Learning in an Ambient Intelligent World: Enabling Technologies and Practices

The rapid evolution of information and communication technology opens a wide spectrum of opportunities to change our surroundings into an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) world. AmI is a vision of future information society, where people are surrounded by a digital environment that is sensitive to their needs, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior, and responsive to their presence. It emphasizes on greater user friendliness, user empowerment, and more effective service support, with an aim to bring information and communication technology to everyone, every home, every business, and every school, thus improving the quality of human life. AmI unprecedentedly enhances learning experiences by endowing the users with the opportunities of learning in context, a breakthrough from the traditional education settings. In this survey paper, we examine some major characteristics of an AmI learning environment. To deliver a feasible and effective solution to ambient learning, we overview a few latest developed enabling technologies in context awareness and interactive learning. Associated practices are meanwhile reported. We also describe our experience in designing and implementing a smart class prototype, which allows teachers to simultaneously instruct both local and remote students in a context-aware and natural way.