Work in progress — Using mobile & social game technology with location-based services for building learning communities

In this Work in Progress, we describe the `my Learning Community´ application design principles and theoretical foundation. The application is a learning community support tool, which we implement in a peer mentoring project in the Department of Computing and New Media Technologies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Combining different learning frameworks, we implement location-based services utilizing publicly available interfaces to Foursquare/Gowalla, which allow the identification and tracking of student participation in study sessions and identification of experts (“mayors”), which in turn mentor fellow students. As students progress through the curriculum, the identified student participation will allow for a transition of students into informal topic leadership. The student and study group location and additional communication among participants of study sessions will be facilitated by the `my Learning Community´ application, which we make available to our students for installation on mobile and desktop devices and are currently implementing our approach.