POSITION PAPER

“DISTRIBUTED CREATIVE ENVIRONMENTS AND UBIQUITOUS SCHOOLS”

Stavros Panageas, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece

Stavros Savas, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece
Stylianos Savas, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece
Sofoklis A. Sotiriou, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece

a. Background

The impact of the Internet in education is indisputable. The Internet has clearly proved to offer high
potential for its use in education and a significant qualitative upgrade to conventional teaching. ICT
and mainly the Internet is altering the roles, functions and focus of teaching and learning. ICT
applications in education are expected to be drastically expanded in the near future. According to the
Demographic and Social Trends Issue paper of the Joint Research Center of the EC about the future
of Education in Europe until 2010, “The growth will be more rapid in the area of short courses, and
most rapid in the new informal education sector.”

Over the last two decades, instructional computing introduced algorithmically based procedures and
information-processing tools such as word processing and spreadsheets to enhance learning. The
Internet added communication, connectivity and collaboration. Education is no longer bound by a
specific location offering a set curriculum limited by economic and personnel realities. Internet
applications change the core relationship between teacher, learner and material, making guided and
self-directed mediated distance learning fully actualized. It is clear that ICT opens the door to “virtual
schooling” [1]. The web though through conventional PC’s is combined with a major disadvantage: It
fails in mobility. Students can only access the web at school or at home. Modern educational
theories though have proved the significance of informal learning in situ. For example students
are more motivated to learn about a historical site or a scientific application when they actually see it,
in a museum or in a factory. Presenting information through the web implies that the teacher
motivates the students in school or at home, where the motivating stimuli is not present.

It is obvious that for the expansion of the idea of learning and the creation of learning schemes that
are based on the effective use of motivation that arises when a student is faced with the stimuli,
distributed learning environments and mobile devices with Internet access can offer significant
advantages. The advantages are clear: accessible resources wherever you are, strong search
capabilities, rich interaction, powerful support for effective learning, and performance-based
assessment: elearning independent of location in time or space.

This approach penetrates the traditional boundary between the classroom, home, and other settings
(museums, libraries, archaeological and historical sites, etc.) as distinct learning environments. It
aims to involve the users (students, teachers) in extended episodes of playful learning. Specific
elements to focus on here include motivating learning, demonstrating application, and scaffolded
practice. Learning enhanced to be fun can be more effective [2]. According to [3] learning embedded
in a motivating setting improves learning outcomes. One implication of this model is that students
should be assigned activities that reflect the application of the content knowledge as it is practiced
outside the classroom. The goal is to induce the learner into a "culture of practice" which makes
the knowledge meaningful. Another implication is that the feedback ideally should be intrinsically
embedded into the context in which the activity is performed. A further implication is to have the
learning challenge carefully balanced to keep it within a "zone" that matches the learner's ability.
What we see is that elements that contribute to effective learning environments include a
thematically meaningful story ("situating" the application of the knowledge), relevant and rapid
feedback, and a carefully managed level of challenge.

b. Technological potentials and requirements

Learning through mobile technology has been slow to grow because most wireless devices up today
have small screens, low resolution, slow processing, and limited storage capabilities. Likewise,
difficulty connecting various types of devices to the same network is a real limitation. Currently WAP
mobile phones do NOT meet the above mentioned criteria and are thus not suitable for educational
purposes [4]. The combination though of handheld devices (such as PDAs and Palmtops) and
GPRS mobile phones that were recently introduced to the market offers a platform that extends
beyond messaging and allows connection to the Web at an acceptable connection speed, a platform
that clearly presents a new challenge for the use of such devices as learning tools. There are
already programs applying handheld devices as educational tools with very encouraging results [5].
It is expected that in the very near future mobile devices that incorporate those functions will
overwhelm the market. For a handheld learning environment to be suitable for learning purposes
some basic criteria must be fulfilled:

Interactivity: it should provide means of communication between students and teachers, allowing
for the formation of an open virtual “classroom”. It should allow for feedback by the teachers that
will be accessible to students;
Interdisciplinarity: Content should be presented in an interdisciplinary way incorporating
information of different disciplines, thus promoting the idea of informal learning.
Unobtrusiveness: so that the student can capture situations and retrieve knowledge without
technology obtruding on the situation;
Availability: its functions should be available anywhere and it should provide seamless
communication inside and outside buildings;
Adaptability: it should adapt to the students’ evolving skills and knowledge;
Usefulness: it should be suited to everyday needs for communication, reference, and learning
Suitability: Content should be corresponding to specific learning needs of students, e.g. content for
the same subject should be presented in several ways and provided according to the specific
student’s profile;
Easy of use: it should be intuitively easy to use, by students with no computer experience.

The learning environment will include full access to digital resources, cognitive tools, knowledge
visualizations, software mentors to help with learning to use devices such as digital cameras,
organise and recall images and sounds of people and situations, knowledge sharing between
students in different environments, contextual personal tools that change their behavior based on
where they are and the activity in progress. Learning activities will include reading material, bulletin
board discussions, multiple-choice quizzes, and writing assignments. Students will have the chance
to be linked to video clips, PDF articles, and Websites.

c. The user centered development in the usability framework

The development in wireless communication, distributed systems, and increases in the power and
interactive capabilities of handheld and portable devices, provide us with the possibility to have wide-
ranging and continual access to computing resources in a variety of contexts. These technological
changes place increasing demands on the quality of the user interface and offer the potential to
further progress the functionality of computing devices. However, this makes human-computer
interaction all the more central to the design and development of applications for such
mobile systems. The case remains that functionality does not exist for the user if that functionality is
not usable. This assumption is even more important when, as in this project, the task is to develop a
learning environment that will be accessible through conventional PC’s as well as through mobile
devices. The user-centred approach, in the usability framework, is the point at which the potential
success of a proposed system will be investigated [6].

