ABSTRACT
Personalized learning has been a goal for education during the past 40 years: to provide access to learning resources and activities that adapt to the needs and abilities of the learner (Dodd, Sime, & Kay, 1968). Mobile technologies can now offer adaptivity to the physical and social settings, and their use and adoption in education have generated a new approach for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) called mobile learning, or m-learning (Sharples, Milrad, Arnedillo Sánchez, & Vavoula, 2009). The rapid development of these technologies, combined with access to content in a wide variety of settings, allows learners to experience new learning situations beyond the classroom. Cross-contextual learning can enable a continuous learning experience across different settings, such as home–school, or workplace–college. This new view on TEL, supported by wireless technologies and ubiquitous computing, is termed ubiquitous learning or u-learning (Rogers & Price, 2006; Syvänen, Beale, Sharples, Ahonen, & Lonsdale, 2005). Although context is an important aspect of m-learning, it is the core concept of u-learning, owing to two important affordances of the learning environment, namely context awareness and adaptivity. By context awareness, we mean that the system providing pedagogical flow and content to the learning environment should be aware of the learners’ situations. By context adaptivity, we mean that different learning contents should be adaptable to the particular settings in which the learners are situated.
