Location Enabled Body Worn Technologies In The Education Sector

The rapid uptake of location-enabled wearable technologies for rich media creation in the extreme sports, community policing, military and medical sectors is now challenging the flexible learning and distance education stereotype.The re-purposed application of these wearable technologies opens up new domains for connecting learners with educators, which in turn poses substantial challenges for organizations as they grapple with the implications that these technologies imbue. Security, privacy, social and cultural issues that emanate with use in educational settings need to be examined amidst a socio-ethical landscape of advanced location-based services (LBS), electronic monitoring techniques in the form of global positioning systems (GPS) and the emergent concepts of Uberveillance. This inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral interrogation seeks to evidence the disruptive benefits or risks that these technologies are having upon existing ICT infrastructures and to inform future educational policy that governs learning design, authentication and validation protocols.