TechTalks Transcript
Student Technologies: What's Hot?
September 19, 2002
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Lonnie Harvel [LH] |
 William Griswold [WG] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for fall of 2002 and to this session on Student Technologies�What�s Hot? You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN co-host and our session today is coming to you with the support of the CREN member institutions. If your institution is not a CREN member, please join today! Let me welcome Howard Strauss, our persistent and always creative [inaudible] technology anchor who�s probably at his office in Princeton today, able to look out his window and see [tape fades out completely]. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Judith. Actually, I�m looking out a window here and there�s no students out here because I�m looking at a house that was recently moved here. So there�s no students between me and the house. But I am Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of webcasts, [inaudible] webcasts can all see this. Maybe next time. Today we�ll engage our guest experts, Lonnie Harvel and Bill Griswold, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about what�s hot in student technologies and will ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask your own questions by sending e-mails to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don�t get to your questions during the webcast, we�ll provide an answer in the webcast archives. In the movie, Minority Report, as Chief John Anderton, Head of the Pre-Crime Unit, rushes from place to place, billboards, kiosks and anything else that could have an advertisement on it calls out to him by name! �John! We have the perfect hair conditioner for you! John! You�d really love to drive the new 2054 Lexus! Why not buy one now? Your car loan is pre-approved. John! It�s your mother�s birthday! She�d adore a diamond necklace from Zingerman�s Jewelry Shop!� Wow! Talking billboards and kiosks that recognize you and know who you are and know all about you! Could this be in our future? Perhaps even more important, is this the way we want to use the powerful technologies that it would take to do this? While we will peek a bit into the future in today�s Tech Talk, we�ll also see some quite amazing things happening right now. For example, you�ll hear about Active Campus, the Active Campus project at UCSD, a student-written application for PDA�s in which the PDA knows where it is and has information about nearby buildings, including a calendar of events for each building. Students can even leave virtual digital graffiti near a building that other students can read when they wander by. All technologies can be used for a variety of purposes, some good, some bad, and most open to debate as to their worth. Digital graffiti is certainly better than the kind that is spray painted on buildings. But when budgets are tight, as they always are, can we afford digital graffiti and does it add to the educational experience of our students? You can be sure that there will be many strong opinions on all sides of debates about technology and very few unequivocal answers. Web search engines seem like old-hat technology until wireless laptops arrive in class and students can use Google to answer questions. A professor talks about the Bermuda Triangle and 50 students key in �alien abductions� to Google and get a list of websites, the first of which asks the most basic question on this subject. �Who do the aliens choose and why haven�t they chosen you?� You could see www.alienabductions.com for the answer and an offer to experience an alien abduction yourself, which certainly changes the familiar classroom experience. We should encourage any technology that gives our students the skills to weigh the information they get from the web and can teach them to use the library, the labs, the human networking, hard work and perseverance that are part of the joy of learning. But we should avoid being taken in by technology that, like Samuel Johnson�s description of a dog walking on its hind legs, is �not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.� Yogi Berra said, �Prediction is very hard, especially when it�s about the future!� It is always difficult to look into the future, but we are trying�we need to try anyway to prepare for what might be coming. One futuristic idea we�ll mention is HP�s cooltown project. cooltown is a place where everyone and everything is connected wirelessly to the World Wide Web. It is an amazing place that offers many advantages but also offers technology that to me often seems very intrusive. Will we be building cooltowns and CoolCampuses in the future? And if we do, will anyone want to live there? We�ll get an expert opinion from Lonnie and Bill, two residents of what may be cooltown precursors on today�s webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Well, thank you very much, Howard. And as we were getting ready for this session, I read somewhere that it�s an opinion that it takes a generation for a disruptive or transformative technology to really transform a society. So I think we�re getting close to that. So with that, we�re just excited to hear what our two experts will share with us today and see how it really does impact learning on our campus. With that, let�s welcome our first guest for today, Lonnie Harvel from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. Lonnie is a senior Research Scientist in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He�s also the director of the Digital Media Lab and Associate Director of the Center for Distributed Engineering Education. His current research includes context-aware computing�which I think we�re going to hear more about today�mobile interaction and distributed education architectures. Welcome, Lonnie, glad to have you here at the CREN Tech Talks.
LH: Good afternoon! Glad to be here.
JB: All right, I�m going to insert something here we hadn�t planned and that is I noticed in your bio that you have a background in theatre and costume design so we�ll see how that background informs and enhances what you�re learning with the computer Cooltown project. With that, let me welcome our second guest, Bill Griswold from the University of California, San Diego. Bill is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His broad research area is software engineering, which is the building, of course, of large, complex software systems at�one hopes�reasonable cost and high reliability. Specifically, Bill�s research concerns the evolution of large software systems, often driven by unpredictable market forces including a customer�s desire for leading edge functionality. How dare they, right? Welcome, Bill, to Tech Talks.
WG: Thank you very much for having me!
HS: Bill, could you start by telling us about some of the technologies that students are using on campus today and what interesting ways they�re using them?
WG: Well, I hardly know where to start! The students often adopt this technology without any of our intervention. I think the most prevalent novel technology that students are using today is instant messaging and in fact, to the students, it�s not novel at all. But what we see is that these students are actually not using e-mail anymore�which is my preferred mode of communication�and prefer to use instant messaging.
