Cornell University
Nomadic Computing in Education

Proposal to Intel Corporation

Evaluating Student Collaboration and Team-based Development in a Nomadic Computing Environment

Cornell University
June 30, 1999

Principal Investigators

William Y. Arms, Professor, Department of Computer Science
4107B Upson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853 (wya@cs.cornell.edu)

Geraldine K. Gay, Professor, Department of Communication
311 Kennedy Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853 (gkg1@cornell.edu)

Abstract

New technologies for nomadic computing, such as inexpensive powerful laptops and fast wireless networks, have the potential to greatly enrich collaboration while simultaneously decoupling location and function, allowing the classroom to be the library or the dorm room to be the lecture hall. These technologies will bring about fundamental changes in the ways that the university creates and disseminates ideas, knowledge, and understanding.

We propose to create a course-based testbed to explore the possibilities and impact of nomadic technologies on the process of instruction and learning. At the same time, by basing the testbed on upper-level courses in digital libraries, computer-mediated communication, and software engineering, we will involve the students themselves in addressing and solving the problems of nomadic collaboration, library access, and collaborative software development.

We plan to both evaluate the direct impact of these new technologies, and to create a very rapid feedback cycle for incorporating changes and improvements into the courses. To this end, the Human-Computer Interaction Group will work directly with the students and instructors in these courses to examine the pedagogical, technical, and evaluative issues surrounding the use of mobile computers for wireless classroom and library access and collaboration. Their reports will include: direct evaluation of the impact of nomadic computing on instruction and learning; the effect of changes in the use of nomadic and collaborative tools on the learning environment; and improved evaluation tools for use in future experiments on nomadic computing.

Current Activities

Computer Science Department

The Cornell CS Department has a major research effort in the area of "anything-anytime-anywhere" computing. This effort involves faculty in multimedia, operating systems, programming languages, and databases. It is funded in part by a five-year NSF Research Infrastructure grant, of which we are just finishing the second year.

Cornell University also has a strong and rapidly growing program in digital libraries and electronic publishing. The university's approach to digital libraries emphasizes tight integration between research and practice. The activities are interdisciplinary with excellent partnerships between academic departments and the university libraries. The Cornell Digital Libraries Research Group (CDLRG), led by Carl Lagoze, has developed and maintains NCSTRL, the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (http://www.ncstrl.org). This is simultaneously a heavily used operational library and a testbed for advanced architectures for digital libraries, distributed information retrieval, and metadata. The group has recently received three important grants from the NSF, including two for international projects.

Human-Computer Interaction Group (HCI-Group)

The HCI-Group, led by Prof. Geraldine Gay, is an interdisciplinary research team investigating social, communication and design issues surrounding the use of computers at school, work and play. Some current, related HCI-Group projects include:

1. CreationStation: Development with Cornell Libraries of a library multimedia-resource organizing and development tool.
2. Cornell/Dalton Partnership: Work with the Dalton School in New York City on the integration of library resources in the curriculum using portable devices. The project also involves an ethnographic study of the use of technology in the curriculum.
3. Monograph-New Directions for Evaluation: An edited volume for the American Evaluation Association (published by Jossey Bass) titled "Using Multimedia Tools in Evaluation: Methods for Collecting, Annotating and Organizing Data."
4. MobileMann: A prototype mobile resource for library patrons with various functions. A key interest is the ability to integrate the CreationStation with Cornell's new customized library functions.

Collaborative Activities

The Computer Science Department and the HCI-Group already share significant ties. The CoNote system of collaborative annotation was developed in the CS department to facilitate faculty, student, and teaching assistant collaboration. Using CoNote as a testbed, the HCI-Group examined the notion of contextualized collaboration-the ability to communicate about an artifact being embedded in the artifact itself and the ability to exchange ideas with others.

