[OSM-talk] New approach to teaching newbies - Educational method and app for mobiles

[Refsvik Kjell Are]

Hi everyone,

Through a course I am attending in "Context Aware Mobile Systems  
Design", I have chosen the OpenStreetMap project as case for a small  
school project.

Through becoming a member/user this winter, I have looked at my own  
newbie experiences and tried to figure out how it could be made even  
more effective and enjoyable. I have narrowed my project goal further  
down to describe how a mentor-protege situation may be helpful for  
training new OSM users and how a suitable user interface (UI) for a  
mobile device may be of help in doing so.

I have now reached a point where I have described how this type of  
training may benefit from the ideas of Lave and Wenger in their Book  
"Situated Learning - Legitimate peripheral participation" and have  
gone on to design some user interface sketches for a simple logging  
application for a mobile phone to support this idea. The idea of  
Legitimate Peripheral Participation was first described in 1991 and  
is, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Legitimate_peripheral_participation):

"... a theoretical description on how newcomers become experienced  
members of a community of practice or collaborative project... and  
through peripheral activities, novices become acquainted with the  
tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community"

The reason for not making the UI sketches for a smartphone or a PDA  
at this moment, is the desire to design an application for a mobile  
device available to a broad audience.

The course I am taking treats the topic of context-awareness as an  
important factor in the design of a mobile system, and I have tried  
to incorporate the topic CA into my suggested design.

The sketches also suggests the need for explicitly entered context  
information by the user compared to the implicitly available  
information and how to treat these two elements to reach the goal of  
a super easy-to-use application.

I know from readin the mailing lists this winter that there are a lot  
of knowledgable OSM people out there, and I would really appreciate  
your input on this. If you find that you have the time to do so, I  
would appreciate a posting on the mailinglist or a few lines of text  
in an email commenting on the following questions:

1. To what degree do you find the idea of "Legitimate Peripheral  
Participation" and "Mentorship" relevant to the OpenStreetMap logging  
case described?

2. What is your comment on the suggested context-awareness aspect of  
the outlined application?

3. Any other comments on my project in general or more spesifically  
on the sketches?

This is list of the sketches:

1. Context and how it is used
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_03.jpg

2. General workflow of the application
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_04.jpg

3. Some of the key screens in the application
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_05.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_06.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_07.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_08.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_09.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_10.jpg
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/mosml/mosml_11.jpg


PS. Please note that I have not done a technical feasibility study of  
the APIs or code needed to build this application as this is outside  
the scope of this project. This will come at a later date, if a  
version of this software is ever built.

Best regards,

Kjell Are Refsvik
kjell.a.refsvik at hiof.no
Graduate student, informatics
Ostfold University College, Norway
http://home.online.no/~refsvik/master/cams/index.html