Smart Cities Key Technologies and Applications Joint Research: Contextual Mobile Learning System for Professional Education
Résumé
The concept of “Smart city” describes how investments in human and social capital and modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure and e-services fuel sustainable growth. Smart city is supposed to support sustainable economic development, provides high quality of life, and has a wise management of natural resources and participatory governance.
Our research group takes smart city as a real augmented environment which allows ubiquitous computing (UC) and ICT. Our work considering smart city is characterized by three acronyms: MOCOCO (MObility, COntextualization and COoperation), IOD (Internet of Data), IMERA (French acronym for Mobile Interaction with Real Augmented Environment).
In this paper, we focus on one of the aspects of Smart City, education. Education in smart city, considering the issues like awareness learning activity, participatory learning path, auto-pedagogical learning infrastructure, could offer people who living in smart city an effective and long life learning process. In our research, we want to find ways to offer people, especially professionals working in smart city, practical and abundant information,
knowledge, or skills whenever and wherever they need, in order to achieve a good education experience.
For providing effective professional education experience, one problem needs to be solved: how to create or to maintain professionals’ working environment and working conditions in order to improve working efficiency and enhance companies’ performance. According to our viewpoint of “Smart City”, we propose to exploit a contextual mobile learning system based on the EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System) to provide professionals the “just-in-time” learning contents and implement a “learning by doing” process.
Contextual mobile learning system puts emphasis on professional mobile learners who are carrying mobile devices, such as smart phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), which has been augmented with hardware sensor, such as GPS receivers, wireless LAN, camera, etc, and software sensors, such as network congestion manager, web log analyzer, learner’s behavior analyzer, etc. These sensors could detect location, activity, network connectivity, learner state, and so on. Contextual mobile learning system examines the sensed learning contexts
and reacts to changes to the learning environment.
The features of the proposed system can be summarized as follows: (1) reorganizing learning contents, so that information in different systems could be shared between professionals; (2) providing professionals with “just in-time” learning contents anywhere and anytime; and (3) increasing the probability for collaborating in workplace learning. We concentrate on the definition of the professional mobile learning context model which is a crucial trategy in smart city education. Our future work focuses on analyzing and collecting community contexts which are important for collaborative learning.