Casual Learn: A linked data-based mobile application for learning about local Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This paper presents Casual Learn, an application that proposes ubiquitous learning tasks about Cultural Heritage. Casual Learn exploits a dataset of 10,000 contextualized learning tasks that were semiautomatically generated out of open data from the Web. Casual Learn offers these tasks to learners according to their physical location. For example, it may suggest describing the characteristics of the Gothic style when passing by a Gothic Cathedral. Additionally, Casual Learn has an interactive mode where learners can geo-search the tasks available. Casual Learn has been successfully used to support three pilot studies in two secondary-school institutions. It has also been awarded by the regional government and an international research conference. This made Casual Learn to appear in several regional newspapers, radios, and TV channels.

Orchestrating ubiquitous learning situations about Cultural Heritage with Casual Learn mobile application

“…All this makes us consider the need for an application for teachers to include tasks in Casual Learn dataset, which is currently published in the Web of Data (Ruiz-Calleja et al, 2021a). This consideration can be extended to any mobile application expected to be used to support UL situations since teachers will likely find the set of built-in UL tasks does not exactly meet their learning goals.…”

“…Casual Learn (Ruiz-Calleja et al, 2020, 2021a) is a mobile application originally developed to learn Cultural Heritage in informal contexts. It o↵ers tasks geolocalized in Cultural Heritage sites of Castile and Leon through two di↵erent modes: in passive mode, learners walk by and receive notifications when they are close to a site, so that the can complete learning tasks associated to it; in active mode, learners browse in a map, and look for sites and tasks, though the tasks cannot be answered unless they are physically close to the sites.…”

“…Casual Learn (Ruiz-Calleja et al, 2020, 2021a) is a mobile application currently available for Android devices in Google Play 1 . Casual Learn lets learners access its more than 10 000 geolocalized tasks in two di↵erent modes:…”

“…More specifically, this study aims to deeply understand the particularities of four UL situations to learn Cultural Heritage following an interpretive research paradigm (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991). These situations are supported by Casual Learn (Ruiz-Calleja et al, 2020, 2021a, a semantic mobile application originally designed and developed by the authors to support informal learning about Cultural Heritage. We choose Casual Learn for two main reasons.…”

LOD4Culture: Easy exploration of cultural heritage linked open data

“…In our previous work we have proposed CasualLearn [27], a mobile application for CH education. It exploits a dataset of 10K geolocalized learning tasks that were generated from DBpedia, Wikidata, and the Open Data portal of Castile and León.…”