As any visitor to libraries and coffee shops around campus knows, students have long worked together in study groups to collaborate on projects and to help each other learn challenging material.

Through the work of a team of computer science and communications faculty at the University of Illinois, students may soon have a better way to tap into their peer networks for learning. The team is working on a test bed for peer-to-peer Mobile Learning Communities (MLC), sponsored by the National Science Foundation planning grant, Vodafone  and Qualcomm, which seeks to enable students to share trusted educational services with each other via iPods, cell phones, and other handheld mobile devices.

The team is tackling the challenge from every angle. Led by computer science professor and multimedia expert Klara Nahrstedt, the team includes faculty in social computing (Karrie Karahalios) distributed systems (Roy Campbell and Indranil Gupta), networking (Sam Kamin), communication (Scott Poole, LAS), and trust (William Sanders, ECE).

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