Sage2: Classroom Edition

About me:

Project overview

Interactive teaching methods are growing in popularity in college-level courses. Examples of these kinds of teaching methods include flipped classrooms, where students watch pre-recorded lectures before class and then engage in group projects or do exercises during class, where teachers and present to provide assistance with difficult material. In other instances, teachers may punctuate lectures with short micro-assessments, such as asking students to answer multiple choice questions, or may ask students to break into groups for a few minutes to answer a posed question related to the previous lecture materials. These methods are popular because professors are able to provide students with feedback before assignments are collected, as well as make lectures more engaging and potentially improve learning outcomes [1,2].

Concurrent with these trends in teaching are the development of technical tools to help professors use interactive teaching methods. ‘Clickers’, where students purchase small multiple choice answer supplying devices that sync to a professor’s laptop, allow teachers to aggregate anonymous student responses.

In classes with a strong visual component, such as art and design, visualization, graphics, user interface design and human-computer interaction, responses to teacher prompts are more complex than a multiple choice response. For instance, teachers may ask student groups to sketch interface prototypes, note usability problems of a website, storyboard interaction with a new data visualization, arrange sticky-notes to brainstorm user requirements or manipulate blocks or other tangibles to understand visual encodings of data. In these instances, students produce digital and physical artifacts as responses to the prompt, responses that cannot be captured by a clicker or a show of hands.

These scenarios have two fundamental challenges. First, there is a sharing bottleneck, where student responses cannot be shared all at once and surveyed by a professor using conventional means. Instead, professors may select one or two students or groups to present their responses. As a result more reticent students may be less willing to participate, missing a valuable opportunity to get teacher feedback. Students may not be sufficiently motivated during interactive sessions, if they know their work will not be shown. Finally, the teacher misses the opportunity to provide more comprehensive feedback, or assess the performance of the entire class on the task. The second challenge could be called condensing visual to verbal communication. When there is no effective way to gather all visual artifacts produced by student break-out groups, professors may ask students to quickly sum up what they did verbally. However, in communicating visual information through speech, valuable information is likely left out.

There are a variety of tools which target co-located, multi-user collaborative scenarios, such sage2, which is a tiled display wall middleware designed to integrate diverse personal devices and inputs, allowing multiple users to display and interact with content on a shared interface. While sage2 has many features for aggregating content from many users, on a large surface for displaying high volumes of visual information, I believe that the interface for sage2 may be insufficiently targeted to scenarios in interactive teaching, resulting in lower use of powerful features for teaching.

Literature:

• An initial survey of related literature yields several prominent areas of research which might frame this work. First, there is research in collaboration and work sharing, which is the focus of sage2 [3]. Second, there is research in pedagogy focusing on how to develop interactive teaching methods for visualization or human centered computing courses [4-8].

Subpages

Conceptualization

User requirements

Design challenges

Formative Evaluation

Final implementation

Summative Evaluation

1. Sessoms, Diallo. "Interactive instruction: Creating interactive learning environments through tomorrow’s teachers." International Journal of Technology in Teaching and Learning 4.2 (2008): 86-96.

2. Gorder, Lynette Molstad. "A study of teacher perceptions of instructional technology integration in the classroom." The Journal of Research in Business Education 50.2 (2008): 63.

3. T. Marrinan, J. Aurisano, A. Nishimoto, K. Bharadwaj, V. Mateevitsi, L. Renambot, L. Long, A. Johnson, and J. Leigh, "SAGE2: A New Approach for Data Intensive Collaboration Using Scalable Resolution Shared Displays," submitted to the 10th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. 2014.

4. Rheingans, Penny. “Minor Adventures in Flipped Classrooms, Team-based Learning, and other Pedagogical Buzzwords” presented at Pedagogy of Data Visualization at IEEE Vis Week in Baltimore, 2016.

5. Huron, Samuel and Wesley Willett. “A Constructive Classroom Exercise for Teaching InfoVis” presented at Pedagogy of Data Visualization at IEEE Vis Week in Baltimore, 2016.

6. Huron, Samuel, Sheelagh Carpendale, Jeremy Boy, and Jean Daniel Fekete. “Using VisKit: A Manual for Running a Constructive Visualization Workshop” presented at Pedagogy of Data Visualization at IEEE Vis Week in Baltimore, 2016.

7. Marti A. Hearst “Active Learning Assignments for Student Acquisition of Design Principles” presented at Pedagogy of Data Visualization at IEEE Vis Week in Baltimore, 2016.

8. Johnson, Andrew. “Teaching Data Visualization in evl's Cyber-Commons Classroom” presented at Pedagogy of Data Visualization at IEEE Vis Week in Baltimore, 2016.

9. Hutchinson, Hilary, et al. "Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 2003.