'Location is not enough!': an empirical study of location-awareness in mobile collaboration

Abstract

There is an ever growing number of mobile learning applications based on location-awareness, However, there is still a lack of information concerning how it might impact socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration. This is what the following empirical study aimed to address. We used a mobile and collaborative game, running on tablet PCs, to test two conditions. In one experimental condition, groups could see the positions of each member; while in the other location-awareness was not provided. All users could use the tablet PC to communicate through annotations. We found no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. Neither were there any differences in terms of cognitive workload. However, players without the location-awareness indications had a better representation of their partners' paths. They wrote more messages and better explicated their strategies. The paper concludes with remarks about how this can be taken into account by mobile learning practitioners.