Perspectives on Wearable Enhanced Learning (WELL): Current Trends, Research, and Practice

​Wearable technologies – such as smart glasses, smart watches, smart objects, or smart garments – are potential game-changers, breaking ground and offering new opportunities for learning. These devices are body-worn, equipped with sensors, and integrate ergonomically into everyday activities. With wearable technologies forging new human-computer relations, it is essential to look beyond the current perspective of how technologies may be used to enhance learning. This edited volume,“Perspectives on Wearable Enhanced Learning,” aims to take a multidisciplinary view on wearable enhanced learning and provide a comprehensive overview of current trends, research, and practice in diverse learning contexts including school and work-based learning, higher education, professional development, vocational training, health and healthy aging programs, smart and open learning, and work. This volume features current state of the art wearable enhanced learning and explores how these technologies have begun to mark the transition from the desktop through the mobile to the age of wearable, ubiquitous technology-enhanced learning.

 PD Dr. rer. nat. Ralf Klamma has a diploma as well as doctoral and habilitation degrees in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University, and leads the research group “Advanced Community Information Systems” (ACIS) there. He is and was a principal investigator in major EU projects for Technology Enhanced Learning (Learning Layers, SAGE, VIRTUS, WEKIT, ROLE, BOOST, METIS, GALA, PROLEARN) and coordinated basic research projects funded by the German Science Foundation DFG (Media and Cultural Communication, CONTICI). Klamma has organized doctoral summer schools, doctoral consortia, workshops and conferences in Technology Enhanced Learning, Software & Web Engineering, and Social Network Analysis. He is head of the steering committee of the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) and member of the steering committee of the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL). His research interests are community information systems, serious games, web engineering, social network analysis, requirements engineering, wearable computing, and technology enhanced learning.

Dr. Fridolin Wild is a Senior Research Fellow leading the Performance Augmentation Lab (PAL) of Oxford Brookes University, located in the Department of Computing and Communications Technologies. With the research and development of the lab, Dr. Wild seeks to close the dissociative gap between abstract knowledge and its practical application, researching radically new forms of linking directly from knowing something ‘in principle’ to applying that knowledge ‘in practice’ and speeding its refinement and integration into polished performance. He is and has been leading numerous EU, European Space Agency, and nationally funded research projects, including WEKIT, TCBL, ARPASS, Tellme, TELmap, cRunch, Stellar, Role, LTfLL, iCamp, and Prolearn. He is the voted treasurer of the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) and leads its Special Interest Group on Wearable-Enhanced Learning (SIG WELL). He chairs the working group on Augmented Reality Learning Experience Models (ARLEM) of the IEEE Standards Association as well as the Natural Language Processing task view of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). He also holds the post as Research Fellow of the Open University of the UK, and from 2004 to 2009 worked as a researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He studied at the University of Regensburg, Germany, with extra-murals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Hildesheim.