Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2.3
Supporting Collaborative Learning
Photo sharing Web site such as Flickr may be satisfactory only to share disaster safety
maps over the Internet. However, in order to support collaborative learning about disas-
ter prevention, we need to provide a way for the students to discuss with each other over
disaster safety maps. Consequently, we need to incorporate a function to post comments
on the disaster safety maps. Some students post comments to a map and the others reply
to them so that they can learn collaboratively.
2.4
Supporting Multiple Languages
The students from various countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Turkey, and so on
are participating in the NDYS project, and various languages are used in each school. If
the students can communicate with others in their native language, it is comfortable for
them to work together with others. To make it possible, the system should support mul-
tiple languages by using machine translation. It is requested that comments submitted
by the students should be translated automatically into other languages.
3
Intercultural Collaboration Support System CoSMOS
We are developing an intercultural collaboration support system CoSMOS as a Web sys-
tem in which the students in different countries collaborate with each other using a Web
browser. CoSMOS is developed based on WordPress
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, which is an open source blog
software that is written in PHP and uses MySQL database. Four design goals, which
are mentioned in the previous section, are achieved by implementing four functions:
handling disaster safety maps, linking disaster safety maps to the world map, posting
comments on disaster safety maps, and translating comments into multiple languages.
3.1
Handling Disaster Safety Maps
Students in each school create a disaster safety map in their own poster format style,
so the map is taken as a picture by a digital camera, and is uploaded onto CoSMOS.
To consider the intent of the students who create the disaster safety map, not only the
drawing and/or painting but also the messages in the map should be clearly readable.
To this end, the picture is taken as a high definition digital image over 10M pixels.
However, we have to deal with two problems in order to display the image.
1. Loading time:
As the number of pixels increases, the file size of the image becomes large. It takes
a long time to load the entire image on a browser.
2. Operability of image browsing:
When the size of image is over 10M pixels, the image usually overflows the win-
dow size of Web browser. It is not easy for the students, who are novice users of
computer, to handle a large image.
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http://ja.wordpress.org/
