Chris DiGiano

Ink, Improvisation, and Interactive Engagement: Learning with Tablets

Instructional models that reflective educators develop and share with their peers can primarily drive advances in the use of tablets in education. Communities that form around platforms such as Classroom Presenter and Group Scribbles should provide an excellent forum for such advances.

Conceptual tools for planning for the wireless classroom

Wireless and mobile devices are beginning to offer stunning new technical capabilities for collaborative learning. Yet, researchers in this field must recognise the importance of complementing these technical advances with improved understanding of the patterns of classroom activity that most need support. The approach taken in the work reported in this paper has been to create conceptual tools that help thinking and talking about technology-supported collaborative learning. A particularly powerful tool is Collaborative Design Patterns, which captures common learning situations and benefits in written form. This paper uses four classroom scenarios to describe eight patterns. These patterns fall into two categories: whole-activity patterns, which suggest ways to organise one or more class periods, and smaller-grained support patterns.

IDEA: Identifying Design Principles in Educational Applets.

The Internet is increasingly being used as a medium for educational software in the form of miniature applications (e.g., applets) to explore concepts in a domain. One such effort in mathematics education, the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project, created 42 miniature applications each consisting of a context, a set of questions, and one or more interactive applets to help students explore a mathematical concept. They were designed by experts in interface design, educational technology, and classroom teaching. However, some applications were more successful for fostering student problem-solving than others. This article describes the method used to mine a subset (25) of these applets for design principles that describe successful learner-centered design by drawing on such data as videos of students using the software and summaries of written student work. Twenty-one design principles were identified, falling into the categories of motivation, presentation, and support for problem solving. The main purpose of this article is to operationalize a method for post hoc extraction of design principles from an existing library of educational software, although readers may also find the design principles themselves to be useful.

Collaboration design patterns: conceptual tools for planning for the wireless classroom

Wireless and mobile devices are beginning to offer stunning new technical capabilities for collaborative learning. Yet, researchers in this field must recognize the importance of complementing these technical advances with improved understanding of the patterns of classroom activity that most need support. Our approach is to create conceptual tools that help us think and talk about technology-supported collaborative learning. A particularly powerful tool, we have found, is collaborative design patterns, which capture common learning situations and tradeoffs in written form.

Integrating Learning Supports into the Design of Visual Programming Systems

The success of a programming system depends as much on the learnability of its language concepts as the usability of its interface. We argue that learnability can be significantly improved by integrating into the programming systemlearning supports that allow individuals to educate themselves about the syntax, semantics and applications of a language. Reflecting on our experience with developing novice programming systems, we identify infrastructural characteristics of such systems that can make the integration of learning supports practical. We focus on five core facilities: annotatability, scriptability, monitorability, supplementability and constrainability. Our hope is that our examination of these technical facilities and their tradeoffs can inform the design of future programming systems that better address the educational needs of their users.

Rapid-assembly componentware for education

We provide an overview of our work in mining design patterns from the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow project. By identifying, crystallizing and organizing design patterns, we aim to address problems of reusability and interoperability that currently present critical bottlenecks for the rapid assembly of educational technology. We describe four categories of patterns: instantiation, interoperability, control cooperation, and screen cooperation and outline three illustrative patterns: parcelled publication, observer, and replicated model.

ESCOT: Coordinating the Influence of R&D and Classroom Practice to Produce Educational Software from Reusable Components

In a 3-year project, a consortium of university, nonprofit and commercial educational software developers formed a testbed for the rapid assembly of educational software from reusable component tools. This testbed incorporated interactive learning tools from a variety of university, nonprofit, and commercial developers, and hosted decentralized authoring teams consisting of teachers, developers and educational technologists. Within its testbed, the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project achieved notable success in (a) producing a large collection of technology-rich learning activities with reuse rates estimated at 90% and (b) scaffolding authoring teams in successful and rewarding collaborative development experiences. Fortunately, since ESCOT was funded as a National Science Foundation research project, we have had time to reflect on the conditions that led to our achievements. In this article, we reflect on the three activities of the project that we believe were most responsible for its success: (1) the selection of a unit of software production (2) the development of a strategy to allow reuse of interoperable software components and (3) the structuring of a distributed, team-based authoring process. We observe that a common characteristic across these activities was reciprocal influence from both the fields of research-based software development and teaching practice.

Orchestrating handhelds in the classroom with SRI's ClassSync™

In our interactive experience, we address the problem of a teacher or other leader managing the use of electronic communication devices by their students. We have embedded the control elements into the physical class structure itself so that the teacher may control the interactive system by moving about the classroom and interacting with the devices therein. We have shifted control from a teacher-controlled display in a static location to a teachers dynamic control that is interactive with items spatially distributed in the room. Our demonstration shows how this orchestration can be accomplished with low-cost infrared communications as opposed to more expensive radio-based solutions.

Interactive pathway design for learning through agent and library augmented shared knowledge areas (ALASKA)

This paper outlines a recently funded NSF-funded effort to integrate three learning technologies (perceptual agents; collaborative workspaces; and digital libraries). Each has emerged and matured over the past decade and each has presented compelling and oftentimes moving opportunities to alter educational practice and to render learning more effective. The project seeks a novel way to blend these technologies and to create and test a new model for human-machine partnership in learning settings. The innovation we are prototyping in this project creates an applet-rich shared space whereby a pedagogical agent at each learners station functions as an instructional assistant to the teacher or professor and tutor to the student. The platform is intended to open a series of new - and instructionally potent nteractive pathways.

Converging on a science of design through the synthesis of design methodologies

The goals of this workshop are: (1) to bring together the community of researchers who are exploring innovative design theories and different design methodologies; (2) to evaluate the appropriateness of design methodologies for specific contexts and explore their respective difference and synergies; and (3) to strengthen the community of researchers who are interested and involved to make progress toward creating a science of design.