FABULA (FremrAgende By for Undervisning og LAering): Seamless networks for transforming the city into an arena for learning

The vision of FABULA is a city that, with the help of seamless networks, becomes a learning arena for its students, with services that allow people not only to access learning material anytime and anywhere, but also, and most importantly, to take an activ e role in collaborative processes of knowledge construction and sharing. This is made possible by the seamless usage of networks promoting different learning experiences, supporting both user and system initiated collaborative activities, centralized as w ell as peer-to-peer. To this aim FABULA will conceive an infrastructure for the development and deployment of learning services, a theoretical account of the affordances of these services, and proof-of concept applications. The project will be user-center ed to assure the pedagogical relevance of the proposed solutions and it will combine basic and applied research. Mobile and ambient e-learning is a field still in its infancy. Some applications show the potential of this approach, but are point solutions difficult to adapt to new contexts. With respect to current research, FABULA is innovative in the following ways: (1) FABULA will not focus only on mobile access to learning resources, but rather on the potential of seamless networks to foster interactio n and collaboration in the learning ecologies of a local territory; (2) FABULA will not work on point solutions, but it will rather identify basic services for supporting learning and provide an infrastructure supporting the development and deployment of these services; (3) FABULA will define a conceptual framework that can help in the design of new applications and in predicting their pedagogical implications. These innovations are necessary to make the development and deployment of learning services more effective and less expensive. This is critical to promote innovation in learning communities since it supports the experimentation with technical solutions to fit different and varying pedagogical needs.