Craig Prince

Classroom Presenter: Enhancing Interactive Education with Digital Ink

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based interaction system that supports the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students. Initial deployments show that using the technology can achieve a wide range of educational goals and foster a more participatory classroom environment.

Supporting active learning and example based instruction with classroom technology

This paper describes an application of classroom technology in support of teaching through the use of examples and active learning techniques. Here we report on using Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC based classroom interaction syst, in a senior level course in Algorithms -- a domain for which the instructor believes working on sample probls is critical to student learning in the classroom. The role of the technology was to integrate activities into the lecture so that students have the opportunity to work with concrete examples in class, while the instructor can collect and review student work in real time, incorporating selected student answers into the discussion. In this paper, we describe the pedagogical goals of the instructor, the types of activities used to achieve those goals, and the role that technology played in supporting those goals and activities. The contributions of the paper are in showing how classroom technology can be used to support pedagogical choices, as well as in phasizing the value of having clear pedagogical goals when incorporating a new technology in the classroom. We believe the application of technology as illustrated in this work could bring similar benefits to the instruction in other disciplines.

WebAnywhere: a screen reader on-the-go

People often use computers other than their own to access web content, but blind users are restricted to using only computers equipped with expensive, special-purpose screen reading programs that they use to access the web. Web-Anywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web browser that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software. The system could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for blind users on-the-go, for blind users unable to afford a full screen reader and for web developers targeting accessible design. This paper overviews existing solutions for mobile web access for blind users and presents the design of the WebAnywhere system. WebAnywhere generates speech remotely and uses prefetching strategies designed to reduce perceived latency. A user evaluation of the system is presented showing that blind users can use Web-Anywhere to complete tasks representative of what users might want to complete on computers that are not their own. A survey of public computer terminals shows that WebAnywhere can run on most.

Speech, ink, and slides: the interaction of content channels

In this paper, we report on an empirical exploration of digital ink and speech usage in lecture presentation. We studied the video archives of five Masters level Computer Science courses to understand how instructors use ink and speech together while lecturing, and to evaluate techniques for analyzing digital ink. Our interest in understanding how ink and speech are used together is to inform the development of future tools for supporting classroom presentation, distance education, and viewing of archived lectures. We want to make it easier to interact with electronic materials and to extract information from them. We want to provide an empirical basis for addressing challenging problems such as automatically generating full text transcripts of lectures, matching speaker audio with slide content, and recognizing the meaning of the instructors ink. Our results include an evaluation of handwritten word recognition in the lecture domain, an approach for associating attentional marks with content, an analysis of linkage between speech and ink, and an application of recognition techniques to infer speaker actions.

PaperCP: exploring the integration of physical and digital affordances for active learning

Active Learning in the classroom domain presents an interesting case for integrating physical and digital affordances. Traditional physical handouts and transparencies are giving way to new digital slides and PCs, but the fully digital systems still lag behind the physical artifacts in many aspects such as readability and tangibility. To better understand the interplay between physical and digital affordances in this domain, we developed PaperCP, a paper-based interface for a Tablet PC-based classroom interaction system (Classroom Presenter), and deployed it in an actual university course. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment studying the use of the system in a real-world scenario. The experiment confirms the feasibility of the paper interface in supporting student-instructor communication for Active Learning. We also discuss the challenges associated with creating a physical interface such as print layout, the use of pen gestures, and logistical issues.

Transcendence: enabling a personal view of the deep web

A wealth of structured, publicly-available information exists in the deep web but is only accessible by querying web forms. As a result, users are restricted by the interfaces provided and lack a convenient mechanism to express novel and independent extractions and queries on the underlying data. Transcendence enables personalized access to the deep web by enabling users to partially reconstruct web databases in order to perform new types of queries. From just a few examples, Transcendence helps users produce a large number of values for form input fields by using unsupervised information extraction and collaborative filtering of user suggestions. Structural and semantic analysis of returned pages finds individual results and identifies relevant fields. Users may revise automated decisions, balancing the power of automation with the errors it can introduce. In a user evaluation, both programmers and non-programmers found Transcendence to be a powerful way to explore deep web resources and wanted to use it in the future.

Addressing Performance and Security in a Screen Reading Web Application That Enables Accessibility Anywhere

The Web provides nearly ubiquitous access to information, but access for blind Web users requires the use of expensive, specialized software programs called screen readers unlikely to be installed on most computers. WebAnywhere is a self-voicing, Web-browsing Web application that makes the Web accessible for blind Web users from most devices with Web access. WebAnywhere requires no special permissions or additional software to be installed on the host machine, enabling it provide a self-voicing interface on almost any Web-enabled device. WebAnywherepsilas interface is written in Javascript, speech is retrieved from a remote server, and sounds are played using either Flash or existing embedded sound players. This paper describes the performance and security implications of the systempsilas unique design and how it has been engineered to provide usable access anywhere. Specifically, we present prefetching and caching strategies developed to make the system responsive even on low-bandwidth connections and security considerations that replicate existing browser security policies.

A study of diagrammatic ink in lecture

In this paper, we present a study of how instructors draw diagrams in the process of delivering lectures. We are motivated by wanting to understand challenges and opportunities for automatically analyzing diagrams, and to use this to improve tools to support the delivery of presentations and the viewing of archived lectures. The study was conducted by analyzing a large group of examples of diagrams collected from real lectures that were delivered from a Tablet PC. The main result of the paper is the identification of three specific challenges in analyzing spontaneous instructor diagrams: separating the diagram from its annotations and other surrounding ink, identifying phases in discussion of a diagram, and constructing the active context in a diagram.

Webanywhere: enabling a screen reading interface for the web on any computer

People often use computers other than their own to access web content, but blind users are restricted to using computers equipped with expensive, special-purpose screen reading programs that they use to access the web. WebAnywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web application that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software. WebAnywhere could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for blind users on-the-go, for blind users unable to afford another screen reader and for web developers targeting accessible design. This paper describes the implementation of WebAnywhere, overviews an evaluation of it by blind web users, and summarizes a survey of public terminals that shows it can run on most public computers.

Integrating corrections into digital ink playback

In this paper, we describe preliminary work on an ink editing application that allows an instructor to correct mistakes to digital ink written during a presentation that is to be archived. These corrections are then seamlessly reintegrated into the digital archive so that when the presentation is replayed the corrected ink is displayed instead of the original incorrect ink. We base our results on a system we have developed and prototype the work flow from initial presentation, through correction, updating the archive and playback. We show that a simple mechanism for correction is effective and low effort for the instructor. A key technical challenge that is addressed is the substitution of strokes by matching of the original and corrected ink.