Towards a Small-Scale Model for Ubiquitous Learning

The ever-increasing use of mobile devices allied to the widespread adoption of wireless network technology has greatly stimulated mobile and ubiquitous computing research. The adoption of mobile technology enables improvement to several application areas, such as education. New pedagogical opportunities can be created through the use of location systems and context-aware computing technology to track each learner’s location and customize his/her learning process. In this chapter, the authors discuss a ubiquitous learning model called LOCAL (Location and Context Aware Learning). LOCAL was created to explore those aforementioned pedagogical opportunities, leveraging location technology and context management in order to support ubiquitous learning and facilitate collaboration among learners. This model was conceived for small-scale learning spaces, but can be extended in order to be applied to a large-scale environment. Initial results were obtained in a real scenario, attesting the viability of the approach.