Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

It is now practical to produce computers that can make decisions based on contextual clues, such as what the user is attending to, the user's location and orientation, what the user is focused on, the date and time of day, lighting conditions, other objects or people in the environment, accessible infrastructure in the immediate vicinity, and so forth. The implications are only beginning to be explored, but may be profound. Context-aware computers can interact with the user or can program themselves to have particular responses appropriate to a situation; for example, to lower the volume of music being played when a telephone rings nearby, or to silence all calls during a meeting or class.

Although the educational application of context-aware computing is still several years away, early experiments continue to spark ideas about how this group of technologies may be applied. Some universities have employed GPS-capable handheld devices for campus tours, giving the viewer information about whatever building or monument happens to be nearest. Applications for context-aware computing will increase as the technologies that make it possible become integrated with commonly carried portable devices, such as cell phones.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• allow tailored presentation experiences; for instance, automatic adjustment of lighting, sound, and projector brightness as faculty moves through a lecture (brighter lights on the faculty when s/he steps away from the screen, or brighter projection when his/her attention returns to it)
• identify the teacher and enable him/her to control projection, lighting, and other room features from anywhere in the room
• deliver information relevant to the learner's location (in a library, museum, or other physical space)

Examples

• Tsinghua University has developed a smart classroom that incorporates pervasive computing technologies to sense where learners are in the physical space, what they are doing, and what they may need. The lecturer controls the display with voice and gesture.

• The context-aware cell phone project at MIT is attempting to build a wearable cell phone which will receive signals about the user's location and behave appropriately (turn themselves off, for example). In a prior MIT project, researchers developed a phone that acquired data about whom the user knows , where the user goes, and what the user habitually does, and then can give the user feedback based on the information it collects. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-11/ns-tpt112404.php

For Further Reading

Context-Aware Computing: A World That Knows What to Do for You
(Paul Brand, Stanford HCI Seminar, May 2005) In this webcast of a seminar from Stanford University, Paul Brand discusses several context-aware computing projects from around the world. http://www.usabilityviews.com/uv010028.html

Potentials and Challenges of Context Awareness for Learning Systems
(Andreas Schmidt, undated.) This paper discusses the challenges of a context aware e-learning system, which would ideally know what material to deliver when to the student. http://www.andreas-p-schmidt.de/publications/abis05_aschmidt.pdf