As we mentioned in the introduction, the best way to understand the effect of ubiquitous technology in our everyday lives is to experience it. This is similar to the Moran et al. notion of evolutionary engagement, in which the evolution of a tool is informed by its early adoption in a real-life-context [10]. Our constant drive to go live with various prototypes was the single greatest challenge we faced, and it comes with some risk given our educational focus. It is not an easy decision to experiment with education, as failure can have dire consequences. We are a relatively low-budget project, which forced us to purchase affordable pen-based technology that was neither ideal nor robust. The development of pre-production, live recording and post-production tools was not difficult work when compared to the maintenance and everyday operation of the student notebooks. With the advent of a second generation of pen-based computing, we hope this situation will improve without significant cost increases.
One great advantage of our prototyping approach has been suggestions from the users. We received many suggestions from students for possible extensions of Classroom 2000 that we did not initially consider. Some of the more promising suggestions are:
Future Computing Environments