CILT99 Presentations

Ubiquitous Computing

The Application of Free Open Source Software to Education and Ubiquitous Computing

Stephen Bannasch
http://concord.org/oss

The world of Free Open Source Software has exploded in the last year with the popularization of the GNU/Linux operating system and related applications. GNU/Linux runs on systems as varied as an embedded controller the size of a pack of cigarettes to a parallel cluster of 120 Alpha computers. While GNU/Linux has been used as a server oriented operating system for years only recently have simple to use GUI desktop environments become available. This development is based on a model of intellectual property where the source code is freely available for any programmer to modify and changes are contributed back to the community. There is a huge opportunity here for the educational community as well as for developers of new ubiquitous computing devices to adapt an OS and applications for specific needs. I'll describe our current work and future directions.

Beyond Black Boxes: Bringing Transparency and Aesthetics Back to Scientific Investigation

Robbie Berg
http://el.www.media.mit.edu/projects/bbb/

In a project called Beyond Black Boxes, children are using a new generation of tiny programmable bricks called Crickets to design their own instruments for scientific investigations. Students become engaged in scientific inquiry not only through observing and measuring but also through designing and building. While computational technologies have, in general, contributed to making today's scientific instruments more opaque (that is, less understandable) and less aesthetically-pleasing than their predecessors, I will argue that these same technologies can be used to bring back a sense of transparency and aesthetics to the design of scientific instruments. I will analyze how students, by building their own scientific instruments, can: pursue a broader range of scientific investigations of their own choosing, feel a stronger sense of personal investment in their scientific investigations, and develop deeper critical capacities in evaluating scientific measurements and knowledge. I will also describe the current state of our Cricket technology, highlighting developments in both software and hardware.

Beyond Black Boxes is funded through the National Science Foundation's Collaborative Research on Learning Technologies. The principal investigators are Mitchel Resnick and Sherry Turkle (MIT), Mike Eisenberg (Colorado) and Robbie Berg (Wellesley College). Additional funding has been provided by the LEGO Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory's Things That Think, Digital Life, and Toys of Tomorrow consortia.

Mobile Inquiry Technology

Arthur Camins, Sheldon Berman

The Mobile Inquiry Technology Project is based on four principles: 1. Access: In order to take advantage of the power of technology to enhance students' learning they must have access to the tools. The Mobile Inquiry Technology project will test a classroom implementation model using class sets of 13 computers and sets of scientific probes in each classroom, enabling pairs of students to collaborate on investigations and share the computers for writing purposes. Teachers will have access to the tools as well. 2. Equity: The Mobile Inquiry Technology project is committed to making use of low-cost, durable, and mobile technology. 3. Cognitively powerful solutions: Our goal is to develop activities that support, enhance, and enrich research-based successful learning activities exemplified by NSF-funded, standards-based curriculum projects. 4. Instructional efficiency: We will develop technology-based inquiry activities that can easily be implemented in the classroom.

Design of a Mechanism with Programmable Force-Response Characteristics

Philip FitzSimons

The design of a mechanism to provide programmable Force-Response characteristics for rectilinear motion will be described. A proposed solution to the kernel of the mechanical problem will be stated. The remainder of the presentation will be used to describe the specifics of the electro-mechanical system and software architectures used to implement the solution.

Shared Learning Environments to Enable the Integration of Personal Technologies

Stacey Inkpen

As technology advances and computers become more affordable, more accessible, and increasingly mobile, there will be an increased use of small personal computers, such as handheld devices. As this trend extends to classroom technology, it is important to provide facilities that enable students to work in a shared collaborative environment in order to have a positive impact on student learning. Previous research in the area of Single Display Groupware has shown achievement and motivational benefits when children work together on a shared computer in an educational environment (Inkpen et al. 1995). In addition, enhancing the traditional desktop environment to better support collaborative interactions, such as providing multiple input devices, has shown academic and social benefits (Inkpen et al. 1997, Stewart et al. 1998, and Bricker et al. 1998). Our research investigates issues related to Single Display Groupware, providing more ubiquitous support to enable seamless collaboration in a face-to-face environment. This includes the ability to integrate personal technologies into a shared learning environment. This approach will allow students to benefit from active discussion and face-to-face.interactions with peers while still promoting individual exploration. Our current research thrusts involve investigating alternative approaches to the traditional one-person/one-computer paradigm, moving beyond current desktop metaphors. Bringing several independent workspaces together (i.e. hand-held computers) means that support must be

provided to enable movement between personal and shared spaces. We are also exploring the importance of new shared screen metaphors and multiple input devices to help facilitate face-to-face collaboration. While the promise of low-cost, mobile, personal computing is exciting, we must be careful not to encourage isolation and inhibit collaborative interactions. Our focus needs to provide support for both individual and collaborative activities in learning environments.

