Making Use of User-Generated Content and Contextual Metadata Collected during Ubiquitous Learning Activities

During the last years significant research efforts have been conducted looking at how to standardize digital educational content. Due to better connectivity and computational power of mobile devices, new opportunities have emerged for collecting user-generated data based on the context and the environment where the content has been generated. While metadata standards for learning objects such as IEEE LOM make it possible to annotate digital content with pre-defined metadata tags, the ability to store custom user-generated or contextual metadata is not yet fully supported. The need for developing a flexible solution to deal with these problems motivated the design of our activity controller system (ACS), a rapid prototyping system and a task manager, which interprets, reacts to and stores contextual metadata and content extracted during learning activities. This paper presents how ACS facilitates coordination and reusability of user generated data, which we believe is as a valuable feature compared with existing standards and initiatives.