During this phase a human factors investigation aims to define:

- who the proposed system would be for;

- what tasks it should support;
- how it would fit into an existing organizational or other environment;
- what technology could or should be used, and
- what the system would cost to develop and install.

The outcome of a feasibility study is a document or set of documents that outlines the system in
broad terms and gives enough information on which to base to base a decision to go ahead or to drop
the brilliant idea altogether. The feasibility phase is thus the point at which a cost/benefit analysis
show how likely it is that the proposed system will be popular with target users and cost effective to
use. The cost/benefit analysis should not only stipulate the relative cost, merits and disadvantages of
developing the handheld tools in different learning scenarios; it should state how each tool would
affect usage and usability in the short as well as in the long term.

The usability-centred approach, thus, allows to carefully analyse what each project is proposing to
give to the target user groups. Empirical measurement may be done at this stage, but because there
is no commitment to go ahead with the system as yet, the tendency is to rely on more informal
investigative tools.

The piloting of the application of such systems will be done in repeated cycles of user-centered
trials. Each cycle includes the design, the development, the trials and the evaluation, which is the
input for the next cycle in the user-centered product’s development approach. The user-centered
development is a process of development that starts with users and their needs rather than with
technology [7]. It starts with a multidisciplinary team that includes representatives from pedagogy,
psychology, sociology, technology, and user experience. Norman's human-centred product’s
development starts with what he calls rapid ethnography, meaning "Studying the users for whom
the device is intended, in the field where they normally work, study, and play. Then, using rapid
prototyping procedures, design, mockup, and test to find out how people respond to the product
idea. Repeat this process until settle upon an acceptable result (this whole cycle is actually quite
fast). Then write the manual - make it short and simple - as simple as possible. Use the manual and
the prototypes as the design specs for the engineers. The whole process can be done more quickly
than some of the methods in use today" [7]. Enabling students and teachers to become active
participants in technological development offers great advantages. It brings researchers, students
and teachers closer together at “grass roots” level. In the proposed approach that all become co-
creators of technology, so that technology becomes created with people rather than for them. The in-
situ trials are not only meant for evaluation purposes but involve both students and teachers offering
them the chance to provide feedback to the project and its technical and pedagogical aspects.

d. Applications

In the framework of this position paper we are presenting two possible applications of the emerging
technologies that could contribute significantly to the qualitative upgrade of everyday teaching and
learning.

DISTRIBUTED CREATIVE ENVIRONMENTS: Current efforts are focused on distributed LEARNING

Environments. However, formal learning does not exhaust the goals of modern educational systems
in Europe that want among other things to enhance creativity through music, arts, theatre,
entrepreneurial activities etc. The importance of distributed creative environments though (that
typically remain under-stressed in framework projects) can be seen by cursory evidence that among
elementary and high school students who were communicating with e.g. a videoconferencing system
a lot of joyful, highly interactive and communicative activities were undertaken through the most
primal form of a distributed creative environment -the net-meeting drawing tool- where students were
drawing on a common canvas.

The proposed action would call for ideas for distributed creative environments (distributed radio
stations between schools, distributed orchestras, distributed movie creation, distributed art creation,
distributed shows)

Technology and creativity should work together to overcome borders, allow European Schools and
Universities to develop an understanding for each other and their common cultural backgrounds.

UBIQUITOUS SCHOOLS: Schools are currently restricted to the few square meters of space of a
classroom. However modern technology allows for an expansion of the concept of a school to
something more wide and natural e.g. a museum, a factory, a business venture etc. There is ample
evidence that learning is much more effective when learning stimuli are present and this is typically
on site. E.g. when someone wants to learn about ancient architecture, or modern art few would
disagree that the most natural way to do it is to visit a museum. However, formal education requires
some standards and a certain curriculum, that do not necessarily coincide with a structure of e.g. a
museum or a factory that are structured around the needs of other groups (the general public, the
workers respectively.)
The proposed action UBIQUITOUS SCHOOLS would call for proposals to make the content of a
museum, a factory etc. accessible in a way unified with the school curriculum to students and
teachers. The proposed action would envisage mobile technologies, and in general networks meant
to expand the current notion of learning spaces, being able to adapt to the needs of students etc.

References:
[1] J. Schnitz, J.E. Young, Models of Virtual Schooling, Global Education, IBM 1999.
[2] C.N. Quinn, Engaging Learning, ITFORUM paper,
itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper18/paper18.html
[3] M.R. Lepper and D.I. Cordova, A desire to be taught: Instructional Consequences of Intrinsic
Motivation, Motivation and Emotion, 16(3), 187-208, 1992
[4] “Learning’s WWW. Web based Learning, Wap Based Learning and Web Mining”, Proceedings
of CAPS ‘3, Ed. Khaldoun Zreik, ISBN 2-909-285-18-9.
[5] J. Fleischman, Going Mobile: New Technologies in Education, Converge Magazine, May 2001,
www.convergemag.com.
[6] G. Lindgaard, Usability testing and System Evaluation, Chapman and Hall, London, 1994
[7] D. A. Norman, The Invisible Computer, MIT Press, 1999, ISBN 0-262-14065-9.