Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

摘要

Information and Communication Technologies, known as ICT, have undergone dramatic changes in the last 25 years, each time producing new and exciting opportunities for the education sector. The 1980’s was the decade of the Personal Computer (PC), which brought computing into the home, and in an educational setting, into the classroom. The 1990’s gave us the World-Wide-Web (the web), building on the infrastructure of the Internet, which has revolutionised the availability and delivery of information. The implications of web technologies on education, often described in terms of e-learning, are potentially far reaching and are still being explored and debated. In the midst of this information revolution, we are now confronted with a third wave of novel technologies, that of mobile and wearable computing, where computing devices are already becoming small enough so that we can carry them around on us at all times, and, in addition, they have the ability to interact with devices embedded in the environment. The emergence of this new wave of technologies offer many opportunities in the education sector, some of which we will explore, with special emphasis given to Further and Higher Education (FE/HE).