Learning by doing as mobile with a Urban Computing Lab

For years the most significant feedback from hypermedia students in Tampere University of Technology (TUT) had noted a lack of examples from real-life situations, even if teachers had used cases from real hypermedia projects as theoretical learning materials. In response to feedback the Urban Computing Lab (UCL) was designed and implemented at the Hypermedia Laboratory in TUT in purpose to support teaching and learning of design and evaluation of web-based services. For motivating students to learn it is important that the learning consists of authentic problems to solve (situations) and factual connections (contexts) to theory. The UCL is a web-based service to collect a large amount of rich, real-time information about quality experiences in real-life situations and contexts where people are using web based services for various purposes. The important component of UCL service is a visualization tool that helps students and researches to understand and analyze the large amount of data by offering visualizations based on social network analysis (SNA). The quality experience of web-based service is a phenomenon with multilevel and multidimensional features. The UCL service with the visualization tool supports students to understand better the dimensions of quality experiences and their relationship to each other. Learning hypermedia by doing Teachers in the Hypermedia Laboratory at Tampere University of Technology in Finland collected feedback from students to develop learning materials and teaching methods in their hypermedia courses. The most significant feedback for years had noted a lack of examples from real-world situations, even if teachers had used cases from the Internet and real hypermedia projects as theoretical learning materials. Hypermedia means in teaching modeling and organizing information and services so that the real users, tasks, and the usage context are appropriately acknowledged. Typical course topics are, for example, accessibility, web content production and design, structured documents, usefulness of web-based services and programming of hypermedia. Students can focus on either the technical implementation of structured information or general design and management of hypermedia projects. The teachers of hypermedia at TUT are also active researchers of the domains concerned. From the learners’ point of view the learning should consist of both real-world problems to solve (situations) and factual real-world connections (contexts) to theory, which motivates students to learn. The concepts of context and situation are in that case related to place, time and even the ways in which learning occurs; learning occurs in situations (situated cognition) and contexts open up opportunities for meaningful learning from real world problems. Meaningful learning makes students to be more motivated, active and intentional. For assure this kind of meaningful learning teachers can use examples and tasks to simulate and demonstrate complex authentic problems. Meaningful learning includes active, constructive, collaborative, intentional, complex, contextual, conversational and reflective dimensions. Such dimensions as transfer, motivation, volition and edutainment were also found in earlier research to enhance deep learning (e.g., Järvelä & Järvenoja, 2004; Entwistle, 1998; Jonassen, 1995; Jonassen, 1994; Kauppi, 1993). In response to course feedback the Urban Computing Lab (UCL) was designed and implemented. The UCL is a web-based service to collect a large amount of rich information from real-world situations and contexts where people use web based services for various purposes. With visualizations teachers can identify from the collected data different kinds of user groups and use situations in various web services, including users’ quality experiences. They can also take screen shots of visualizations to illustrate the phenomenon to students. The purpose of the UCL is to assess the variety of quality of the web-based services by a systematic analysis of the information collected. The results help students to understand how and why different users prefer different properties of web services and why users’ feedback on quality issues differs. The results also help designers to make prioritized decisions on improving the quality of web services.