The Design Concept of U-Guide Ubiquitous Learning System

A ubiquitous learning system enables people to learn at any time, at any place and in any form. In particular, it has the context awareness property to provide learners the right information in the right place and at the right time. In this paper, we introduce the design concept for a ubiquitous learning system, U-Guide (Ubiquitous Guide) System. U-Guide integrates two existing technologies, Ad-hoc Positioning System (APS) and Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), with three newly developed technologies, Tag Forwarding (TF), Tag-Assisted Positioning (TAP) and Data In-network Cache (DIC) technologies. U-Guide can be realized by off-the-shelf portable devices with wireless communication capability; only few devices are required to be equipped with RFID readers. By those devices and RFID tags attached to smart objects, all devices can locate themselves, perceive the existence of smart objects, and acquire objects’associated data efficiently.