A Technology Framework for Smart Classrooms and Knowledge Communities

• In Event: A Framework to Understand the Impact of Technology on Collaborative Learning

Abstract

New digital media and information technologies offer opportunities for researchers to examine new forms of instruction where students collaborate across contexts, dynamically generate knowledge, build on peers’ ideas, and investigate questions as a knowledge community. We are developing a flexible, open source “smart classroom” infrastructure called SAIL Smart Space (S3) that integrates technologies to support collaborative inquiry and knowledge construction.
We will detail three implementations of S3: PLACE.Web - a student-driven space for physics concept negotiation, Embedded Phenomena for Inquiry Communities (Moher, 2006; Slotta, Tissenbaum & Lui, 2011) where tablet computers and Smartboards support student investigations of simulations running within their classroom walls, and evoRoom -- an immersive, room-sized simulation of a Sumatran rainforest where students investigate evolution.
These three projects, demonstrate how smart classrooms can scaffold the collection, aggregation, and representation of information across varying contexts and environments. Below we outline the patterns of interaction amongst various devices that occur within S3, and their affordances for inquiry and collaboration

Local Device-to-Large Display: Supporting collaborative groupware and whole class visualizations.
• Aggregating Ideas: Students make observations on tablet computers, which are aggregated on a large display during small group activities. The collective visualization of student ideas provides a sense of group or class progress for students and teachers.
• Orchestrating Class Activities: student work can be aggregated, either in front of groups or the whole room, informing the teacher’s orchestration of subsequent activities.
Large Display-to-Local Device: Students can interact directly with large displays or be influenced on their device by teachers or peers who interact with the displays.
• Personalized meaning from public space: When large screens provide aggregated information, students can move around the room and make personally relevant observations - collecting information tangibly from the large displays onto their devices.
• Central filtering and orchestration. Teachers observing the aggregation of data on a large central display can respond in real time, selecting promising ideas or challenging cases, and sending new conditions or constraints back out to students’ local devices.
Device-to-Device: Students gain insight into the work of peers through real time updates across devices, informing questions or inquiry activities.
• Personalized Aggregation: Students (or small groups) can personalize aggregated information on local devices to address specific learning goals.
• Real time updates: Student devices are updated in real-time during inquiry activities, providing a valuable form of feedback and input.
Spatial mapping of phenomena: using large and small displays situated throughout the room, S3 can turn the room itself into a powerful simulation or information mediator.
• Embedded Phenomena: allow a running simulation to be mapped throughout all wall and floor surfaces in the room, supporting student inquiry.
• Immersive Simulations: The entire room is mapped onto a simulation (e.g., a human heart, animal cell, electric circuit or rainforest), supported embodied learning and shared inquiry experiences.
• Distributed Semantic Networks: The room serves as a semantic index, with different locations corresponding to specified semantic variables or values, with certain themes or topics appearing in certain parts of the room.

Authors

• Mike Tissenbaum, University of Toronto

• James D. Slotta, University of Toronto

• Michelle Lui, University of Toronto - OISE