Research Strategies: The primary technological goal of ADIE is to identify and eliminate barriers to commercialization in products and technologies emerging from basic research organizations. It does not itself perform basic research; this is what it gets from its research partners. ADIE will be able to tune its products and demonstrations to the needs of its customers and the sources of its funding. For the purpose of this proposal, we have defined an educational group as our immediate customers, and will then show how applying what is currently research technology to the needs of a prototype educational environment can produce commercializable products that are appropriate to many other business sectors.
Scenario Background: We have, as a testbed, a scenario depicting a student project as it might be accomplished in a digital educational environment. This scenario assumes that the student, her teachers, her informants and her primary sources are all online, and electronically accessible. It also assumes that she has at her disposal electronic tools that allow her to compile and synthesize the material with which she comes in contact. This environment and the tools in it are the the testbed that ADIE will work on, so it can implement, develop and demonstrate the research at its disposal to the educational and other markets.
In order for such a digital educational environment to become a reality a number of research problems have to be addressed, and, selectively, solved. Most are in the realm of applied research in computing and technology, working in areas that are beginning to be understood, but not yet implemented for daily use. Examples of such domains include networking, data structures, computer supported collaborative work, security, information visualization, and user interfaces. Others, such as student/teacher interaction, collaboration among peers, etc belong to educational or social/media research. ADIE will be working primarily on technological research, but it is impossible to develop that without taking into account the educational, social and market factors with which it will interact. ADIE has to draw on human factors researchers, educators, and business people. It also needs to experiment using a real user population as it applies its research technologies.
Task oriented research topics: The audience whom ADIE is addressing is businesses who want to implement and commercialize research technologies, and produce marketable products from them. To this end, the research areas that are outlined here have been organized by task, and not by technical category of research. Functioning products usually depend on more than one enabling technology, and one of the most important roles ADIE can play is to show how technologies from different research domains can be put together to solve a problem. This discussion also is not an exhaustive analysis of every research topic and implementation that arises out of the areas that are listed. Sample areas are chosen to be discussed in more depth.
Our five task-oriented research topics are infrastructure, information gathering, information analysis and filtering, information synthesis and authoring, presentation of results, and assessment. Notice that specific questions to be answered are often phrased in terms of the scenario outlined above. This helps ensure that ADIE's research is targetted at producing usable products. While the scenario is an educational situation, we feel that the research topics are broad enough to address scenarios in a variety of domains. We will discuss some examples of additional scenarios at the end of this section.
There are global issues that have to be solved in order for an advanced digital information environment to work at all. They will affect all users of a system; however, they are not areas where users themselves can intervene. Technical infrastructure research problems include:
Versioning. Keeping track of versions of documents as they develop, as well as the different incarnations of a document in any one phase of its development.
All of these issues have to be taken in to account. However, ADIE is will only be able to focus on a few, which will be determined by its clientele, and research partners. However, ADIE must, inasmuch as possible, remain abreast of research being done in the other areas.
Data standards are a very important part of any information environment, but are crucial when information has to remain useable 12 or more years, as it must in an educational evaluation instrument like a digital portfolio. Data will be gathered from many different sources, as well as created by the student. Furthermore, it will be displayed and organized for different purposes and output devices. However, if there is not an underlying data standard for archival purposes, and for interchange, the whole portfolio will be a static, compartmentalized system, if, as is more likely, it doesn't become unusable over time.
To this end, one ADIE project might be to remain abreast of (even participate in) current and emerging data standards. It should be able to evaluate and recommend which ones to use, from the point of view of ease of use, and availability of current and future software, and longevity. As ADIE will also be aware of user and customer needs, it can even be in a position to help formulate standards that will provide for them.
Potential customers: NERLAB and the districts it serves, others?
Being able to keep track of multiple versions of work over time is an important topic of current research. ADIE has to be able to look at the different models that are being developed or recommended, suggest what is appropriate for each stage of the educational/evaluation process, and investigate different ways of providing them. In the educational scenario, a student could, taking advantage of version control, keep track of the development of a project over several years. A teacher could, in the shorter term, better evaluate how the student is going about their work.
Finally, a basic understanding of version control and security, and an underlying stratum that includes these is necessary for sophisticated collaborative work systems. Such collaborative environments will be discussed in more detail later.
