Smartening Up the Student Learning Experience with Ubiquitous Media

This article describes how an experimental platform for social, mobile and ubiquitous computing has been used 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 community formation, for context sensitivity, automated learning and adaptation to the user, and for management of privacy and 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 the devices belonging to that user. Three of the case study services were intended for use in a physical environment specifically created to support ubiquitous intelligence; they were highly interactive and used shared screens, voice input and gestural interaction. Another three ubiquitous services were available throughout the university environment as mobile and desktop services. The case study exploited this architecture's ability to integrate multiple novel applications and interface devices and to deliver them flexibly in these different environments. The platform proved to be stable and reliable and the study shows that treating a provider of services and resources (the University) as a CSS is instrumental in enabling the platform to provide this range of services across differing environments.