635 CONTEXT DEPENDENT SERVICES IN AN M-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: THE PRINTING CASE Anna Trifonova Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni Università degli Studi di Trento, 38050 Povo (Trento) Italy Marco Ronchetti Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni Università degli Studi di Trento, 38050 Povo (Trento) Italy ABSTRACT We study a context-dependent problem that arises in an m-learning environment: how to print a document when being in a generic place. We implement a working solution, and argue about the general value of our approach. We examine the printing problem because it has a practical value, and at the same time it turns out to be a prototype for a class of other problems that can be encountered when moving from e-learning to m-learning. KEYWORDS m-learning, printing, location-dependent services 1. INTRODUCTION “m-learning” is one of the successful buzzwords of the beginning of the millennium. It combines the promises of two very promising fields: e-learning and mobile computing. E-learning is growing at a very fast rate: nowadays most universities have at least some degree of support for e-learning, companies are investing in the field, and the need for continuous education pushes for e-learning solutions. On the other hand it is likely that mobile telecommunication will continue to grow and to add new services. Competing and complementary wireless technologies like wireless LAN, Bluetooth, GPRS and UMTS will multiply potential handheld applications. IDC forecasts that 63 millions handhelds will be sold by 2004, and that approximately 38% of them will be smart phones, integrating PDA functionality with features for communication. Most mobile clients will support Java (J2ME) making it easier and less costly to develop portable applications. Given such scenario, forecasting the success of m-learning seems to be an easy bet. It is more difficult to understand in detail how m-learning will help reaching the goals of a better learning, and how it will be different from the rest of e-learning. According to the literature [Zobel 2001, Steinberger 2002] successful m-learning will be characterized by the following properties: 5 minute value: the ability to use small fragments of time (e.g. waiting time) for learning (e.g. doing quizzes, using a discussion forum, communicating, reading material); Simplicity: the limited display and input capabilities of the mobile devices make it difficult to use rich (e.g. complex and multimedial) documents using a PDA-like interface: it is therefore not useful or practical to transpose a power-point presentation on a PDA; Context dependent information: the dependency can be relative to: - location context; i.e. the system knows the location where the learner resides and adjusts to it; - temporal context; i.e. the system is aware of time dependent data; - behavioral context; i.e. the system monitors the activities performed by the learner and responds to them adjusting its behavior; - interest specific context: i.e. the system modifies its behavior according to the user’s preferences.