There is a worldwide discussion about digitization in school education. This discussion is mostly
technology-centered, leaving a lack of solutions for daily schooling or focuses on isolated educational
applications. With the Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS) platform, we developed a didactic infrastructure
as an integrated environment that supports self-directed learning inside and outside school. The
platform interlinks mobile and stationary learning applications. The artificial division between the
classroom and the world outside vanishes through the pervasive cloud-based backend system NEMO
(Network Environment for Multimedia Objects) connecting students’ mobile applications with central
semantic media storage. This paper emphasizes on the two mobile applications for task-oriented
(MoLES) and discovery-oriented learning (InfoGrid). The InfoGrid System is a mobile application that
supports the creation of augmented reality tours enabling the learners to study and discover physical
places like urban spaces, architecture, museums, industrial settings, or natural habitats. Physical
objects will be overlaid by media like text, images, audio, video, or 3D objects augmenting the
physical/natural world with a digital informational layer by discovering and selecting visual
(photographic) targets. Teachers or students can create content and tours by themselves through a
modeling and editing application. The mobile application Mobile Learning Exploration System
(MoLES) allows setting up tasks (challenges) to be solved by students inside and preferably outside
school. Tasks can be created by teachers or students themselves depending on the pedagogical
goals. The students use their own smartphones or tablets to solve these tasks by collecting
information in form of different media like texts, photos, audio recordings or videos. This information
will then be tagged and transmitted to NEMO. When the tasks have been solved, the students return
to school and use the information collected for presentations in the classrooms or the school foyer.
Both mobile applications make use of large multi-touch screens (InteractiveWall) or multi-touch tables
(InteractiveTable) located in their school to discuss, sort and structure the media into media collections
by a tool called MediaGallery for further use. Using their own digital devices in the sense of “Bring your
own Device” (BYOD) in a physical environment keeps the students connected to their physical (real)
world. They will solve tasks, discover interactive content in a project- and topic-oriented manner
outside school and bring the results back to the classroom to be discussed in a structured way.
Keywords: Ambient Learning Spaces, Mobile Learning, Augmented Reality, Semantic Modeling,
Multimedia Learning.