Teacher's group notes

Steve Wolfman

Second, in designing new applications for Tablet PC technology, we believe that researchers should bear in mind the powerful influence they wield over practice. As John Canny put it, "[We can] use the innovative features of the tablet as a magnet to pull people towards [new, positive pedagogies]." By fulfilling instructors' evident needs (such as Classroom Presenter's support for inking over slides), we secure our applications' adoption. By affording positive pedagogical behaviors (such as the flexible, interactive instructional style afforded by Classroom Presenter's slide navigation controls), we channel instructors towards the positive pedagogies we envision.

Now, on to detailed discussion. We start with the primary problems facing instructors. Rather than a focus on instructors' problems relevant to the Tablet PC, we consider the biggest fundamental problems we see as facing teachers today. Addressing these problems will make the Tablet PC truly valuable to instructors. The four primary problems we see are:

1. Engaging students in the class and motivating students' excitement about the subject. (We and many instructors see interaction as a key element to addressing this problem; therefore, increasing interactivity of classes is a reasonable subgoal.)
2. Managing time. Instructors face time management challenges both in allocated their own limited resources and in managing students' time commitment to their classes.
3. Understanding and adopting new pedagogical perspectives. As teachers, we know that under pressure to accomplish immediate goals, meta-cognitive tasks often suffer. For our own part, the problem of managing time commitments means that the meta-cognitive task of exploring new pedagogical directions suffer. For instructors that want to keep abreast of new pedagogical advances, this is an important problem. For those instructors unaware of or uninterested in pedagogical advances, this problem might be rephrased as "subverting" instructors to new pedagogical perspectives: changing the instructional environment so that, without their conscious adoption, these instructors naturally adopt pedagogical advances.
4. At least for university teachers, management of large classes is often a pressing concern. Despite the wide variance in class size across the institutions represented in our group, large classes were generally viewed as a problem. While the definition of "large" differs across these institutions, the problem large classes pose remains the same: scaling up pedagogical techniques successful in "small" classes.

The tablet offers a set of technological features that have the potential to address these problems. Several are (relatively) unique to the Tablet PC platform, while others are shared with many other platforms but are nonetheless critical features available for tablets. We focus first on those features of the Tablet PC that distinguish it from most other technologies and then move on to features it shares with many modern computing devices.

1. The ability to naturally and easily create annotations in the context of existing classroom artifacts. The eBook example above exemplifies this strength: placing naturalistic (but digital) ink annotations in the context of the textbook transforms the textbook from a static artifact to a dynamic venue for interaction. Similarly, Joe Tront and Beth Simon use Classroom Presenter's student interaction features to transform static class slides into dynamic, collaborative artifacts. We see this strength as the _key_ feature that distinguishes the Tablet PC from other technologies; therefore, the strengths discussed below should be viewed in light of this point.
2. Tablets fit well physically with instructional environments. They are easy to carry and do not block eye contact. The pen as input device affords easy transitions from gestures to input and back again. (Unlike keyboards, it requires no careful positioning of the hands, and unlike a mouse, it requires no "reregistration" of the position of the onscreen cursor with the position of the mouse.) Finally, the tablet is easy to hand off, e.g., for an instructor to hand a student her tablet to work an example for the class.
3. Personal expression. Different people's typed text looks mostly the same (e e cummings notwithstanding). Different people's inked notes and diagrams are highly individualistic. The Tablet PC's pen input provides an opportunity for instructors and students to make annotations that are clear personal expressions, carrying emotional and aesthetic connotations that are inexpressible in typed text.
4. Like any modern digital device, the tablet has powerful archival potential. Storage, search, retrieval, and replay of data created with the tablet opens up many possible applications. The tablets multi-modality --- with ink and audio standard and video coming on -- --many tablets --- makes this potential even more exciting. Archiving also enhances the theme of making static artifacts dynamic: dynamic artifacts created in an interactive session (such as in class) can be archived and themselves used as venues for later interaction.
5. Mobile networked collaboration. The tablet's wireless connectivity and design for mobility creates the opportunity for collaboration not only in new metaphorical venues (such as over an e-textbook) but in new physical venues.
6. Rich data source. Just as the tablet's multimodal input presents exciting archival potential, it also presents exciting opportunities to collect data about instructors' and students' activities. For researchers interested in understanding learning, the tablet offers a platform for rich data collection. (Obviously, security and privacy concerns obtain.)

In light of these problems and affordances, we suggest that successful tablet applications for instructors bear in mind a set of six goals.

1. Focus on helping instructors manage time. Where realistically possible, reduce the amount of time instructional tasks take for instructors by increasing the efficiency of instructors' tasks; otherwise, make clear the gain in learning effectiveness that instructors will reap in exchange for their increased time commitment.
2. Design to shape positive pedagogies. In particular, tablets have the potential to increase interaction and collaboration in the learning process. Going a step further, personal expression, dynamism of previously static artifacts, and ubiquitous connectivity present the potential to create new _communities_ for learning: long-term, stable venues for interaction to which students can not only subscribe but belong.
3. Make adoption and sharing of tablet-based materials easy. If importing (adopting) and exporting (sharing) materials is easy, instructors and students can exploit the tablet's potential for making static artifacts dynamic and archiving experiences.
4. Explore qualitatively different social mechanisms for interaction. While improving efficiency of existing tasks (as mentioned in the first goal above) is important, tablets also offer the potential to qualitatively change how instruction works and thus improve learning. The Classroom Feedback System (an extension to Classroom Presenter) provides one good example. In the system, students leave annotations as marks directly on the slide. These annotations are private (i.e., an annotation is visible only to the instructor and the student who left it). While giving verbal feedback ahead of a lecture is socially unacceptable --- "I know you haven't gotten to the last bullet yet, but could you explain what it means?" --- the private nature of annotations in the --> --Classroom Feedback System makes this pattern --> --of giving feedback "ahead" of the lecture --> --socially acceptable and successful. Tablet --> --PC applications should seek out such shifts --> --in social mechanisms of interaction that --> --have the potential to improve learning.
5. Target value for (and adoption by) not just "top" teachers but the "average" teacher as well. A natural tendency when designing a learning intervention is to work with energetic, excited, excellent teachers. However, improving learning in the "average" instructor's class will impact many more students.
6. Assist (and avoid hindering!) disabled instructors and students. By introducing new modalities for interaction, the Tablet PC offers opportunities to assist disabled instructors and students, but relying thoughtlessly on these new modalities can also potentially hinder disabled instructors' and students' adoption and use of tablet applications.

In sum, the "killer application" for instructors on the Tablet PC would be one that uses fluid, natural annotation and editing to transform the disparate activities and often static artifacts of course instruction into a connected web of highly interactive learning communities.