Nitin "Nick" Sawhney, Gregory D. Abowd & Chris Atkeson
GVU Center & College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 USA
{nitin,abowd,cga}@cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce
Table of Contents
We are interested in prototyping future computing environments that
will enhance the classroom experience and empower both teacher and
student. In this paper, we describe the Classroom 2000 project at
Georgia Tech which is integrating personal and group pen-based
technology, audio services and the World-Wide Web to record in-class
interactions for later review.
Ubiquitous computing, educational applications, pen-based input, using
the WWW, audio indexing.
Our vision for educational technology is to empower both teacher and
student to enhance existing modes of classroom interaction as well as
form new modes of group and individual activity and break the physical
and temporal boundaries of the traditional classroom to provide
ubiquitous electronic access over time and space. Imagine that while
studying for an exam, the student could query a repository of all
information collected throughout the course. This would include
intelligent content-based searches through the teacher's prepared
lecture notes, the student's own notes taken during class, and the
audio and video records of the classes. In reviewing this information,
the student could also make associations between issues discussed in
separate lectures. Then imagine that this retrieval and association
could be done across all classes that an individual student had
attended or all classes taught at an institution. Providing automated
support for the capture and exploration of such a rich information
source is our ultimate goal in this research. It is for these reasons
that we began a project to introduce and examine the effects of
electronic notebooks within the traditional lecture-based
classroom. We call the project Classroom 2000 to suggest a futuristic
approach that is not very far off in time. Our prototype classroom,
which has been built over the last 3 months and tested in an
undergraduate computer science course, will be fully functional for a
graduate level HCI course in the Winter Quarter of 1996 at Georgia
Tech.
Shneiderman et al [2] discuss
the effects of introducing technology into the classroom in terms of
the paradigm shifts that result. All of the existing systems discussed
in this article, and all of the attempts we are familiar with have
some commonalities that we are trying to avoid. Technology in the
hands of the student usually translates into a workstation at each
desk. This approach is fine, and even necessary, for classes which
involve computer-based activities (such as programming). We want to
investigate the usefulness of alternative interfaces which are less
intrusive and allow natural handwritten notetaking, such as a
pen-based laptops, PDAs or tablets.
Our work in Classroom 2000 has been greatly influenced by the work in
ubiquitous computing and electronic notetaking done at Xerox PARC. We
want to capture information provided by the teacher during a lecture,
so electronic whiteboard capabilities provided by the Xerox LiveWorks
LiveBoard [1] naturally suggest
themselves. The teacher in Classroom 2000 uses the Liveboard and our
software to present and annotate prepared lecture presentations.
We also wanted to provide the students with an electronic notebook
with the capability to take notes during the class that could be the
basis for review after class. The Marquee note-taking prototype
developed at Xerox PARC [3] came the
closest to what we wanted to have in the hands of the
students. Marquee provided a simple mechanism for producing notes with
a pen-based interface that also created automatic indexing into a
video stream. We currently have the capability to handle digital audio
recordings of classroom lectures and will eventually be able to
support digital video. Using the students's electronic note-taking as
a simple and automatic way to index into those rich information
streams provides a value added capability beyond paper-based notes.
In designing the prototype for Classroom 2000, we found it useful to
divide the activities into three distinct phases---pre-production,
in-class use and post-production.
In the lecture-based model of the classroom, we assume that the
teacher does some preparation for each lecture. This pre-production
phase can range from the preparation of a complete slide-based
presentation that will be shown in class to a less formal preparation
of notes that the teacher alone will use during the lecture. Any
prepared materials that the teacher wishes to make available to
students during the lecture must be transformed into a format that can
reside on the student's electronic notepad and be presented on the
Liveboard during class. We developed a single software system,
ClassPad, that runs on both the Liveboard and the student notepads
(see Figure 1 for a screenshot of the ClassPad
prototype). We have automated the pre-production phase so that all the
teacher must provide is a Postscript file of the prepared
presentation, which is then run through a UNIX filter to create the
files for ClassPad. After simple adjustment of initialization
parameters for ClassPad, all material is set for the live lecture.
Figure 1: Screenshot of ClassPad prototype
A prototype, ClassPad, was written in Visual Basic. This application
runs on both the Liveboard and pen-based Windows machines in the hands
of the student. As the teacher is presenting the lecture, she can mark
the slides with additional annotations. The students can do the same
thing. Blank slides can also be created on the fly in order to insert
additional notes that might not fit on the prepared slides. The entire
lecture is currently digitally recorded; we will soon be able to
support digital video recording as well. Every pen annotation is
recorded with a timestamp to facilitate audio indexing. It is
important to stress that in designing the ClassPad application, we
tried to introduce as little extra work for the note-taking
student.