HS: Lonnie, is that what you�re seeing? Is e-mail disappearing/�
LH: Well, it�s definitely going down a lot farther. One of the things we find fascinating with the instant messaging is the fact the students also use it not just to send messages but the file transfer protocols that are now embedded in instant messaging are getting used a lot more by our students. I have found that when I deal with the students in my lab and the students in my classes, if I will use instant messaging to reach them, I get instantaneous responses. If I send e-mail, it would probably be later that night or the following morning. They don�t check their e-mail as often as they log into the instant messaging.
HS: I thought you had to be online to receive an instant message.
LH: Well, Georgia Tech is one of the campuses that is pretty much a wireless campus now. Most of the areas in Georgia Tech�and I imagine this is probably true for Bill as well�are accessible wirelessly and our students have wireless PDA�s, wireless�of course�their cell phones that they�re getting instant messaging on and then there�s a slew of places they can use their computers and laptops. And laptops are becoming more prevalent.
HS: Both of you are involved with some kinds of research with students using technology on campus. Could you tell us a little bit about how that�s working, what kind of research projects you have going on?
LH: Bill, I�ll let you go first on that one!
WG: Okay, thanks, Lonnie.
HS: Thanks a lot, Lonnie!
LH: Right. But it�s such a neat project!
WG: So I have this project called the UCSD ActiveCampus project and what it concerns is the construction and deployment of web services for mobile computing. We�re focusing on a particular domain in order that we can drill in deeply on these issues and the domain we�re looking at is sustaining educational communities like those at UCSD and Georgia Tech. At universities like these, we have a very large student population that�s changing all the time and that�s probably growing as we get into our second post-World-War-II baby boom.
HS: How large is large?
WG: We have currently at UCSD about 20,000 undergraduates and it�s growing to 30,000 undergraduates in a decade.
HS: Wow!
WG: Very rapid growth and that�s putting a lot of stresses on our traditional institutions. And what we�re hoping in the ActiveCampus project is that we can introduce technology to help ameliorate some of those stresses. So for example, one of the things that students find very challenging is making sense out of the campus environment. There are lots of big buildings, a lot of people. It�s a giant sandbox for students to play in, but all the toy�s aren�t out there on the green. They�re inside buildings, inside labs, and they have to find their way to these resources in order to make the best use of them. And ActiveCampus basically provides a transparency metaphor whereby students can see into buildings and into laboratories and into all sorts of places on the campus to see what those opportunities are and take advantage of them.
HS: How did this project get going? Was this a student idea, your idea? How did you get one of these things off the ground?
WG: Well, it was actually an outgrowth of a summer seminar held by the ActiveWeb project in the Computer Science department here at UCSD. We had a number of students and faculty talking over the summer about what is all this mobile computing really going to be for? What can we use it for? What�s the killer app? And what we saw were these tremendous stresses in our environment and we saw that as the opportunity. So it really sort of emerged out of a long series of discussions and it continues to evolve today.
HS: So that�s available on laptops and PDA�s, is it?
WG: Yeah, right now, it�s a web browser based application so if you have a UCSD e-mail address and access to a web browser, you could start using our system.
HS: Judith, you were about to say something?
JB: Yes, I was going to ask�coming back to the fact that you were looking at these technologies to reduce some of the stresses that you see coming, which stresses did you see really being impacted potentially by this?
WG: Well, I think that the campus, in my mindset, is evolving from a small town to a big city so what I see are the typical stresses of city living�confusion, alienation, lack of feeling of belonging. And so those are the things that the system is meant to address by really showing you what opportunities are there for you, sort of amongst the crowds of people and crowds of buildings, departments and laboratories.
HS: How long have you been using this and what kind of experience have you had with it?
WG: We�ve been using it for about a year and our personal experience is very positive. We have yet to deploy it widely on the campus so you�ll have to bring me back for another talk sometime to answer the bigger question.
HS: When you say it�s not widely deployed, do you mean you don�t have a lot of buildings in the database or do you mean that a lot of people aren�t using it yet?
WG: A lot of people aren�t using it yet. We�ve sort of�we�re operating quietly right now, sort of an alpha deployment to firm up our systems and make sure they�re stable. But this Saturday, we�re actually deploying to 300 undergraduates.
JB: How many have been using it up until now?
WG: It�s been deployed to about 100 people but I�d say about 20 people use it regularly.
JB: All right.
WG: So our personal experience is that as you�re walking around and you look down in your PDA and you see a map of your vicinity and you�ll actually see links to departments and laboratories that you didn�t know where in your vicinity. And you go, �Oh, my gosh, I didn�t know Linguistics department was over here. That�s really interesting!� Or I�ll be in a meeting and discover that there�s�a large meeting�and discover that a colleague of mine is at the meeting too and so I can change my seat and we can exchange words during the meeting. Things like that.
HS: Lonnie, you�re involved with the cooltown project at Hewlett Packard. Can you tell us something about that project?
LH: Well, I think I can. Let me jump in with a connection to what Bill was just talking about, which ties the two together. We had been working on a couple of different projects here for the last several years, one of which was the Class of 2000 which was being led by Gregory Abell. And the intent of that was, as we added all these technologies into the actual physical classroom�multimedia projections and animations and web pages�how do the students now capture that experience? Writing down the notes is very difficult for them when there�s multiple things going on and some of it didn�t�wasn�t very well suited to be copied down into a note. So one of the things that we came up with in the Class of 2000 was capture it automatically and make it available to them later in archive. Of course, like most universities, we were engaged online education as well and so some of us went, �Well, how do you put those two things together? How are we going to make it easier for people to work in a classroom or away from a classroom and be still a part of the same experience?� We started working with what we refer to as distributed education and a lot of others have started calling it that as well because it�s education that can happen at any time or anywhere. Students are connecting in by Palm Pilots�that�s one of our newer projects we�ve just started doing. Also with laptops, they can connect into the classroom. Most of the time, this is being done from classroom to classroom. We have some of the same growth problems that Bill�s campus is having but we don�t have much physical space to grow since we�re in downtown Atlanta. We�ve actually grown out to other universities, so our engineering program now reaches out to several universities in the Georgia system and we have students in multiple places.
