NSF II Project: Exploring Social Trust in Mobile Educational Environments
Prof. Klara Nahrstedt (PI)
Prof. Roy Campbell
Prof. Indy Gupta
Prof. Sam Kamin
Prof. Karrie Karrahalios
Prof. Robin Kravets
Prof. Marshall Scott Poole
Prof. William Sanders
Collaborators on the Project
Prof. Lawrence Angrave
Undergraduate Students: Min Koo Kang and Benjamin Gass
Summary
Advanced wireless technologies allow users to communicate anytime and anywhere and wireless communities are becoming ubiquitous with the proliferation of iPods, G1 and other mobile devices. These communities are very different from traditional Internet-based online communities in which people are connected with one another but neither know each other in person nor necessarily care where they are at any specific moment. In contrast, in wireless communities, people are much more closely bound to each other through a sense of sharing a common physical and/or social context.
This planning grant explores small ‘nomadic’ and ‘settled’- like wireless communities in educational environments and the social trust aspects when using educational services within these mobile learning communities (MLC). The PIs develop a limited mobile wireless testbed, with hybrid wireless peer-to-peer, and infrastructure-based connectivity, and a small set of trust-ensuring educational services, made available in the form of a MLC-toolkit to students in a selected class. The PIs validate the MLC- toolkit in a small MLC group and explore the social trust depending on the type of class / users activity, active participation of students, and mobility of students (nomadic versus settled). The PIs also explore, where the assurance of social trust comes from, e.g., from friends and their various types of ties (strong versus weak ties), and/or from the underlying software and hardware infrastructure. The impact is in developing, and deploying the MLC-toolkit, and understanding social trust metrics and their relations to users and underlying infrastructures.
Projects/Experiments
Our first experiments within the MLC project are involving the class cs425. We are running in
cs425 - Distributed Systems, Fall 2009 a pilot project, where mobile and educational distributed applications on mobile Google phones are build by the students and for the students. The cs425 students are building as part of their machine problems applications for Google phones that will be used in other undergraduate class(es) in Spring 2010. The cs425 class projects will enter the Qualcomm-sponsored competition on December 8, 2009 (2-5pm in 216 SC) for the best educational application. We will post here the advertisement of the final cs425 projects as well as the winner of the Qualcomm competition.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF 0855129, Qualcomm and Vodafone Educational Grant.