Once the lecture is complete, we enter the post-production phase of
Classroom 2000. We have tried to treat the whole data collection and
reviewing task as a Worldwide Web authoring and browsing task. A class
home page holds a syllabus containing all information accumulated for
each lecture, including the prepared lecture notes, the teacher's and
student's annotations on those notes and the audio track. The ClassPad
application accumulates annotations and timestamps and produces an
HTML document that can immediately be hung off the class Web page for
browsing from any Web browser. The browsable form of the notes
contains links attached to each slide that accesses a customized audio
service tool to deliver the portion of the lecture pertaining to that
slide.
We will in the future be able to do some further post-processing of
the collected lecture information (notes plus audio). For example, we
could use a voice recognition system trained on the teacher's voice to
provide keyword-based search within and across lectures. We could use
handwriting recognition to convert the notes into a more searchable
form. We could create automatic links within and between lectures
linking up parts of the course that discussed a common topic. These
augmented capabilities would support both the student and the teacher
in reviewing lecture and course material. Ultimately, the entire
course would result in an on-line multimedia book authoring
session.
We have developed all of the Classroom 2000 infrastructure during the
Fall Quarter of 1995 at Georgia Tech. Throughout the quarter,
different aspects of the prototype classroom were subjected to live
evaluation in an undergraduate programming course with 40 students. We
received constant feedback on various aspects of the prototype system
(use of Liveboard, the ClassPad application, the Web-based syllabus
and audio service). At the end of the quarter, we issued a
questionnaire asking for specific feedback on Classroom 2000.
Almost all the initial reactions to the new technology were positive,
but that is to be expected amongst technically-oriented
undergraduates. Students appreciated the increased class participation
that the Liveboard encouraged and the increased availability and
richness of lecture material after class (especially when they missed
class). The organization of material on the Web greatly facilitated
review. Several students chose to design and implement (in Smalltalk)
a tool to help in the construction of the Web syllabus, making the
task of maintaining the class page much easier for the
teacher. Although the audio service was only completely functional for
one lecture, students did find it useful to hear class discussions
connected with static notes.
During development, we only had one electronic notepad for student
use, and some students complained that this caused a
distraction. Despite having cross-platform Web-based electronic
versions of class materials, some students still preferred paper
copies of materials for review. The Web implementation was not
well-suited to printing out the in-class material. The increased
technology in the classroom tended to make students lazy about writing
their own notes and they were sometimes disappointed by the quality of
notes provided by the class scribe. The general feeling was that the
scribe notes were only well-suited for the individual who took the
notes.
Classroom 2000 will go "live" during the Winter Quarter of
1996 to support a graduate introductory course in HCI. We hope to
overcome many of the problems cited in our initial evaluation by
providing electronic notepads to a larger percentage of students on a
rotating basis. We will also use the course to provide a longitudinal
study to determine the effectiveness of this technology in the
classroom. We expect new forms of pedagogy to emerge through continual
use of Classroom 2000, but rather than try to predict what those forms
will be, we have chosen to implement a system and observe it in
use.
During the three months of active design, development and use of
Classroom 2000 we have learned several things. We have found it very
useful to separate the activities into the pre-production, in-class
and post-production phases. We have come to appreciate the need to
make entry into Classroom 2000 easy for both the teacher and the
student so we have put in extra effort to streamline any activity that
is above and beyond what would normally be done in a lecture-based
course. We have seen that the novelty of the electronic classroom soon
wears off, so Classroom 2000 needs to have clear advantages over the
traditional recording mechanisms of paper and memory in order to
maintain student and teacher interest.
In response to the question raised in the title of this paper, the
electronic notebook can enhance the classroom, but only when it is
considered as one part of a larger integrated system uniting
activities both before, during and after the actual in-class
interaction. The electronic notebook offers capabilities to augment
student memory, but many improvements remain before it could replace
paper.
Classroom 2000 has truly been a group development effort, and the
authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the following
members of the development team: Sue Long, Yusuf Goolamabbas, Dietmar
Aust, Scott Register, Ami Feinstein (who built the audio service
tools), Amy Ayers, and Ron Hutchins. Classroom 2000 is supported by a
seed grant from the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. We would also like to
thank Peter Freeman of the College of Computing and Janet Kolodner,
Mark Guzdial, Cindy Hmelo, Hari Narayanan and Wendy Newstetter of the
EduTech Institute at Georgia Tech for their continued support of our
work. Gregory Abowd would like to thank his Fall 1995 CS 2390 class
for their help in evaluating the early and sometimes buggy
prototypes.
- S. Elrod et al. Liveboard: A large
interactive display supporting group meetings, presentations and
remote collaboration. In CHI'92 proceedings, pp. 599--607, May
1992.
- B. Shneiderman et al. Windows of
opportunity in electronic classrooms. Communications of the
ACM, 38(11):19--24, November 1995.
- K. Weber and A. Poon. Marquee: A tool for
real-time video logging. In CHI'94 proceedings, pp. 58--64,
April 1994.