Some some places of interest (historical and archaeological) do not add information to a site for fear that the display may ruin the aesthetic qualities or integrity of the site. Other sites may not have the money to invest in additional exhibits.
The negative stigma associated with asking questions must also be considered. Students in middle school fail to ask questions simply because they do not want to feel incompetent1. By not asking questions students place themselves at a disadvantage. A survey conducted for WikiWorld indicates this problem persists later in life.
In order for the application to be successful, it must address these concerns. This means the solution needs to be unintrusive to the site while providing users with an emotionally safe environment where users feel comfortable asking questions.
The problem of what makes a question good, or what makes a response valuabe, must also be considered. Rather than having the system determine how valuable a contribution was, we instead implemented a community driven rating system. In an active community, this approach will help to determine a question, or answer's contribution. During development we also had to keep in mind the original objective of creating a safe enviroment for asking questions. Any rating system that we created would have to be sensitive to this fact. The initial star rating system was considered clumbsy during initial user tests. This system was then replaced with a binary thumbs up thumbs down system. Testing of this rating system raised concerns that negative feedback would stop users from asking their own questions. By conducting a quick online survey and after conducting a brain storm we developed the thumbs up/confused, rating system. This rating system rewarded good questions with a thumbs up while suggesting that other questions that were not well worded or otherwise considered bad questions we confusing and may benifit from being reworded or by providing more context.
1Phelan, Davidson, Cao. Speaking Up: Students' Perspective on School. May 1992.WikiWorld uses a mobile device with GPS and an internet connection as a platform. Portability is a major reason for this choice. With GPS and WiFi users will be able to go to any site and modify it. The GPS will allow wikiworld to track the user’s location. This information will then be used to display virtual notes/exhibits that are around the user’s location. An internet connection will be used to gather data about a site from a server. This will also serve as a means to publish the user’s newly generated notes. Use of the internet will also mean that little information will be saved on the mobile device itself. Although primary development will be for the iphone there will be attempts to port this to other, cheeper phones. the development for different phones will allow the program reach a great variety of users including the disadvantaged.2
2Jill Attewell. Mobile technologies and learning: A technology update and m-learning project summary. Technology Enhanced Learning Research Centre, 2001.To develop the application quickly and address potential problems, several prototypes were created and tested.
First iteration:
Stickie notes. This helped to illustrate the situational aspect of WikiWorld.
Second iteration:
Color-coded sticky notes, prompts, and a physical device gave a feel for the interaction of the device in the situation.