2         What is Context?

            Existing work within education, computer science and Artificial Intelligence as applied to Education (AIED) has started to explore the nature of learning contexts.  In education, studies of contemporary practice describe classrooms as Social Learning Contexts (Mercer, 1992), in which the organisation of the learning resources, including the computer, will influence the manner in which these resources are used and the nature of the context.  Each individual class will have its own unique culture and brand of learning environment (Smagorinsky and Fly, 1993).  In computer science, specifically, the ubiquitous computing community, context is defined in a manner that will enable the development of 'context aware' applications.  This work has resulted in definitions of context such as that offered by Dey (2001), which characterises context as: "any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves". This has been critiqued by Dourish (2004) who proposes greater attention be paid to the nature of human activity, and Chalmers (2004) who highlights the way that history influences ongoing activity.  He suggests that an individual's experience and history is part of her current context. 

In the AIED and mobile learning literatures the nature of context is discussed in terms that  combine the educational and technological perspectives. This research community has explored how we can design adaptive technology that takes a learner's context and potential collaborators into account  (Greer, McCalla, Cooke, Collins, Kumar, Bishop, and Vassileva, 1998, and  Murray and Arroyo, 2002, for example). By moving beyond the desktop and outside the classroom context, wireless, mobile and ubiquitous technologies have been shown to engage learners in hands-on experience and activities in real world learning situations.  As we have previously identified (Smith, Luckin, Fitzpatrick, Avramides and Underwood, 2005; Stanton Fraser, Smith, Tallyn, Kirk, Benford, Rowland, Paxton, Price, and Fitzpatrick, 2005) such activities can lead children to be more imaginative in their understanding, can yield both motivational and cognitive benefits and offer learners greater ownership of their data. 

Finally, there has been some early work to explore how modeling can be applied in a variety of learning contexts in order to build systems that can respond appropriately to contextual features. Beale and Lonsdale (2004), for example, present a hierarchical description of context that they define as "a dynamic process with historical dependencies."  This is described as "a set of changing relationships that may be shaped by the history of those relationships".

             In summary previous research suggests that a context can be described as: a situation defined through the relationships and interactions between the elements within that situation over time.  More specifically, in the case of a learner's context we can describe it as a situation defined through social interactions that are themselves historically situated and culturally idiosyncratic.  It is also evident that getting the context right can lead to better learning experiences. 

The educational research we cite has been influenced by a sociocultural approach and it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon the parallels between the recent work on context and the earlier work of writers such as Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978; Vygotsky, 1986).  Recent work on context has moved beyond the notion of context as a snapshot of elements interacting within a situation and has placed an emphasis upon the importance of the history of those interactions and relationships within that situation.  In other words context has both a static and a dynamic dimension in which the nature of the dynamic interactions changes the nature of the static definition.  This mirrors the definition of the Zone of Proximal Development by Vgotsky.  On the one hand it is a spatial metaphor for measuring a child's potential ability through articulation of the difference between what she can achieve alone and what she can achieve with assistance (Vygotsky, 1986).  On the other it is a dynamic process that must be created through socials interactions between the learner and others using sign systems within a culture that are both a means of storing past and of forming future activity (Vygotsky, 1987). 

In the introduction to this paper we state that the issue at the heart of this paper is how we can understand context in a way that will enable us to use mobile technology effectively to help learners (and teachers, peers and parents) to adapt the resources they find within a particular context to best support their learning needs. The focus of this paper is therefore the presentation and evaluation of a framework for the characterization of a learning context.  In particular, we identify some of the aspects of context should be taken into account, and possibly represented and modelled.  Successful evaluation of this framework as a characterisation of a learning context may then inform the future design of experiences that use such technology.

We define a learning context as an Ecology of Resources: a set of inter-related resource elements, the interactions between which provide a particular context.  In keeping with our previous discussions, both here and in Luckin (2005), this definition has both a static dimension, through which the resources can be identified and categorized, and a dynamic dimension that describes the organizing activities that activate the resources and form an Ecology that is centred on the learner.  The categories in the static dimension are: what is to be learnt (Content), how it is to be learnt (Process) and where it is to be learnt (Place.)  These are described more fully in Table 1.  The organising activities are described in Table 2.

Table 1 Categories of Resource that form a Learning Context

Table 2 Organising activities

In our previous theoretical discussions (Luckin, 2005) we offer more detailed descriptions of these activities and suggest that the organization of learning resources within the learning context must promote the mutual construction of learning activities between teachers and learners.  In some situations teachers or more able peers are likely to play a more dominant role in this process, but nevertheless, the organization of resources must maximize the opportunities for interaction between more and less able participants. It is also important to note that there are additional factors that influence the nature of any context. For example, the culture, as well as the political and policymaking infrastructure within which a context exists, will be defining factors upon its specification and upon the resources that it comprises.