HS: So you have students in multiple places and you�re saying what they do is they connect into a lecture going on in some remote place.
LH: Exactly. Some of them are connecting in�sometimes we�ve instrumented other classrooms so they�re connecting in over IP to those classrooms. Some of them are actually�we have a few now that are testing it for us at home. Can we actually get people to connect in from home? Which is of big import for us because we�re testing it actually from rural areas of Georgia that would not have access to this kind of university and especially when you�re dealing with students that are trying to get degrees or even people trying to do professional development that want to be able to access the classes
HS: So they get some kind of video and audio feed, even on a PDA?
LH: They can do it to the PDA. One of our signal processing projects is low bit rate encoding, so how do you scrunch one of these things down so that you can beam it so that it�s usable on a PDA? And sometimes you have to look at it, and that�s part of what our research�when Judith was talking about context-aware computing, one of the things we use the cooltown project for, one of the things in cooltown is the idea of web presences. Everything has a web presence ID, whether it�s a person, a place, an object, a device. So we register the devices. This is a project that we�re trying to get to be a little bit more stable because we�re working with it right now. But if I walk in with a PDA or if connect with a PDA to the system, it knows it�s a PDA and it knows what its constraints are.
HS: If we could just back up a bit and get a higher view of this cooltown thing, what�s it all about and what are they trying to do?
LH: Well, what cooltown is trying to do is to create sort of a place where everybody�kind of the way they put it is everybody gets to play together. A place where all the devices and people have sort of an equal representation within cooltown. So in other words, I would have a web presence ID and my computer would have a web presence ID and one of the projects we have with our students, our mentoring stations, is that when a student comes up to the computer, usually right now our main way of identifying people without them having to identify themselves�as you were referring to in the Minority Report�is to use RFID. But as a student is recognized by the computer��
HS: Because the student carries a proximity card, that sort of thing?
LH: Something like that. Actually, mine�s on my foot. It�s connected to my shoe, so if I come walking up, the floor knows who I am and informs the computer of who I am and the computer will them, with my web presence ID and the web presence ID of the computer, can determine what interactions are acceptable between these two entities. One of the places we use that as we build our new classroom is that you can walk up to what is called a cooltown beacon. This is just a small device that broadcasts a radio frequency and pass a sort of tag in the real world that maps you into this web presence world. So I walk up with my PDA and I aim it at this RFID and now the control of the classroom has been passed to my PDA. If a student does the same thing, I would rather not have the student get control of the classroom because we have wireless projectors and we don�t want to actually reroute where the signals are coming from to the wireless projectors or who know what�s going to show up on my screen?
HS: Right. How do you deal with the problem if for some reason you put your PDA down and a student picks it up, the student�s now you?
LH: Well, that would be one of the problems that we�re trying to work on and I refer to that as synthesis of context. In other words, I have the context of what is the PDA. I also have the context of who I am. How do I synthesize those into a single identity. So me with my PDA is actually a different entity than me with my laptop because my laptop has more capabilities than my PDA does. And a student with my PDA should be a separate entity from me, but context synthesis is a bit of a difficult problem.
HS: Yeah.
JB: Do you have a different ID when you are with your PDA vs. when you are with your computer?
LH: That would be the goal, or at least it would modify my ID in some way.
HS: Are there lots of folks walking around your university with RFID�s in their shoes? And how do you get through an airport? That�s another question.
LH: Well, actually, I haven�t had any trouble with mine. Some of the video adapters in my laptop have stopped me, but the RFID tag on my foot hasn�t been a problem. Over here, of course, we have a couple of dozen students running around with them and some faculty. Over in the [inaudible] home, we have many, many more that are doing it but as far as distribution, one of the things you mentioned about intrusive technology. Instrumenting an environment to accept RFID is intrusive and requires a lot of work. That�s one of the things, I think, that we have to look for is a better technology for recognizing people. We have some projects that are going on in face recognition. We do have voice recognition so sometimes we try and combine voice recognition with RFID. RFID also is what�s called a signpost placement. I don�t have an entire floor covered in RFID, I have mats in various locations. So as I move forward, I may end up someplace so that the computer knows I�m in the room but it doesn�t know where I�m in the room.
HS: So what kind of things do you do now that everything has a web presence and everything recognizes everybody else? Given that you�re now able to do this, what things happen that couldn�t have happened before?
LH: Once again, you�re back into a lot of instrumentation and I think that a question could be raised whether or not an environment would ever be this instrumented or no. But at least in the research that we�re trying to conduct here, we are beginning to track the students� performance. In other words, as they take online quizzes and online tests and we also have systems for in-line quizzes that allow the students to be in distributed locations and all partake because they can use PDA�s or laptops to interact with the quiz system. We store that. We�re also working with various people in the education community to find ways to learn about the students� learning styles. So when a student would come up to a mentoring station, their web presence ID would allow the system to access a learning profile of the student, directing them to problems that they�ve had difficulty with in the past, to more content, to the resources that they use most often. Basically allowing systems in the environment to adapt to the individual, sort of like what you�re talking about in Minority Report. You specialize it to the single individual. One of the problems with that, by the way, that we�re really starting to have to face now is how do I get my web presence ID and that profile to move from one environment to another with me? So if I left here and I went over to Bill�s campus, my ID, of course, and all that profiling would probably be lost. So how do you share that kind of information?
