Educational Affordances of a Ubiquitous Learning Environment in a Natural Science Course

Educational affordances are worthy of being explored because the affordances of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide the pedagogical effects for promoting cognitive acceleration, increasing the self-management of students, facilitating data collection, and presentation in science learning. This study aims to explore educational affordances on a course with a learning environment. To address this research goal, this study employed a ubiquitous learning environment termed the Environment of Ubiquitous Learning with Educational Resources (EULER) and conducted a natural science course for eight weeks. The participants included elementary school teachers and students. Detailed studies of how the students use EULER and how this course affects their learning have enabled us to identify specific educational affordances and their potential application in supporting learning. This study describes thirteen educational affordances that were revealed through the responses given by students in an open-question survey and interviews as well as through transcripts from researcher observations and student discussions. These educational affordances of ubiquitous learning environment employed in the natural science course have implications for current and future developments in pedagogy.

[1]  Joanna McGrenere,et al.  Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concep , 2000, Graphics Interface.

[2]  Rosnaini bt. Mahmud,et al.  Form one students' engagement with computer games and its effect on their academic achievement in a Malaysian secondary school , 2009, Comput. Educ..

[3]  Maria Virvou,et al.  Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness , 2005, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[4]  Tan-Hsu Tan,et al.  Outdoor Natural Science Learning with an RFID-Supported Immersive Ubiquitous Learning Environment , 2009, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[5]  Daniel U. Levine,et al.  Improving student achievement through mastery learning programs , 1985 .

[6]  Benjamin S. Bloom,et al.  Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. , 1957 .

[7]  Hiroaki Ogata,et al.  PERKAM: Personalized Knowledge Awareness Map for Computer Supported Ubiquitous Learning , 2007, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[8]  William W. Gaver,et al.  AFFORDANCES FOR INTERACTION: THE SOCIAL IS MATERIAL FOR DESIGN , 1996 .

[9]  R. Shaw,et al.  Perceiving, Acting and Knowing : Toward an Ecological Psychology , 1978 .

[10]  Ann Hill Duin.  Implementing Cooperative Learning Groups In The Writing Curriculum , 1986 .

[11]  Tsung-Yu Liu,et al.  Using ubiquitous games in an English listening and speaking course: Impact on learning outcomes and motivation , 2010, Comput. Educ..

[12]  J. J. Gibson.  The theory of affordances , 1977 .

[13]  Haym Hirsh,et al.  Exploiting Background Information in Knowledge Discovery from Text , 1997, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.

[14]  J. Nichols,et al.  Cooperative Learning and Student Motivation. , 1994 .

[15]  L. S. Vygotskiĭ,et al.  Mind in society : the development of higher psychological processes , 1978 .

[16]  Anind K. Dey,et al.  Understanding and Using Context , 2001, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[17]  Tsung-Yu Liu,et al.  A context-aware ubiquitous learning environment for language listening and speaking , 2009, J. Comput. Assist. Learn..

[18]  J. Stanley,et al.  Book Review: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain , 1957 .

[19]  S. Greenberg,et al.  The Psychology of Everyday Things , 2012 .

[20]  Daniel Churchill,et al.  Educational affordances of PDAs: A study of a teacher's exploration of this technology , 2008, Comput. Educ..

[21]  Benjamin S. Bloom,et al.  A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , 2000 .

[22]  Shelagh A. Gallagher,et al.  Problem-Based Learning: As Authentic as It Gets. , 1993 .

[23]  L. Vygotsky.  Interaction between learning and development , 1978 .

[24]  Liyan Song,et al.  Digital Game-Based Learning , 2014 .

[25]  D. Krathwohl.  A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: , 2008 .

[26]  Mary E. Webb.  Affordances of ICT in science learning: implications for an integrated pedagogy , 2005 .

[27]  Brendan Tangney,et al.  Designing collaborative, constructionist and contextual applications for handheld devices , 2006, Comput. Educ..

[28]  L. Vygotsky.  Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes: Harvard University Press , 1978 .

[29]  Tan-Hsu Tan,et al.  RFID-based Ubiquitous Learning Environment for Outdoor Learning , 2007, Seventh IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2007).

[30]  Kurt Squire,et al.  Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a window into a virtual simulated world , 2002, Proceedings. IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education.

[31]  Phil Benson,et al.  Learner autonomy 5: The role of motivation , 1997 .

[32]  Paul A. Kirschner,et al.  Can we support CSCL? Educational, social and technological affordances for learning , 2002 .

[33]  Jonathan Cooper.  Engaging the Visitor: Relevance, Participation and Motivation in Hypermedia Design , 1993, ICHIM.