One way to view classroom teaching and learning is as a group multimedia authoring activity. Before class, teachers prepare outlines, slides, or notes and students read textbooks or other assigned readings. During the lecture, the words and actions of the teacher and students expound and clarify the lessons underlying the prepared materials. It is common practice to annotate the prepared material during the lecture and to create new material as notes on a whiteboard or in a student notebook. These different forms of material -- printed, written and spoken -- are all related to the learning experience that defines a particular course, and yet there are virtually no facilities provided to automatically record and preserve the relationships between them. Applying computing technology in the classroom setting to support the classroom's group multimedia authoring and review experience should lead to an enhanced teaching and learning experience.
To test this hypothesis, we initiated the Classroom 2000 project at Georgia Tech. The Classroom 2000 project is applying a variety of ubiquitous computing technologies -- electronic whiteboards, personal pen-based interfaces, and the World-Wide Web -- together with software to facilitate automatic capture and content-based access of multimedia information in the educational setting of the university classroom. The goal of the project is to evaluate and understand the effect of ubiquitous computing on the educational experience, both in terms of how it improves current practice and suggests new forms of education. This paper reports on our initial experiences developing and using a number of classroom prototypes.
Successful uses of ubiquitous technology will fundamentally alter some forms of education, but in ways that are hard to predict. To begin to explore the effects of such technology, our approach is to introduce novel technologies gradually into the traditional classroom lecture setting and see what happens. We do not intend to replace the traditional lecture-based style of pedagogy, at least not initially. However, much of the information in a lecture is inefficiently recorded or lost, and we can use simple capturing techniques to improve the situation. The result is a more complete record of what occurred during the lecture in a form that can be reviewed more easily.
Future Computing Environments