HS: Right. So we need some global system, something that goes much further than the bounds of the university.
LH: And we do so well with global systems, don�t we?
HS: Well, we can send e-mail to each other!
LH: Well, one of the suggestions was we could map it to cell phone numbers.
JB: Actually, that�s not a bad��
LH: Which is rapidly becoming global.
JB: Not a bad idea, is it? As the PDA�s become cell phones, you solve the problem.
HS: Yeah. One of you said before when we talked that students will bring the technology with them into the university. And a lot of folks really believe that it works the other way, that the faculty and the staff and things like that sort of decide. Could you talk about that concept of students?
LH: I�ll jump in pretty quickly. I think the philosophy we take here is the fact that I believe the students will bring the technologies. However, if they bring technologies and we�re not prepared with the right types of curriculum, the right types of tools and the right type of pedagogy, then the tools that they bring, the technologies they bring won�t be very useful. So a lot of times we do what I refer to as artificial implementation. In other words, I�ve implemented this room and I�ve created all these clumsy technologies just so we can develop the tools that we would need to work with students when they bring a better technology to the table. So if I want to be able to distribute information to these students regardless of where they are, that�s not really viable in our current technology environment now. So I create an artificial environment, figure out what I can do with that and then we�re ready when the students actually do have laptops and everybody has wireless connections that can handle video streaming.
HS: Could you give us an example, though, of students bringing some technology with them?
LH: There are numerous. I think that some 60% of students coming to our campus have cell phones in spite of the high cost of monthly contracts and they will use those phones when it seems socially acceptable to them. That�s sometimes in the back of a classroom. A huge percentage of students, at least by the time of graduation, possess a computer of some kind but most of them probably bring a desktop with them from day one and many more of them are acquiring laptops and PDA�s. Many of them own game machines, whether it�s a Sony PlayStation or XBbox or whatever and those are an important piece of technology for them in terms of blowing off steam or other things.
WG: I think a key thing to understand here is when they bring those technologies with them, they are going to opportunistically find ways to use them that enrich their lives from their perspective and I think we have to accept that and be prepared for it. And part of what Lonnie�s talking about is by being forward-looking, we can anticipate what�s going to happen and try to direct the use of that technology to more educational ends.
JB: Before we take another answer here, I would like to remind everyone that now�s a good time to send in questions for you both and those questions can come in to expert@cren.net.
HS: I know that we need new social rules in restaurants because cell phones have been introduced there, but I wondered, do we need some new social rules in classrooms because of laptops and PDA�s and cell phones?
LH: We have seen an increase in the use of laptops. I think with the cell phones, of course, when a cell phone rings in class, that is rather disturbing. Most of the students have, even in our freshman orientation now, our students are reminded that if they carry a cell phone to turn it off or make it silent. The laptops, however, more and more students are bringing them in. They�re using them for note taking. Since our faculty, a lot of our faculty provides slides, they provide the slides online a couple of days before the class, the students download them and actually annotate the slides. This is sometimes done in Adobe Acrobat, sometimes it�s being done in PowerPoint. But the process of actually sitting there typing on a computer does create, I think, some difficulties in the social structure. The students around them sometimes are distracted by what the student�s doing. The faculty are sometimes distracted. There�s just not a model of note-taking that all of them are comfortable with. I think some of that will solve itself as society creates rules and I think sometimes faculty need to be educated. If students are obviously reading mail or playing a game on their computer and not actually interacting with the class then the faculty member may have to do something, just as if a student was sitting in the back of the room passing notes.
JB: But I have seen some studies that say that students are actually sending notes in class but the note-sending is actually instructionally pertinent.
LH: Some of it is. Actually, we have found just very recently, as a matter of fact, some of our students that are on campus here will instant message with students that are on some of our other campuses. It�s not as widespread because a lot of our other campuses don�t have the wireless networking capabilities and so we�re contemplating providing it for them so we can see where this will go. But you know, students that are sort of sitting in class as a faculty member is lecturing will look at each other with the �Did you understand what he was saying?� kind of look and then they sort of collectively get up the nerve to ask a question. Students don�t like to ask questions any more. I don�t think they ever did, but they don�t do it very often now. And some of them are using it by instant messaging, going, �Did you get that?� �No, I didn�t get that.� And then someone will finally get up the nerve to say, �Wait a minute! I didn�t get that!��
JB: So then they feel that kind of support, then, to go ahead and ask, huh? That�s interesting.
LH: Well, as we start to split up our educational environments, as we begin to say we�re going to have education anywhere, the whole question of the relationship between the students and the relationship of the students and faculty becomes an issue. How do we reconstruct that model?
WG: I think this is a case where being forward looking gives us a chance to gain control of or give some direction to the use of that technology, so I�m not going to be happy about the use of instant messaging during a quiz, for example��
HS: What a great idea!
JB: Right!
HS: Any students listening here?
WG: Yeah, really!
JB: Right! Turn it off!
HS: They�ve probably been doing it.
WG: It�s happened! We�ve seen it. And the other thing is that quite often these back channel conversations would be of benefit to many of the students in the class beyond the two at the opposite ends of that messaging channel. We�ve been experimenting with a very simple technology called ActiveClass where some of those conversations could be shared globally in the classroom with all the students and with the professor and relatively anonymously so that students won�t feel the social pressures or peer pressure of having asked stupid questions or things like that.
