topics definition” screen. By doing this, topic label will be relocated
in the center of the screen, showing its links to papers of both students.


5.6 Engagement invitation

A student can invite another participant to a face-to-face interaction, in order to access
to his/her “face-to-face only” topics and links. Invitations are generated in the
interaction screen drawing a line between both students’ icons. This will show a
dialog which allow the students to make a rendezvous appointment in a certain a hot
spot. The invited student will get an alert in his/her device inviting him/her to meet in
the appointed location. Such alert has a “dismiss” icon, which will cancel the
invitation. In this case, the first user will be notified of such response. In case the
invited student accepts the proposal, both participants will meet in the assigned place
and start a face-to-face interaction, as described before, entering the interaction
screen.


6 Discussion & Conclusions

The use of handheld computers to support learning has attracted the attention of many
authors. Among the earliest works we can cite is described in (Jippling, 2001). More
works are described in [18] and [13]. In all cases, the reason for having mobile
devices is to support the social face-to-face interaction and to achieve high levels of
activity in the classroom, avoiding passivity of the students.
   The importance and potential of context in general and awareness in particular was
discovered very early in the short history of the development of collaborative mobile
applications. In [10] the author presents a works showing how context information
can be used in different application areas, e.g. tourist guidance, exhibition guidance,
e-mail, shopping, mobile network administration, medical care and office visitor
information. In these studies, the location of the user is the main attribute used in the
context-adaptation. In [1] the authors show the value of context information and
social awareness for developing an application to support collaboration between
experienced and novel doctors in a hospital. In [15] a mobile application which offers
various services supporting office-type work which uses context-awareness, mainly
information on position of the user and available services nearby. It seems there are
no major contributions in the field context-aware applications for supporting
collaborative learning except for those dealing with participatory simulations, like the
one described in [11].
   In this work, we apply the theoretical framework proposed by Dix [3] to develop a
model and a whole-classroom collaborative learning application. We think this model
an application can also be applied to other scenarios beside the described in section 2
where the common element is that the information about proximity between users can
be used for having a context-aware application. Some of these scenarios may be
conference participants using handhelds during the conference to ingress a list of
topics reflecting their research interests, a small group of employees performing
teamwork in an ad-hoc setting (e.g. emergency management), but they do not know in
detail the responsibilities and activities of their colleagues, or any kind of activities
with people doing field-work having to exchange information among each other in a
reduced surrounding.


Acknowledgment

  This paper was funded by Fondecyt 1050601.


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