Ubiquitous Computing Technologies in Education

Ubiquitous Learning: The New Age For Education

In recent years, digitalization around the globe has been proceeding toward wireless communication and sensor technologies, which are able to detect the contexts of our daily lives, and provide personal supports accordingly. Such technology has been called ubiquitous computing (u-computing). The innovation and advance of those new technologies have led to a new research issue in education; that is, to develop an innovative learning environment so that the students can learn in any place at any time. Moreover, with the help of context-aware (sensor) technology, the learning system is able to detect the student learning behaviors in the real world, and hence more active and adaptive learning activities can be conducted. Such a learning scenario is called context-aware ubiquitous learning (context-aware u-learning), which has gradually become a popular trend of education.

Researchers have demonstrated how a context-aware u-learning environment can be used to help the learners in increasing their ability for solving problems in the real world. For example, a group of researchers in Japan has employed u-computing technologies to conduct students to learn Japanese under real-world situations. The systems can provide learners with appropriate expressions according to different contexts (e.g., occasions or locations) via mobile devices (e.g., PDA, Personal Digital Assistant).