JB: How are you doing that?
WG: It�s a relatively simple technology. I think that you�ll find things like this incorporated into many distance learning environments, but we�re thinking about it in the classroom. The basic idea is, again, think about just using a simple web browser connected to the ActiveClass service. The student can ask a question anonymously. The server posts it so that all the people who are connected to the service see that question, then other students can jump in and try to answer that or a TA could answer it as part of the back channel. And then other students can actually vote on that question and say, �Hey, that�s a really good one. That�s something I want the professor to pay attention to.� And then, see, you have this sort of ecology of questions running in the classroom and the professor is sort of encouraged to answer the more popular questions.
HS: And do you archive that stuff, so that students can go back and look at it later?
WG: The professor can archive it if he or she wants to, yeah.
LH: You brought up the interesting point a little while ago about the fact that the students will be opportunistic with the technologies they bring in. One of the student projects that we had about three years ago connected into our automatic capture system. The Classroom 2000 system was automatically capturing everything that was going on in the classroom�everything that was written on the slides, when it was written, all this information. So we had them build a system that we refer to as a Wizard of Oz system. That is, it doesn�t really function but it gives such a good impression of it that as long as you don�t look at the person behind the curtain, you think it�s really working. And what this thing pretended to do was to take a set of lectures and automatically reduce them down to the salient points. You could determine what granularity you want, you could determine how many pictures you wanted vs. how much text you wanted and you could specify from the last test to the upcoming test and it would summarize all this stuff using these fictitious summarization capabilities. We had students that wanted to buy stock in this thing! And the faculty, of course, are going, �Not in my classroom you won�t be putting that thing!��
WG: That�s digital Cliff Notes, right?
LH: Exactly! And so��
HS: You�re saying this took like an hour�s worth of classroom video and you could say, �I want to see the important ten minutes of it�?
LH: This one was functioning over the actual transcribed audio. Audio transcribed into text and then we were using some true, real information retrieval and summarization techniques to create the sort of basic structure. But then in order to make this interface, we actually had individuals that produced over 140 variations on this set of notes so if students changed their options, it actually looked like the system was really doing something.
HS: Oh, okay.
LH: But the students were actually believing, when they looked at it, that there was this system that would actually make it possible for them to summarize the class and tell them what they needed to have known. And they wanted it!
HS: Do you know that Microsoft Word does have a summarize feature?
LH: Yes, it does. And that�s one of the ones�we built this as a plug-in to Microsoft Word and we used some of those capabilities. This was built with Visual Basic. But what was interesting to me was the fact that we created a truly fictitious technology, one that possibly could be built given enough time and research, but it was a technology that the students desperately wanted and the faculty desperately didn�t want them to have! And I think that�s also one of the things that we have to look into, as we bring intelligent technologies to the table is the fact that we are actually changing the structure of our education. In the past, as we have brought technologies to the classroom, they have been technologies that provided tools, not intelligence. A projector doesn�t provide intelligence. Now with the stuff that Bill�s doing, the stuff that we�re doing, we�re talking about tools that will actually possibly�hopefully�make it more efficient for students to learn, but are we building cognitive crutches?
HS: Okay, we have a question that just came in from Richard Danielson at Laurentian University up in Canada. And Richard asks, he says, �It sounds like Active Class is much like a chat system. Why not just use synchronous chat?��
WG: Well, it is a chat system. It is structured and designed around typical college classroom practices so it�s been streamline for the particular patterns of lecture, questioning and discussion that we see in a classroom. That enables providing the features in an extremely small form factor and yet providing all the information the students need. So certainly, if you�re dealing with a desktop system, you might be able to just use a chat system but by customizing it to the cultural context and to the device, you can actually do much better and make the students� and the professors� lives much better. More focused on the learning aspect of the classroom rather than getting all caught up in adopting the technology.
HS: Are the technologies that you�re both looking at, are these aimed just at college students or do these have some applicability in the K-12 area and are they being used down there?
WG: Well, you know, I think that�and I�ll let Lonnie answer for his half��
HS: For the east coast! But for the west coast
WG: Yeah, those people east of the Mississippi, I know nothing about those folks! But I�ve picked a particular domain because the general problem is so difficult to get your head around, to understand and to build for, especially in dealing with small form factor devices like PDA�s. You have to understand the context or you won�t be able to fit it onto the device. You�ll saturate the screen, the memory, the CPU, everything. So we�ve chosen that, so there may be applications in other domains but you probably want to adapt the technology in certain ways. We�ve thought about the K-12 environment but in terms of the small town/big city problem, that might apply to communities generally, not necessarily learning communities. Certainly, making one�s way around a major city like Atlanta or San Diego is no easier than getting around our university campuses. So we can see applications there and a lot of use, but I think you�d probably end up changing how those applications work.
JB: During our prep session, we talked about the fact that one of the projects�and I forget whether it was you, Lonnie, or Bill�that talked about the capability that when I�m walking through the campus, I can tell whether my friends are anywhere near me.
LH: That�s Active Campus.
JB: That�s Active Campus, okay. Why don�t you talk about that a little bit? I mean, you mentioned that you�ve got about 25 or 30 folks actually using some of that system. How are they applying it and what are they finding out with that capability?
WG: Well, mostly I can only speak about my own personal experience because that�s the one that�s been most arresting for me. But I was sitting in another meeting the other day and someone was late for the meeting so we said, �Well, gee, let�s see what Pat�s up to.� So we look at our PDA�s and we could basically see his progress through the campus. And we could detect that he was actually coming, that he hadn�t forgotten about the meeting or something like that. So we kind of sat tight rather than starting the meeting.
