Motivation: Educational Value Proposition

• Access to Quality Content• Transformations in Form

– Traditional Virtual

• Transformations in Function– Knowing Affecting and Changing

• A pedagogy of abundance– Connected; Continuous; Community

• Impediments and Sustainability

Pervasive Computing to

Abundant Educational OpportunityVijay Kumar

vkumar@mit.eduMIT

CSG, Harvard, 9-22-04

Worldwide Collaboration through Online Laboratories

“If you can’t come to the lab… the lab will come to you!”

iLab: worldwide collaborationNUS (Singapore, 13 time zones)

Since Fall 2000(20-30 students/yr)

iLabs at MIT

Shake table (Civil Eng., to be deployed early 2004)

Flagpole (Civil Eng., deployed 2000, inactive)

Polymer crystallization (Chem. E., deployed 2003)

Microelectronics device characterization (EECS, deployed 1998) Heat exchanger (Chem. E., deployed 2001)STEF

Value of iLabs

• Pedagogy (Opportunity & Flexibility).

– iLabs create laboratory experiences in subjects that didn’t have them before.

– iLabs enable laboratory experiments at most opportune moment in curriculum.

– iLabs allow students to perform experiments in pleasant environments at times of their choice

– iLabs allow students to work in a “stop-and-go” mode

iLab: impact on MIT studentsMIT graduate and undergraduate coursessince Fall 1998

iLabs Value• Labs can be located in places inaccessible to students

• iLabs hold unique scaling characteristics: - round the clock usage; from anywhere in the world

- iLabs can be broadly shared: fundamental change in economics of the lab experience

– Order-of-magnitude more laboratory experiences available to students

– Can afford sophisticated labs involving:

advanced instrumentation; rare materials; unreachable locations

• iLabs embedded inside rich educational platforms containing visualization tools, simulations, data processing remote collaboration and tutoring

• iLabs will spawn communities of learners to share hardware and educational content

Local ServiceBroker

Lab Servers Clients

Campus network

Internet

Campus network

Local databases

iLab Shared Architecture

Field expedition to measure water quality in Australia

Project based Collaborative engineering design

•Curriculum for design fundamentals

• Simulation tools

• On-line collaboration environments

• Peer-review assessment tools.

Robot World

Robot WorldVision - project based learning for teaching engineering

design leveraging Tablet PCs

• Tools– PREP - Peer Review Evaluation Process tool– Engineering Design Spread Sheets and MatLab simulations for detailed

robot design• Content

– Engineering Design Spread Sheets and MatLab Simualtions for detailed robot design. (See OCW or http://pergatory.mit.edu/2.007 )

– Slocum Book FUNdaMENTALs of Design Chapters 1-7 (See OCW) – Virtual Take Apart Documentation – 2.000 How Things Work lecture set

Principal Investigators: Alex Slocum, Principal Investigators: Alex Slocum, Marty Culpepper, John WilliamsMarty Culpepper, John Williams

Gerald Schneider

Rutledge Ellis-Behnke

Jordan Gilliland

Next Step:Say goodbye to backpacks !

First Ph.D. Thesis defense using Tablet with live connection from MIT to Hong Kong

University 10-02

MIT 8:00pm

Hong Kong 8:00 am

Active sketching with Magic Paper

One-to-One Vision• Transform Athena into a:

– Collection of services to support student-owned computing and selected cross-department shared computing resources

• special-purpose computing facilities, shared file spaces, collaboration tools, and Application management

One-to-One Computing Status• Laptop Educational Projects (4)

• Laptop loaner program• Experiments in tablet PCs, and

handhelds• Leveraging commodity

computing and individual ownership– Providing services and software

for machines not owned by MIT– Managing licenses and

distribution of DLC owned software

– Managed Windows,– Open AFS client for Linux

IS Customer Survey Spring 2003

Continuation of trend toward student laptop ownership

• Limited penetration of laptops in curriculum

• Standard suite of software needed – Especially for Windows

• Transition of traditional public Athena clusters

• Wireless coverage of residence halls – Lack of Institute service provision

One-to-One Computing Issues

Electricity & Magnetismwith Studio Physics

Studio format Visualization/simulation Desktop lab experiments Student teams

Educational Value Proposition

• Proximities– First Hand; Learner-Teacher; Research-

Teaching

• Choice– time, location, modality

• Active Learning– Experience; Project based; Collaborative

Educational Value Proposition

• Quality Content• Transformations in Form

– Traditional Virtual

• Transformations in Function– Knowing Affecting and Changing

• A pedagogy of abundance– Connected; Continuous; Community

• Sustainable ecology

Pervasive Impediments• Network bandwidth is not uniform throughout.

• No cohesive computing, life, and learning strategy

• Technical and Business models for delivering software and services to a heterogeneous (dis)connected environment not yet there.

• No deliberate curriculum strategy to leverage pervasive computing.

• Logistical impediments: weight, form factor, security

Many Repositories…

IDC

I

BM

Remote

ECL, Fedora, MERLOT…

IDC

Institutional

OCW, DSpace

Local

iMac

Many Protocols, Data Specs & Standards…

IDC

I

BM

IDC

SOAPSRW

HTML

Z39.50

DRI

Remote

Institutional

MarcDC

LOM

SCORM

METS

IMS CP

Local

iMac

File System

Service Abstraction for Interoperability

App. 1

Imp. A – Protocol Connector (plus Local Business

Logic)

Imp. B – Protocol Connector

OSID

Imp. C - Local Connector

Local Service C

ImplementationsApplications

App. 2

Application Client Servers

Protocol A

Protocol B

Network Service A1

Network Service B

Network Service A2

Data

Data

Data

Data

Federating Repositories with OSIDs

VUE

Fedora

DR OSID

Clouseau

Application Client Network Repositories

Other

OCW

ECL

iTunes

Local XML

iPhoto

Tools Plugins

Edusource Gateway

LOBSTER

Celebrate Celebrate Broker

Local Repositories

Endgame 1“What is the problem to which headlamp washer-wipers are the

solution?”Neil Postman. Educom Conference 1992

• Enable the movement and manipulation of educational materials - Simply, Meaningfully– Portability– Interoperability– Reusability

• An ecology characterized by Open, Community or proprietary Source Commodities that provide :– Value (heterogeneous)– Choice (of Technology and Tools)– Sustainability

Information and Getting Involved with iCampus: http://icampus.mit.edu/outreach