Introduction

The arrival of Mobile User-Centric Media and Future Internet opens a range of opportunities for the development of software applications. The newly structured system serves as a platform on top of which novel mobile applications benefit from enhanced multimedia support, network-embedded ubiquity services and interoperability. On the social side, users get new opportunities for social interaction and collaboration, benefit from the mobile-specific content and service personalization and participate in the dynamic and contextual crafting of mobile ecosystems. Mobile User-Centric Media and Future Internet serves as technologically sound layer on top of which application – specific open frameworks with the support for specific area of human activity can be built.

The project is an open framework for mobile learning which bridges the gap between the generic services offered by the Future Internet and the learning-oriented services that will be made available to future mobile learners.

Features

The main features covered by the M2Learn framework are:

User-Centric Media

• User-centric framework focused on user-driven collaboration and communication through wikis, blogs, chats, and forums integrated in e-learning platforms. 4.1.2 Social Networking • Participation in social learning communities, thanks to its integration to e-learning platforms.

Ubiquity

• Easy access to sensors (e.g. motion sensors), improving student engagement in content and activities. • Invisible management of location-based technologies (e.g. GPS, cell towers-triangulation, WiFi). • Advanced gathering of contextual information, through the access to geographic services. They allow translating a latitude and longitude coordinate into a name of area (e.g. room, building, street, city, and country).

Content and Service Personalization

• Personalized access to content and services, according to user context, (e.g. location, moment, profile, schedule, people around him/her, or preferences). • Search personalization support automatically including user context in search queries. • Contents and services discovery depending on spatial and temporal variables. • Mainstream and social media integration through the support of data feeds (RSS). • Easy mashup development through a web-based API that offers different contextual information about the user or a group. The framework incorporates a service called ContextHub that helps users to share their context with other users that belong to the same group.

Services interoperability and Framework

• Easy development of mobile applications through an easy-to-use API, empowering non-expert users to build up systems themselves • Plug-and-play configuration environment thanks to the use of standards, and definition of public interfaces. It allows adding new services to the environment without changing the software. • Interoperability between mobile applications and e-learning platforms, becoming the last one as the e-portfolio repository of all student activities, regardless if the data come from the e-learning platform or from an external application.

Future Internet

• The framework offers an open API to simplify the mobile computing development. • It supports new multi-modal interfaces, such as motion sensors (e.g. accelerometers, etc.) • Access, publication and sharing of content and services depending on particular locations, profiles and moments. • Personalization of services depending on user’s contextual information (context-awareness). • Transparent retrieving of information from sensors to provide an invisible acquisition of context to automatically personalize the provided services. • Support of location-based social networking. • Support of context-aware search engines. • All the external functionalities are provided in a service-shape. • Support of different sensors, such as RFID, associating the tag’s ID to services, locations, or contents.

Education

• Support of e-learning standards, such as LOM for Learning Objects and IMS-QTI assessment. • Interface to access services from e-learning platforms (currently Moodle), such as calendar, chat, forum, blog, assignment, and wiki. It also supports integration of logs from external applications to gather the student’s e-portfolio. • The support of learning objects fosters the implantation of any kind of personalized (multimedia) content (open or not) in the mobile device. • Augmented Reality becomes easier through the use of the M2Learn framework as it support several location technologies, and motion sensors. Therefore, to build an augmented reality application a developer only needs to use the provided API, and add the information that wants to mashup in the images from the camera.

Digital Ecosystem

• As a Future Internet cannot be conceived as an isolated application, but as a live ecosystem of both services and users, the framework is designed to serve as a leaven to the coexistence of multiple users that interact, collaborate and communicate with each other, giving rise to global value-added applications that mind the group’s context.

Open frameworks

• M2Learn code is forecasted to be released during 2010, creating an open community around it that will use the framework and improve it.