HS: But suppose you found him in the local pub. I mean, you just
WG: Well, you�d send him an instant message saying, �Hey, what are you doing? Come on! Get over here!��
JB: You�re supposed to be over here, right?
WG: I�ve been late for meetings and I�ll send an instant message, �I�m on my way,� and then people can keep track of my location as I�m approaching to get a sense of my progress and things like that. I had a student drop by my office last school year and I wasn�t there. He looked on his PDA, saw that I was at the local campus restaurant and dashed down to the restaurant to join me at lunch with my colleagues. So that�s sort of the spontaneous�this last one, what I�m really seeking is this sense of spontaneity where you can take advantage of opportunities as they appear to you because our lives are really very unstructured in many aspects and so the ability to take advantage of the sort of random opportunities, I think, is an important thing about keeping a community healthy.
HS: Yeah, of course, that�s nice if you�d welcome another person to join you for lunch. But really, if this was a student who you didn�t want to join you for lunch and he popped in and said, �Hi! I know you�re having lunch with Professor So-and-So.� So this thing can really work both ways. It can be an invasion of privacy and��
WG: Well, yeah. But the technology
HS: You could turn your PDA off so no one could find you.
WG: In the development of Active Campus, we�ve developed a number of features for controlling who can see whose information. To be a buddy in the first place, there has to be a mutual agreement amongst the two people that they�re going to be buddies. So that�s a relatively high bar. Random people can�t see you. Second of all, at any particular time, I can dial down my visibility so if I want to drop out, I can certainly do that and I think that is important. As we add power into these systems to keep track of us for our benefit, that we provide the controls that assure us it�s always for our benefit.
JB: Can you make it look as if you�re somewhere else than where you are?
WG: Yeah. I think of that as it�s a free speech right that I should be able to lie about my location.
LH: If can real quickly jump back to the K-12 question��
HS: Sure.
LH: We have a project here at Georgia Tech called the Electronic Learning Communities. Dr. Amy Bruckman is the one that�s handling that one. It�s built around the concept of creating environments for students to explore. Also for providing various types of tutorial type stuff. One of the ones they have is called Aqua Moose 3-D and it�s a three dimensional math learning environment which is designed to build connections between mathematical and artistical thinking. So the intent that they have there is to try and tie the creative process, both the artistic creative process and the mathematical creative process together��
HS: Sounds great.
LH: �to allow us to explore both. They also have one called the Palaver Tree Online, and I love this one because it creates an environment to get kids interviewing elders on the Internet to build up a multimedia archive of these people�s historical experiences.
JB: What is that called again, Lonnie?
LH: This is called Palaver Tree Online. Once again, part of the Electronic Learning Community.
HS: I mean, both of those kinds of things, at least conceptually, sound like they would be great ideas for college students. I mean, the idea of linking the arts and math would seem to be a wonderful thing. I think there�s a lot of freshmen who are struggling with math in college right now who if they could see some link to anything else would find it a real positive experience.
LH: Another project we have over in another group called Edutech that Dr. Kolodner is running is called Learning by Design and I really wish I had this when I had been a kid because it is basically teaching people the design process, irrespective of where you�re going to apply it. And sometimes you�re using paper and paints, other times they�re using computer simulation models. And from what they�ve experienced, the students, since it has been introduced to them early on, begin to see all of the tools as tools and not obstacles, allowing them to explore that.
JB: And the tool that is being used or the tools that are being used in the Learning by Design, Lonnie, are which ones?
LH: Well, they have a whole collection of things. In many cases, what they�re doing is they�re creating interactions through artifacts, is what they say. And the artifacts can be paper representations, they can be models that they make, they can be computer simulations or whatever objects make sense for that particular exercise that the students are working on. So to answer the question that you�d ask, do these technologies map down, I don�t think it�s a direct mapping. But I think the concepts map down. As you were just saying, some of these concepts would map back up!
HS: Oh, yeah!
LH: To higher education.
HS: Yeah, in fact, I think all of them would. So I asked the wrong question. I should have said do the K-12 things map into the college and university sphere.
LH: That is also important. I mean, I think that we have a situation, in fact, in some cases, our students are arriving on campus with a collection of tools that the campus is not prepared to make use of. I referred to that earlier, and that we try to think ahead. But you know, the students are using all these wonderful things like instant messaging and Google searches, as you pointed out, in class and all of these other things. But do our curriculums reflect that?
HS: Yeah, you certainly don�t want somebody to come from a multimedia-rich environment in K-12 and come into a talk-and-chalk environment.
LH: One of the interesting adoptions I�ve seen recently was there was a professor that said that one of the first things he would have his students do is spend three weeks�three weeks!�finding the relevant papers to a particular topic. Now it�s due the day after tomorrow because it can be found so much quicker.
HS: Okay, we�ve been talking a lot about what�s happening in classrooms and distance learning and things. I wonder if you�re seeing any of these technologies applied in the labs that students wind up in, the chemistry labs and electrical engineering labs and biology labs and other places like that.
LH: Definitely in our engineering labs, our electrical engineering labs. All of our engineering labs, of course, are computerized. Those kinds of technologies are important. One of the things that we find fascinating are the tools that are available for students on their PDA�s that allow them to solve a lot of their circuit questions before they actually get to the lab. So in many cases, they�re making notes on their PDA, actually designing circuits on their PDA. Then they come to class and build the circuit, they come to the lab and build the circuit.
