Ubiquitous Computing in Education: Invisible Technology, Visible Impact

Abstract

Recent advances in ubiquitous computing have provided many opportunities for extending learning and education. The new technologies are being designed to enable different forms of learning to take place that contrast with the way desktop computers have been used to support classroom-based learning. These include e-learning, m-learning, lifelong learning and informal learning. The emphasis has been on 'any time and any place' learning, enabling students to learn at home and on the move, for example, using a mobile phone application to practice pronouncing vocabulary for a foreign language while waiting for a bus. A further motivation has been to reach out to socially excluded children and adults who have missed out on schooling. Mobile and pervasive technologies can also be used to enhance and support learning in novel ways, moving it away from the computer screen to other foci of interest. One possibility is to shift the locus of computation into the physical environments in which we live and interact (Ishii & Ullmar, 1997). In doing so, students can interact with digital information in the physical world in quite different ways than when interacting solely with digital information at a PC or solely with the physical world. The physical world can be digitally augmented, for example, through embedding the environment with information contextually relevant to an ongoing activity, but not otherwise available in the physical world. The dynamic integration of a learner's information and data with others' over time and space is also possible, facilitating new forms of collaborative learning while also broadening, connecting, and deepening students' understandings and reflections both in the physical world and in classroom settings.

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