Enhancing Learning Experiences through Context-Aware Collaborative Services: Software Architecture and Prototype System

Context-aware computing systems hold the promise of enhancing the level and quality of educational activities. However, development of such systems to provide novel educational services is still extremely challenging and requires new architectures and middleware paradigms. In this paper we present a structured, agent based, middleware architecture, able to support sophisticated context-awareness in lectures, presentations and meetings. The architecture caters for the generation of sophisticated context by employing a large set of context-acquisition components, while enabling service logic using non-trivial situation state models. Based on this architectural framework, we have developed a wide array of innovative context-aware services that can play a significant role in education. We present the most prominent of these (named ´memory jog´), which provides pertinent information and human-centric assistance to participants in lectures, presentations and meetings