Search in Virtual and Study in Real: A Ubiquitous Query/Answer System

Abstract

U-Learning has emerged with the development of UbiComp. In the precomputer era, people can only learn from surrounding environment or other people. Given a subject, it is difficult to find out the concerning learning contents in the real environment. In the era of CAI and M-Learning, people can choice to learn in the virtual world and rapidly find out the related virtual learning contents. But they still could not rapidly find the right learning contents in the real world which has confine the learner’s learning practice. U-Learning, by making use of digital artifacts in the ubiquitous environment, has provided the possibility for a learner to learn from more extensive learning contents including both of the virtual contents and real contents, and bridge the virtual and real contents seamlessly. In such a system, people learn not only from books or web pages, but also they can explore their knowledge in the real world as well. In this paper, the architecture of a ubiquitous query and answer system for pupils is presented to show the possibility of integration of searching and providing real and virtual learning contents in a ubiquitous environment. And a matching algorithm is proposed for find out the proper learning contents by matching the learning contents database with the ubiquitous learning environment database. Finally, the scene of learning by such a system is shown through a concrete example.

This research is partially supported by a funding of Fukushima Prefecture and a funding from JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) No. 18650251.