HS: Okay, so they can discover they don�t quite work the way they do in the [inaudible] tools.
LH: The simulation tools have been around for a while but now those simulation tools can be put on something the student can carry around.
JB: And that�s making a real difference, from what you�re saying, the fact that it�s available on these PDA�s.
LH: Yeah, some of the PDA�s or the laptops, but especially the PDA�s are more powerful than some of our old mainframes! And so we actually can have design tools and students can say, �Okay, do I put this transistor with this particular circuit or do I want an �and� gate here or do I want an �or� gate? What kind of gate do I want to put in? And they can test their logic.
HS: Okay, so this is tried by dragging and dropping kind of thing, before they go through the trouble of actually trying to build the thing?
LH: Yeah. What I look at, sometimes I think, �Okay, all we�ve done is we�ve taken something like the stamp tools that you have in a drawing package and we�ve applied intelligence to it.� So now I�m actually stamping out an �and� gate and now I�m stamping out an �or� gate and I�m connecting them and what am I getting out the other end?
HS: Okay, so are we seeing tools like that in chemistry and biology as well, other of the sciences?
WG: I think, in fact, the physical and biological sciences for many years were ahead of computer science and electrical engineering.
HS: Yes!
WG: The professors in these disciplines have been working with these technologies for a couple of decades now. An example here is with Gabriella Wienhausen and the Biology department. Her team has been working on interactive laboratories in biology and chemistry for quite a while and then evolved that into online test taking and distance learning and in many respects, I think, we�ve been playing catch-up for quite a while. I think that�s in part because many of the students taking those physics, chemistry, biology courses are non-majors and there�s a desire to reach out to those students and help them, whereas in electrical engineering and computing, you are typically more likely a major in the discipline and are willing to slog through the chalk and talk, so to speak.
LH: Or the age old mentality of, well, they should be able to build it themselves!
WG: That�s right! That�s right! Exactly.
LH: But you know, you were mentioning that we are in some ways lagging behind. Think how long we�ve had writing tools available to us that�ll help us check our grammar, that will help check our spelling, that will tell us if we�re being too wordy. Also, I think on the website that y�all have for this talk, you have the Michigan State University and what they�re doing with their English students, providing tools for them in class that help to construct the English narratives.
HS: What about in the area of foreign language training? Are you seeing any new tools popping up there, some current technology being used in those places?
LH: Both Bill and I are waiting on the other person to answer!
WG: I do not know. I can�t really speak to that.
LH: I can�t either. I was immediately, the moment you said it, I was thinking, you know, well, we have phoneme matching that we�ve built on English. Perhaps if we did phoneme matching in a foreign language, we could test for pronunciation online without the instructor!
HS: Right. Are we seeing things where a professor gives a quiz and students have to give an audible answer so that they can check their accent and the way they speak and things like that? I mean, those things seem possible to do.
LH: Yeah, they definitely seem possible. I don�t know of any projects that are doing that but that�s probably lack of knowledge, not the fact that the project isn�t being done. You were talking about translation tools, though. What�s kind of interesting is I do collaborate with individuals in other countries and more out of entertainment value, we actually oftentimes translate our responses into the other person�s language using things like Babel or something like that to translate it. And you know, I think that�s a step. I think it�s a very small step, but I wonder how far away we are from automatic translation. And we have a large number of foreign students on our campus, and as I said, we have distributed learning. One of our campuses is in France. How far�I hope my computer has good pronunciation or the French may get upset! But I wonder how far we are from that?
JB: That sounds like a good question or a good topic for a Tech Talk coming up! I think actually there�s quite a bit of work been done there but I think, like everything, it�s a little ways away. But yes, it�s a very good question. Like to remind everyone that there�s time for a question or two so do quickly get them in. And with that, I�d like to ask a question�bring us back one more time to instruction. If I were to ask each of you what you think, looking forward, the best instructional application of these tools that you would like to see students use in the future.
HS: Lonnie. We�ll just have to pick a particular person here.
JB: Yeah, I guess so.
LH: Well, I did it to him last time so I figured it was my time to take the hard question first!
JB: I didn�t mean it to be hard anyway!
HS: [inaudible] as possible. We want to stump the stars here.
LH: Picking your favorite�s always very, very difficult. But one of the technologies that we experimented with early on and the real environment didn�t exist yet was basically think of it as group notes. The faculty member�s up there annotating the slides as they go along and sure, we can capture that. Well, the student can make annotations as well and that can also be captured. And the project we did here, talk about one of the worst names of a project. This was supposed to be the Student Pad and it got shortened to StuPad! Which because, we had at that time really only tethered laptops with pen-based things that you could write on, this was very clumsy, very intrusive. But now that I can tie it to my Palm, that�s a project I would like to revisit and I think that would have a major impact because I could share my notes with other students. I could allow my notes to become part of the permanent archive. I could keep them separate. I could create an environment of annotation and I think that a lot of that information about what did I understand, what did I not understand, the faculty could go back and look at student notes.
JB: Well, you know, that�s a really good point. It occurred to me as you both were talking before about the types of interactions going on in the classroom that were creating potentially this really dynamic classroom, that as an entity, it�s multitasking, just like an individual multitasks at a computer. That collectively, there�s multitasking in the classroom but more focused on instruction.
LH: Well, here I can give a segue to Bill and one of the things that I�m always fascinated with and what I really enjoy and what they�re doing there is this, what he refers to as the back channel. The fact that our students are actually capable of absorbing a lot, they really are. And the back channel is actually providing one learning mechanism for one particular type of learning style while the visual presentation is performing another one and the spoken is performing a third. So what is happening is we�re increasing the number of learning styles that we can support at one time.