The CS digital libraries group, together with the University Libraries and the HCI-Group, are also beginning collaboration on a major research project in Digital Libraries. Funded through the NSF/DARPA/NASA/LOC DLI-II program, Cornell's PRISM project will investigate the issues of integrity for digital libraries, including Preservation, Reliability, Interoperability, Security, and Metadata. As part of this project, the HCI-Group will develop data collection and analysis tools and techniques capable of examining human-computer and computer-computer interactions and assessing the ability of the technology to satisfy the requirements of the digital library's users: authors, publishers, librarians, and patrons.

Project Description

Students are busy people. With few exceptions, they use the resources that are most accessible and do not use tools that are inconvenient. This project sets out to demonstrate that, by eliminating barriers to use, mobile computing can have a significant impact on the use that students make of digital libraries and collaboration tools, and hence on the quality of their education.

The project will designate a number of courses as information intensive. Students and instructors within these courses will be provided with a rich set of information services and laptop computers equipped for mobile networking. The HCI-Group will study the impact of these innovations and use the results to modify the courses for the future.

Our objectives include:

1. Exploring the integration of library resources with mobile learning environments;
2. Exploring the use of mobile computers to document and record learning activities;
3. Examining the use of mobile computing systems for distributed learning activities; and
4. Examining the use of these systems for collecting and annotating documents and composing papers and multimedia.

Access to digital libraries

Locality has always been one of the weaknesses of libraries. Studies consistently show that people use the information that is most accessible, not the information that is of most relevance. Although digital libraries are based around networks, their utility has been greatly enhanced by the development of portable, laptop computers. By attaching a laptop computer to a network connection, learners can combine the digital library resources of the Internet with the personal work that is stored on the laptop. However, even at a well-equipped university such as Cornell, not every student has a laptop and network connections are not universal. When the user disconnects from the network, only those materials that have been explicitly copied to the laptop are retained for personal use.

We are interested in the educational, intellectual, and social impact of truly ubiquitous access to information. At Cornell an enormous amount of material is accessible online. This includes course materials, academic materials licensed by the libraries, and the open access web. What will it mean for students and instructors always to have access to these materials, even in class and in examinations?

Collaborative work

The distinction between digital libraries and collaborative work is steadily diminishing. A student who is always connected to the network is not just passively receiving information. The student's system can be used for software development, symbolic manipulations, and content creation. The student can be part of an analysis team, an evaluation experiment, or a project development team. Working with colleagues is a productive part of education, but teamwork involves a commitment of time and effort.

We will study how the provision of improved computing, notably laptops with wireless networking, increases collaboration. We will also see if there are limits on acceptable collaboration. Should students exchange messages during class? Is it reasonable for a student in an examination to have communication tools such as email?

Information intensive courses

We will use the equipment provided by this grant to study a number of courses where the barriers encountered by instructors and students will be reduced to the absolute minimum. The first two of these information intensive courses will be in Spring 2000. In one, William Arms will be teaching an experimental course, tentatively entitled "Advanced Topics in Digital Libraries." A focus of this course will be on the representation of information in digital libraries and electronic publications that go far beyond simply converting conventional libraries to digital formats. In the second, Geraldine Gay will be teaching a course in Computer-Mediated Communications, an issue central to this proposal. Every student and instructor in both courses will be provided with nomadic computers, laptops with wireless network connections.

These first information intensive courses will be constructed to encourage students to use information in novel ways. A very broad range of relevant materials will be available to them. However, the use made of these resources will be left to each student. These students are knowledgeable about and interested in online information. Some will decide to use the opportunities in unexpected ways; others will use them lightly or not at all. We will learn more from studying how each student makes use of the facilities provided than from constraining them to follow a required path.

Research

Over the course of two years and six semester-long courses, our research project will consider ways to:

• Assist students in searching, managing and using information more effectively by providing a mobile venue for information access.
• Investigate the ways, if any, that mobile computing hardware and applications can enhance the classroom and library experience, encourage cooperative learning, and improve communication among remote and on-site researchers.
• Explore the value of specific functionality of mobile computing systems and the changes required in curricula and teaching practices in a formal teaching context.
• Research and apply project-appropriate methods for evaluating mobile systems for learning.
• Identify the features of the technology that encourage or discourage effective use of mobile computing.

