Introducing Location - Awareness into a Learning Environment Supported by Mobile Devices

This paper describes a location aware enhancement of a learning environment supported by mobile devices. Such an extension is proposed in order to facilitate the learning process and to provide a solid framework for introducing a more situative approach to learning and teaching into an everyday classroom experience. Introducing location sensing into an existing system creates a framework not only to determine students' locations in a learning environment but to introduce context awareness and location - awareness into the learning process as well. What is more, location awareness is a solid base for numerous services in a modern mobile device supported learning environment since looking into the summary data on students' locations gives a better insight into their habits and needs, both individual and within a group. It is our belief that location awareness presents a significant step towards creating a learning environment even more oriented to students and their needs. The paper [resents an implementation of a location aware extension of an existing system that uses mobile devices to support a learning environment, reporting module which uses acquired location data, discusses technology requirements and limitations and deals with privacy and security issues.