Coordinating Networked Learning Activities with a General-Purpose Interface

Abstract

Classrooms equipped with wirelessly networked tablets and handhelds can engage students in powerful collaborative learning activities that are otherwise impractical or impossible. However, the system must fulfill certain technological and pedagogical requirements such as tolerance for latecomers, supporting disconnected mode gracefully, robustness across dropped connections, promotion of both positive interdependence and individual accountability, and accommodation of differential rates of task completion. Two approaches to making a Tuple Space-based computer architecture for connectivity into an inviting environment for the generation and creation of novel coordinated activities were attempted. One approach made the technological “bones” of the system very clear but assumed user vision of the complex goals and settings of real education. The more satisfactory approach made clear how Tuple Spaces matches the complex goals and settings of real education, but backgrounded technical complexity. This approach provides users with a system, Group Scribbles, which may inspire a wide range of uses.