Enhancing Interaction With Smart Objects Throught Mobile Devices

Interaction with smart objects can be accomplished with different technologies, such as tangible interfaces or touch computing, among others. Some of them require the object to be especially designed to be 'smart', and some other are limited in the variety and complexity of the possible actions. This paper describes a user-smart object interaction model and prototype based on the well known event-condition-action (ECA) reasoning, which can work, to a degree, independently of the intelligence embedded into the smart object. It has been designed for mobile devices to act as mediators between users and smart objects and provides an intuitive means for personalization of object's behavior. When the user is close to an object, this one publishes its 'event & action' capabilities to the user's device. The user may accept the object's module offering, which will enable him to configure and control that object, but also its actions with respect to other elements of the environment or the virtual world. The modular ECA interaction model facilitates the integration of different types of objects in a smart space, giving the user full control of their capabilities and facilitating creative mash-uping to build customized functionalities that combine physical and virtual action

Supporting lifelong learners to build personal learning ecologies in daily physical spaces

This article presents the results from a questionnaire filled out by 147 lifelong learners with the aim to analyse learning practices of adults, and to recognize patterns of lifelong learners in order to support them with technology. These patterns capture the context in which lifelong learners are more willing to learn, that is, the day of the week, duration, location activity being performed, type of device being used, way to interact with their devices and how these aspects can affect when an adult student takes the initiative to learn. Likewise, this article examines previous publications on surveys, questionnaires and information collected with the same objective, to corroborate and contrast the findings. Moreover, we present a literature review on augmented tangibles for learning identifying potential contexts to orchestrate tangibles depending on the physical space where they are normally used. As an outcome of this work, important research questions are risen to integrate smart learning objects in learner-centred ecologies of resource