Strengthening learning contexts: An introduction

This document discusses contexts and how strengthening learning contexts can improve the learning experience. It defines context as a combination of environment, competence, action, artifacts, people, purpose and devices. Context matters because understanding and accounting for context can increase awareness, motivation, cognition, interaction quality, experience quality, knowledge management and appropriation. Contexts can be strengthened by augmenting people, places, facilities, devices, networks, environments and tools through personalization, adaptation and contextualization. The document presents STELLAR's vision of contextualizing virtual learning environments and instrumentalizing real learning contexts to support novel learning experiences and the mobility of learners across distributed settings. It proposes using standards to achieve interoperability and reusability of learning resources across