This project will draw from research into situated learning, digital libraries and computer-supported cooperative learning. Many people in the library, school technology, and higher education communities have considered ways to enhance access through portable devices. Others, such as Bob Tinker, have focused more directly on the learning aspects of mobility and ubiquity. Our research portends that the introduction of mobile computers into the field experience can potentially transform the activities of learning and researching in and from the field.

This investigation will be informed by the emerging concerns of activity theory, an approach to the design and evaluation of technology that attempts to redress the shortcomings of cognitivist, or information-processing, approaches to human-computer interaction (Kuutti, 1996). As outlined by Nardi (1996), Kuutti (1996), and Kaptelinin (1996), activity theory focuses attention on action, doing and practice, but within the "activity" as the unit and context of analysis. Activity theory is exerting an increasing influence over studies of learning and human-computer interaction and serves as a useful "mediating device" that enables understanding of the potential role of mobile computers in learning activities.

As students work on projects supported by multimedia resources at the point of learning, they can bring different perspectives to bear on problems (though whether they in fact do is a matter for investigation). Likewise, multimedia enables the expression and representation of knowledge in different forms (e.g., graphics, film clips, video, spoken and written text). Hence it can augment the acquisition of tacit knowledge that is part and parcel of socialization into a community of practice (i.e., a profession), and provide students with an opportunity to learn in diverse contexts. The introduction of nomadic computing and computing resources at the point of learning seems to be particularly appropriate for developing and maintaining, and simultaneously transforming, communities of practice.

Below, we list some sample research questions:

• What impact do mobile networking tools have on the development of learners' intellectual and group collaboration skills, such as improvements in the following: (1) overall comprehension of course material; (2) communication and contribution to each other's learning; (3) team participation and coordination; (4) comfort with networked communication and collaboration technologies; and (5) reducing disparities in learners' enthusiasm and support of networked technologies?
• What changes to classroom curricula, if any, will this new instructional delivery system or mediating device require?
• In what ways, if any, will learners shape the manner in which mobile and collaboration technologies are designed and used to meet their unique group needs and interests?
• In what ways do students' predisposition toward, and past experiences with, mobile and collaboration environments shape their attitudes and usage? How do students at various levels of experience use the resources? Are students able to build on skills in this environment?
• What hardware and software functions and design features are most successful in aiding group communication and information exchange? How have learners' and administrators' perceptions of the various iterations of knowledge networking technologies changed over the course of the project?
• Which methods are most appropriate for evaluating mobile computing instructional delivery systems?

[Administrative and financial information omitted.]

Project Timeline

Evaluation and Reporting

Our project involves the study of a complex, technologically-rich knowledge networking environment, one that demands an equally rich data collection and analytic tools for an accurate and meaningful evaluation. Hence, measurement and evaluation will employ a mixed-method approach, generating both quantitative and qualitative data from different sources and artifacts. Focus will be on both system performance and users' experiences with the hardware, tools and the mobile and collaborative learning environments.

In a continuous and integrated fashion, we will conduct student assessments (through on-line surveys and focus groups), unobtrusive electronic tracking and monitoring, as well as technical evaluations. The research population will include students and faculty members in the participating courses, as well as the staff members coordinating the project. A section of the project web site will be devoted to evaluation and sharing of on-going findings among the project team; this will facilitate project coordination, planning, data collection and reporting of results. Class assignments will be the unit of analysis. This allows for over-time tracking of document-based interactions and a basis for comparison and other analyses across different courses. Below is a summary of the data collection plan.

A comprehensive project archive will be maintained. The following reflect sample documentation:

• Server data
• Classroom observations
• Web site databases
• Correspondence
• Chat interaction logs
• Videotapes of meetings, focus groups
• E-mail correspondence
• Publicity, including clippings, Internet, etc.

[Administrative information and biographies omitted.]

This work is supported in part by generous gifts from Intel Corporation.