uClassroom: Expanding Awareness in Classroom To Ubiquitous Teaching and Learning

This paper describes the concept of ubiquitous classroom and its implementation that enables us to expand "the awareness among faculty and students in classroom" to ubiquitous teaching and learning environments. As we have experienced, the awareness among faculty and students in a real class is crucial to know students\´ learning situations, and faculty adapts a way of teaching to them in order to maximize the outcome of teaching and learning through a class. This kind of awareness is also crucial even if faculty supports students\´ learning activities outside classroom through course management system (CMS). However, the conventional Web-based CMSs used in higher educational institutions are too limited to realize such awareness because of Web-browser\´s functional and security restrictions. We addressed this problem by developing eclipse RCP (rich client platform) based uDesktop and context infrastructure integrated with Sakai collaboration and learning environment as an institution-wide and production-level information infrastructure system. We will show the effectiveness of "awareness" through iPod integration used in English language learning