Tangible books with context-aware supports: A mobile phone to augment reading practice with virtual learning community

The most recent advances in ubiquitous computing technologies have brought augmentation of objects to context-aware and social supports. Although most students prefer intensive reading on tangible books, few studies have been done on augmenting reading practice in tangible books with the context-aware supports. This article introduces a methodology to integrate mobile phones, tangible books and a Web-based environment so that the integrated system can extend learning supports to collective intelligence from virtual learning community. The result of evaluation showed that reading practice in tangible books with line numbers tagged could be facilitated by mobile phones and could be informed with context-aware supports via sending contextual recommendations timely.