C-notes: designing a mobile and wireless application to support collaborative knowledge building

In order to support rich forms of collaborative learning, learners need appropriate tools to share, exchange, and negotiate their ideas. The use of wireless networked handheld computers in education is rapidly increasing, thus providing new opportunities to engage students in collaborative activities independent of time and space. In this paper, we describe our work in progress related to the design and implementation of a mobile and wireless application to support collaborative knowledge building. The paper presents an innovative approach for supporting the exchange and discovery of key ideas among students by using wireless optical readers, handheld devices and an application we have developed using Java and XML.