Abstract: Introduction Lifelong takes place anywhere and anytime and across multiple contexts. Some of the opportunities take place in a formal context, while others happen in an informal setting. Therefore, e-learning infrastructures that focus on lifelong should integrate both formal and informal support. Koper & Tattersall (Koper & Tattersall, 2004) present an integrated model for lifelong called a learning network, which tries exploit the strengths of a heterogeneous community of self-directed learners. The importance of such communities support a lifelong process has often been stressed in educational research. In this respect, research has been done specifically considering the strengths of embedding support in authentic contexts and communities of practice (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Additionally, lifelong emphasises the responsibility of the self-directed learner create and structure the content himself (Koper & Tattersall, 2004). In a lifelong scenario, a learner can be involved in several activities in different contexts at the same time. In this sense, a great deal of is informal and therefore highly unstructured (Livingstone, 2001). Mobile devices offer possibilities make use of these spontaneous, unstructured situations. In addition, mobile technology should be seen as a mediating artefact (Sharples, 2007) that (1) can be used give more structure informal and (2) integrate informal into blended scenarios. Koper & Tattersall (Koper & Tattersall, 2004) support the potential of mobile devices for learning, by arguing that mobile devices offer new opportunities to create flexible, rich and interactive environments. Moreover, they specifically identify the potential of mobile information access for lifelong as being able reach anyone, anywhere. Furthermore, mobile access personalised content provides an instant way of accessing and collecting personal memories. More specifically, mobile access to, for instance, educational blogs (Oravec, 2002) would provide the learner with a way instantly collect personal information and experiences, in that way offering simple tools for supporting long-term informal processes embedded in authentic contexts (Trafford, 2005). Next on-spot creation and delivery of content, mobile devices offer several ways of acquiring information about the learner. On the one hand, mobile technology is often personal and therefore offers means for personalisation, for example using calendar information find appropriate moments for learning. On the other hand, by using sensor technology, information about the environment of the learner, the learner's context, can be acquired. In context-aware computing a variety of notions of context and automatic possibilities for context detection have already been discussed (Abowd & Mynatt, 2000; Dey & Abowd, 1999). More particularly, the combination of context-aware computing with ubiquitous and pervasive techniques leads systems that are able adapt the user's identity, preferences, location, environment and time (Gross & Specht, 2001; Specht & Kravcik, 2006; Zimmermann, Lorenz, & Specht, 2005). Lifelong learning, supported by these techniques, could provide a high level of personalisation and furthermore provide the learner with suitable content at a suitable place and on a suitable moment. A detailed review of the current state-of-the-art in mobile and contextualised solutions has been given in (De Jong, Specht, & Koper, 2008). However, several challenges in contextualised can be still identified. First, contextualised support needs an infrastructure for contextualisation with a strong technological foundation in the area of context-aware systems (Zimmermann, Lorenz, & Specht, 2005). …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 37
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