Thesis of the Week


Collaborative Classroom

"Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable from all points of view - artistic, hygenic, and educational - to the needs of the children. We had a good deal of difficulty finding what we needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: 'I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening.'"
- John Dewey, A Speech on "Society and Education", 1899.

I am working with Ephraim Glinert, Ed Rogers, Cheryl Geisler, and John Tobin on the construction of The Collaborative Classroom. This showcase classroom is RPI's premiere teaching and learning space and will be located in the Troy Building. Plans are to have it up and running by August 1997.

So far I've just been reading papers, going to meetings, and trying to figure out what everybody is doing. Of course there are lots of room for ideas.

Use of cartoon like avatar's to replace video image of a person in a long distance learning environment. The cartoon avatar would mimic the lip movement (via analysis of audio) and facial expressions (via some limited image analysis of facial features... possibly in the prototype using makeup to highlight significant features). This would eliminate a lot of the bandwidth issues for video conferencing. The questions are:
  • How expressive can the avatar be?
  • Will the long distance learner accept the avatar as a replacement for an actual human face?
The artifacts of the collaborative process consist of multiple media. Currently our system provides a very primitive file based system for organizing and accessing the material. Is there a better way to do this?
  • Maybe we could create some kind of intelligent knowledge base that processes the artifacts after the fact and allows users both in the group & outside the group to view & use the intermediate results of collaboration.
  • Some work on intelligent Guides (data organizations with different Agendas (Apple) (i.e. paths through the data)) and
  • knowledge base creation from highly structure documents (at Northeastern) has been done.
  • It would be really interesting to see what kind of post processing of artifacts like CHAT sessions could be done..
Our system for support of collaborative work is a very low level system. It's great because it doesn't get in the way of group communication, works well with non-collaboration aware software, and will support collaborative-aware applications as well. The problem is that it is highly unstructured. In an open ended design project, this is good. In a more focused project, we are going to need additional software. Is there a generic teaching framework that will support more focused/directed projects?
Long distance learning is a hot topic in collaborative classrooms. One idea I've had is to use the computer as a hypertext document constructor/guide/aide which brings up appropriate documents in real-time as students are chatting electronically about a subject. For example, if a group of students were chatting about Semaphores... the computer aide would bring up a selection of web documents on Semaphores. The more specific the students were in their chatting about the subject... the more specific the document hits would become. The system would also have to use a thesaurus approach because new learners lack the proper vocabulary for the domain they are learning about. This aide could also use the hypertext documents to classify the chat sessions that were currently underway. If a student joined the classroom, s/he could check out the topics of conversation by looking at the computer's analysis of the chat sessions. This analysis could be presented as a list of topics & subtopics that the computer has found conversational "hits" in... presented in temporal order (also possibly use color as heat to indicate what subjects are currently hot in the chat session).
A radically new "document". That is constructed on the fly based on the user's process of inquiry. For example, if the user asked: 
STUDENT> I'm trying to find out something on semaphores and
dead-something.  Or maybe it's grid-lock.  I can't
remember what the prof said in class.
The system would extract keywords based on the "document" stored in the database and begin building a document on semaphores & deadlock. This document would include hypertext links to other keywords (that were pre-recorded...) and possibly added new links based on keywords that the user typed in.
Combining GIS, Databases, Education, and Collaborative technologies and pedagogies into some kind of Educational GIS. One immediate application of this GIS would be in the teaching of core ideas of Computer Science. Kind of like a survey course of CS areas using the GIS as the practical medium to explain concepts like: Grammar (the language used to program the system), Image Processing (satellite/aircraft surveillance), Graph Theory (modelling roads), Simulatino (traffic patterns), Computational Geometry (don't get me started here!), Graphics (2D & 3D terrain models), GUI, etc. Maybe a course could be devised that uses this specialized COLLABORATIVE GIS to teach these concepts.
GIS Simulation... SimArch. Students work together to race against the clock... One group is trying to investigate a recent archeological discovery in NYC... the other group is trying to erect the skyscraper whose construction uncovered the find.
Collaborative Simulation. Using the public/private system we have here at RPI... students would work together in a shared simulation. The simulation would stimulate all kinds of cooperative activities. An example of this might be The Human Body. Each student is responsible for a different system in the human body (private), what the body experiences externally or events that require coordinated responses from these systems would be shown on the public machine.

Some Great Quotes

Old Theses of the Week

Bob Dugan dugan@rpi.edu