WG: Yeah, I think that�s a very important point because if we look at how the university environment has changed over the last 50 years, basically since the end of World War II, we�ve seen a relatively homogenous environment become incredibly heterogeneous, culturally and otherwise, and I think with that comes a whole host of learning styles. And also, context in which different learning styles can thrive. Everyone used to be a full time student who really didn�t have to worry about how they were going to pay for their education and that�s just not the way it is anymore. And so we have to accommodate those things and I think a lot of Lonnie�s projects speak to that.
HS: Now, I think I�ve heard that there are more non-traditional students than there are traditional students, than the traditional come in, spend four years and leave.
LH: If I know my class, they�re definitely not traditional! Oh, that�s not what you meant.
HS: No, that�s not what I meant by �traditional.� But that would be true nearly anywhere!
WG: No, let me give my own answer to that question, though. Rather than focus on a technology, I think I�d rather focus on an objective with the technology and this speaks to what Lonnie was saying. I�m interested in what I call democratic modes of learning. I as a single professor on a campus with thousands of students, I have limited capacity for touching those students and changing their lives, and certainly technology magnifies that. But it�s certainly not going to be the only possibility. Through democratic modes of learning, where students help other students learn, you get at this incredible magnification of capacity. And not only that, there�s all these interesting things happen. What I mean by democratic modes of learning is basically student to student or peer to peer. Also TA to student and so forth. But what you get is the students who are being help understand that the professor doesn�t have special knowledge. This is knowledge that really is available to everyone. They don�t have to have it bequeathed to them. They can go out and get it or someone can, working in teams, they can work it out. And I think it�s that cultural transformation, that change in mindset where students say, �Hey, I can do this! All the tools are available here. I just have to figure out how to do it. I don�t have to wait for someone to come and give it to me.� And I think the technology, whether it�s instant messaging or Active Class or Active Campus or Classroom 2000 or StuPad or Student Pad. Actually, Student Pad is a superb example of democratic learning because everyone gets to see what everyone else is contributing. And it�s not just the professor holding absolute control over the knowledge. That�s my hope. That�s my goal.
JB: Exciting possibilities here! Well, with that, Howard, do you have a final comment or question?
HS: I certainly do! You can count on it, right?
JB: I can usually count on it.
HS: Okay. No, you can always count on it, Judith! Let�s not just say sometimes here. Bill and Lonnie, it sounds like we�re talking about lots of new technology, lots of interesting stuff that the students are doing and both of you have been involved in this all the time. But there�s lots of faculty who have not, so my question is, when this technology appears on campus, how do you get all these faculty members to learn enough about how to deal with so that they can deal with it effectively? Lonnie?
LH: Well, this is probably not the most politic answer, but I pay them. Either I pay by providing them with technology that they want to use�I mean, when had all of the projectors and we built all of these multimedia classrooms, that didn�t get the faculty to use it. What got the faculty to use it is when I handed them laptops and said, �If you�re going to use the projector, I�ll give you a laptop.� And they go, �Okay!� Or a lot of times, especially as we start to move to multi-modal presentation, there�s a lot of work that we�re asking the faculty to do to convert their course, the very structure of their course and the way the content is presented. They have to make slides, they have to make diagrams, have to make all of these��
HS: Oh, yeah, it�s not just the work! You need some skill before you can do that.
LH: Well, that�s a good point so we provide two things, I guess I should say. One, we provide the Digital Media lab to help them actually produce the content and then the second thing we will do, that we will attempt for the faculty as we move through the curriculum�and we started at the bottom with our main core courses. We will pay the faculty release time to help them work on this material. To expect it to come out of thin air is just something I think that is unlikely to occur. I think you�ll have a slow transition that way but I think that the students and the technologies will be moving faster if we wait on that model. [inaudible]�
HS: Okay, and from the other coast, do we pay the faculty?
WG: Essentially, that�s what you do. You could call it being paid or bribed or whatever you want. One professor I worked with, when he found out that all of his students and his TA�s would get PDA�s, he put two and two together and realized that this would make him a very popular person. I think another thing, though, is to think about designing the technology to the environment. One thing, I was emphasizing a web browser based environment. I didn�t have to tell professors that they have to abandon this technology or learn that new technology. So I�ve sort of taken an incremental approach, providing new modes of interaction without forcing a lot of technology on them in the process and so it�s kind of this symbiotic process where I think we meet each other halfway.
JB: Sounds like a workable model! Sounds exciting! Well, with that, I think it�s time to say thank you to you both for being with us here today, and also thanks very much to our audience today. And I would like to invite everyone to join us again, this time in three weeks, for a session on Smart Classroom Design. For those of you will be at EDUCAUSE 2002 in Atlanta, our experts will be doing a live, on the road Tech Talk on Wednesday, October 2nd and I�ll be sending out notices about that. This session will be sponsored by the Sextant Group from Pittsburgh in addition to our CREN member institutions. Our experts will be repeating this session in our usual audio format at our regularly scheduled time on October 10th at 4:00 Eastern time, again sponsored by the Sextant Group. Thanks to all of you, all the CREN institutions and our sponsors for making these Tech Talks possible. Many thanks to our Tech Talk experts, Lonnie Harvel and William Griswold; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis, our audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time. Bye, Lonnie, Bill, Howard, take care and we�re looking forward to a great transcript here.
HS: Yeah, this was great fun. Thank you all. Bye-bye.
LH: Bye.
END OF WEBCAST
