Title: The Ghost Landscape: Closing the Gap between Information and Experience
PIs: Robert Semper, Noel Wanner, The Exploratorium
Other collaborating institutions: Concord Consortium; the American Museum of Natural History's National Center For Science Literacy
This project proposes to use a high-speed wireless network and handheld tablet computers to provide a scaffolding of information to museum visitors exploring an outdoor setting. The project will explore and test the idea that this ubiquitous, invisible architecture will help to bridge the gap between the direct experience of the environment and the mediated, abstract world of information. Visitors will walk through the landscape with a laptop or other hand-held network device, linked to a wealth of information and media related to their direct experience of the ecosystem. Both real experience and abstract information will be literally at the visitor's fingertips. This will result in an outdoor "exhibit", making possible a new informal inquiry-based curriculum for teaching biology/ecology. The curriculum operates in two parallel realms in order to create a bridge between abstract information and concrete experience. The first part, the concrete, is an interpretive nature trail to be located in the restored Crissy Field Wetlands, located in San Francisco's Presidio National Park, a stone's throw from The Exploratorium. The second portion, the abstract, will be a rich, web-based data base of text, images, video and curricula about the natural ecosystems in and around the wetlands.
The project's innovation lies in its use of small, ubiquitous computers and wireless networks to allow the integration of these two environments, which have previously been separate. The on-line information is navigated through a visual representation of the trails and of the wetlands at large; at the same time, sensors in the environment read the movements of the visitor, enabling the delivery of information specific to the location. Thus the virtual landscape becomes a map of the real landscape, an overlay of information and media to be explored by the visitor, to whatever depth or level of complexity the visitor chooses. While either site may be used independent of the other, each is designed to illuminate and locate the other through physical pointers and digital representations.
Project website: http://www.exploratorium.edu/lagoon
Title: Palms Together: Collaborative Use of Multiple Baby-Faced Displays
PIs: Kori Inkpen, Simon Fraser University; James A. Landay, University of California, Berkeley
Other collaborating institutions: Lord Nelson Elementary School
Handheld technology is becoming ubiquitous in the form of PDAs and handheld games. As we begin to explore the use of these alternative technologies in educational settings, it is essential that we investigate how to seamlessly support children's natural interactions. One of the main limitations of handheld computers is the small display size, making face-to-face collaboration around these devices almost impossible. For use in educational environments, supporting collaboration is important because of the achievement and social benefits this mode of learning provides.
Our proposed research will investigate a new interaction paradigm for handheld computing: using multiple interconnected devices to form a shared workspace. This will provide children with the opportunity to obtain a larger shared view of a collaborative information space and provide access for all children to interact and manipulate the environment. Students will work alone or in small teams and then come together, in the field or in the classroom, to collaboratively analyze and discuss on screen visualizations of their work. We will conduct research to understand how handheld computers could be used and what interaction styles must be supported. We will develop a prototype system and conduct a user study to evaluate the prototype and the ideas embodied in it.
Mark Bilezikjian, Regan L. Mandryk, Scott R. Klemmer, Kori M. Inkpen, and James A. Landay, Exploring a New Interaction Paradigm for Collaborating on Handheld Computers. UC Berkeley Computer Science Division Technical Report, November 2000.
Regan L. Mandryk, Kori M. Inkpen, Mark Bilezikjian, Scott R. Klemmer, and James A. Landay. "Supporting children’s collaboration across handheld computers." In Extended Abstracts of CHI, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Seattle, WA, April 2001. p. 255-256.
Title: Library Information Access and Collaboration through Mobile Computing
PI: Geraldine Gay, Cornell University
Other collaborating institutions: Corporation for National Research Initiatives; The Dalton School, NY
Many sectors in industry-including healthcare, retail, delivery and manufacturing-have embraced the arrival of fast, powerful and simple mobile computing devices. We believe that university students, faculty, staff, and other informal education audiences can benefit in similar ways to portable, wireless access to library data, user annotations and other information sharing.
Through this CILT Seed Grant, we will begin to examine the pedagogical, technical, and evaluative issues surrounding the use of a new generation of hand-held, mobile computers for wireless library access and collaboration. Our overall objective is the development, refinement, and evaluation of a prototype mobile computing system for an academic library.
Our research group currently has several academic library development and research collaborations. We receive funding through the Digital Library Initiative from NSF and private funds supporting a digital library collaboration with The Dalton School, a K-12 school in New York City. While both projects consider information resources and access points, funding from CILT would allow us to leverage the information from these two initiatives to create and test the mobile and ubiquitous aspects of digital library research.
Seed Grant Products:
Download the Library
Information Access Document.
Title: Ubiquitous Images
PI: Ann Rivet, University of Michigan
Other collaborating institutions: HPL Research Library; Cornell University; MIT Media Lab; Concord Consortium
We plan to examine the use of digital cameras embedded in activities supporting field-based science investigations by students at several grade levels. Digital camera technology is improving extremely quickly and these devices are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Until recently integrating digital visual recording into student investigations has been rare. We believe that by embedding the recording and analysis of images over space and time in a suite of field-based investigations many phenomena which normally remain abstract will become more concrete and knowable. We will outfit several class settings at different grade levels with ongoing field-based investigations with digital camera technology. We will work with teachers to develop pilot activities which use the cameras to expand the range of analysis conducted by the students. We will be specifically looking for new student understandings and situations in which students use images to describe phenomena. We will write up our work and results and speculate on ways in which a palm-sized computer/camera hybrid device could be designed and used to better support these types of investigations.