A Web-Feed Based Service for Enhancing Asynchronous Learning on Personal Computers and Mobile Devices

Dictionaries are essential tools for looking up words people do not know when they read. This is especially true for non-native English speakers who do not have enough vocabulary, and for whom reading an English article can be a difficult task. Moreover, it could be time consuming to do the same thing when there are too many new words for them, consequently reducing the willingness to read or learn in the end. Therefore, a Web based asynchronous dictionary service was developed in our project for automating the repetitive look-up tasks. It provides an efficient and easy way to search for vocabulary automatically by the system. The result is formed in XML format and users may use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) readers to get the result on PCs or mobile devices, so the results can be read and studied anytime, anywhere. Moreover, people can share the results with others easily because RSS feeds are used to send the dictionary response to targeted groups of subscribers.