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students (Collaborative Learning) [5]. Beside the use of those general-purpose
tools in education, other tools that make more specific use of technology have ap-
peared. This applies to those that make use of Context-awareness information and
ubiquitous computing and communication.
The inclusion of context-awareness in educational scenarios and processes refers
to Context-aware Learning [6], a particular area of application of Context-aware
Computing [3]. Moreover, the ability to characterize and customize the context that
surrounds a learning situation at a certain time and place provides flexibility in the
educational process. This way, learning does not only occur in classrooms, but also
in a museum, park or any other place [7], obtaining ubiquitous learning spaces.
Thus, there is an extensive literature that addresses the problem of this kind of
learning, highlighting those works that attempt to solve contextual information
acquisition and providing data to users [8]. The use and integration of different
technologies and the approach to specific learning activities characterize these solu-
tions. However, the complexity of understanding and use of the technology and
solutions in the aforementioned works does not allow a wide use of them.
This paper presents the use of CAFCLA [9], a framework aimed at designing,
developing and deploying context-aware educational scenarios. Teachers are able
to characterize the context where the learning activity will occur through the crea-
tion of a world model in which locate data collectors (e.g., sensors), identify and
characterize areas of interest (e.g., paintings in a museum), etc. Moreover, the col-
laboration between students and the customization of the information available is
also provided and can be integrated in the activity design. For that, a botanical
garden has been chosen as scenario, as it presents the physical and content features
to develop a context-aware collaborative learning activity: indoor and outdoor
spaces within multiple learning objects (trees and flowers).
The following section describes the background and problem description re-
lated to the presented approach. Then, CAFCLA are described: what kinds of ac-
tivities are covered, how the context of the activity can be defined, who the users
are, which activities are implemented by the framework, taking a botanical garden
as example scenario. Finally, the conclusions and future work are depicted.
2 Background and Problem Description
A growing interest in educational software, commonly known as e-learning, has
appeared over recent years [5]. Mobile devices provide important benefits to edu-
cation: mobility, communication skills including collection and provision of con-
textual information, as well as precise location anytime. Mobile Learning is
defined as “the processes of coming to know through conversations across mul-
tiple contexts amongst people and personal interactive technologies” [10]. This
definition implies two important ideas: first of them is that technology can be in-
volved into the learning process; the second idea suggests that mobile learning
emphasizes the communication between the involved people and their interaction
with the context [11].
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