The Tipping Point

Curtis Lee

South Pasadena USD is a five school district with a demographic snapshot that resembles much of the country. Under the auspices of the Digital High School program, we have embarked on a journey towards redefining the informational space of a large public school campus. The goal is a campus that has total wireless Ethernet coverage at a sufficient density to sustain the eventual one-to-one computer to student/faculty/staff-ratios we seek. Wireless networking combined with small light portable devices (HPC's) is the killer app for public education. They provide a personal information tool to a clientele who are desperate for such autonomy. In New Ideas for a New Economy, Kevin Kelly articulates the phenomena by which a growing number of simple nodes eventually create a critical mass whose impact then ramps up exponentially once this "tipping point" has been reached. This is about the ability and opportunity for everyone to have and use tools that allow for the abstraction, manipulation, and management of information as it moves through and around them all the time, every day. SPUSD has additionally chosen to use thin-client computing as another essential strategy for maximizing this approach. This technology dramatically lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the long-term and alleviates the bandwidth limitations associated with wireless Ethernet. Using Citrix Meta-Frame technology, these devices have network access to the full range of software applications that typically require computers that are much more powerful. We achieve the benefits of a stable, portable.platform without sacrificing the ability to run demanding software applications. Our partners in this solution are NEC, Proxim, Citrix, Microsoft and New Technologies. They are providing both equipment and expertise to make this vision a reality. Thorough testing has been conducted at SPHS in a variety of configurations to assure the viability of this approach.

Adventures in Imaging

Brian Smith
http://www.media.mit.edu/explain/projects/imagemaps.ht ml

Historical photographs are typically used as visual aids to accompany text or lecture-based presentations. We are exploring the use of images as learning tools for understanding historical, architectural, and cultural change. Our focus is on developing tools that allow students to actively investigate how and why their communities over time, using imagery as data for inquiry. The presentation will describe our pedagogical use of archive photos and our progress in augmenting digital cameras to automatically retrieve historical images using ordinary, tourist photos. We will describe the camera's architecture and mapping tools that we hope will facilitate historical inquiry in classrooms. If time permits, we will also describe our larger agenda concerning imagery and video and tools for active inquiry.

Parallelism and Participatory Modeling in a Classroom Network: A Collaborative Match

Walter Stroup
University of Texas, Austin

The new, cross-site, NSF-funded, Participatory Simulations Project brings together two lines of research -- the study of complex dynamic systems and the use of participatory simulations as a powerful way into systems modeling -- both of which can be enabled and advanced through emerging, classroom-based, network technologies. Participatory simulations are activities that allow learners to enact their intuitive modes of reasoning. Students engaged in these participatory simulations act out the roles of the individual system elements and then see how the behavior of the system as a whole can emerge from these individual behaviors. The emergent behavior of the system and its relation to individual participant actions and strategies can then become the object of collective discussion and analysis. These analyses can center on using both aggregate (e.g., STELLA or Model-It) and object-based (e.g., StarLogoT) modeling tools. The hardware for the network of low-cost devices is being developed in close collaboration with a commercial partner, Texas Instruments. There are numerous challenges in the design and implementation of networked participatory activities. Among them is the need to maintain various levels of programming: code on the local device, code to operate the network, code in the form of a scripting language to collect sequences of network actions, and a meta-code for the larger activity design sequence. This presentation will center on the good news that implementing the network functionality in a way that builds on a parallel model of computation Ò something we are calling n-Logo -- solves or makes much more elegant the task of designing various forms of collaborative interaction in the network. Brief examples of working models will be given. It expected that this redesign of network interactivity could make real a range of more-fully collaborative, cost-.effective, group-based learning experiences in schools. The Project sites are Tufts University and The University of Texas at Austin. Uri Wilensky, PI; Walter Stroup, Co-PI.