Smartening up the Student Learning Experience with Ubiquitous Media

Abstract

This article describes how an experimental platform for social, mobile and ubiquitous computing has beenused in a wide-ranging longitudinal “in the wild” case study of the platform with a set of third-party services.The article outlines some of the relevant aspects of the platform, including built-in support for communityformation, for context sensitivity, automated learning and adaptation to the user, and formanagement of privacyand trust relationships. The platform architecture is based on the notion of Cooperating Smart Spaces(CSSs), where a CSS is a partition of the platform corresponding to a single user and distributed over thedevices belonging to that user. Three of the case study services were intended for use in a physical environmentspecifically created to support ubiquitous intelligence; they were highly interactive and used sharedscreens, voice input and gestural interaction. Another three ubiquitous services were available throughoutthe university environment as mobile and desktop services. The case study exploited this architecture’sability to integrate multiple novel applications and interface devices and to deliver them flexibly in thesedifferent environments. The platform proved to be stable and reliable and the study shows that treatinga provider of services and resources (the University) as a CSS is instrumental in enabling the platform toprovide this range of services across differing environments