Potential customers: NERLAB and the districts it serves, others?
Students will gather information from many sources, in many different formats. They will have to store and retrieve it, as well as incorporate it into their own work. Some of the problems that are involved in supporting this task are:
Some information will be collected from informants
Legal and technical issues will both play a role in deciding if information that is found in external libraries and databases should be copied into the student portfolio or if only some sort of bookmark out to be the only information retained. One reason in favor of copying information is archival (will that material remain available, will its address change?), another is convenience (can the student perform her work when she is not connected to the network). Mechanisms for both types of retention need to be tested. A set of fields or attributes that would apply to both types might be developed so that a relevant base set of information could be stored in either case. A note taking tool is another useful pat of an information retrieval system.
ADIE might implement demonstration versions of such an information gathering tool, showing how it can be integrated into a larger information handling environment, and how it would attempt to conform to data standards. A great deal of research on these topics is going on now in the Digital Libraries community, and in the past in the library community. ADIE has to remain in touch with current practices, and can disseminate this information to its industrial partners.
Educatational institutions and districts will also be amassing their own collections of digital data. This data will need to be stored and cataloged in standard formats, so that it will be easy to share and excerpt. ADIE might address not only the data standardization issues from the point of view of facilitating retrieval, but also the cataloging and descriptive needs that will make it possible to tell if the information is potentially valuable.
Together with educators and librarians, ADIE researchers can test effective retrieval strategies, and implement tools that support them. They can expand this type of work to try and include effective evaluation strategies for deciding if information is useful or not.
In addition to searching and capturing information from already existing databases, students can also be gathering information that does not already exist, in electronic form or otherwise. Examples of such information are interviews, photographs or videos taken by the student, even text that is scanned into the computer. Such information may only exist in a personal, perhaps temporary information store. It may not need to be as extensively cataloged as information that is being placed into public databases. However, it will have to be described enough so it can be effectively retrieved, and formatted in such a way that it can be manipulated and incorporated into a final paper or presentation.
This kind of information gathering, and database creation has particular applications in the commercial world, because it facilitates the ad hoc collection of diverse information, for example all the data an engineer might need in order to study why a structure was damaged, or that a lawyer might need as evidence in a court case.
ADIE can demonstrate ways of collecting and storing such information with the least possible effort involved, but in such a way that the parts of it that will be needed for analysis or presentation can be retrieved and converted into more standard and manipulable formats.
After students have gathered information from various sources, they will have to work with it, analyze it, decide what to keep and what is irrelevant, and perhaps go out and gather more. The tools necessary for supporting this phase of the research/learning process are:
Annotation tools
Students will have gathered a variety of information for a project, including text, audio, video, and numerical data. Different information sources may have provided the same kind of data in different formats: one source may use normal audio CDs to store audio, while another might use MPEG2 audio compression for Internet-based files. Students will be faced with the daunting task of analysing and filtering information from a daunting array of formats, analogous to someone trying to translate a book written in fifteen different languages.
Hence, it is clear that information analysis tools will need to support a variety of formats in a manner. As the student usually cares about the content, not the format, the user interface should be able to hide the complexities of various formats. Further, this kind of multiformat support will need to support plugging in new modules to handle new formats as students find new sources of information (which may themselves be using new formats).
Information visualization tools will help determine what data is relevant and what data can be filtered out of a report. New information visualization techniques will need to be developed to support the different kinds of information that students will encounter, as existing information visualization techniques are limited to a few kinds of information in a few domains.
Many of the tools a student will use will make use of concepts the student may not have learned. For example, most grade school students have not had a course in statistics, yet statistical tools can be very useful for drawing conclusions about large amounts of data. Most computer applications, however, are designed with a great deal of assumed knowledge in mind - statistical programs assume you know something about statistics. Research will need to be done in user interfaces and help systems in order to provide applications that can be used by a broader audience without crippling their power.
The tools that were described in the previous section are the same ones that are used when synthesizing information and drawing conclusions from it, and preparing to present these conclusions to others.The tools are used, however, to a different purpose. Instead of being used to winnow information out, they are being used to organize, and annotate it. Students must also be able to indicate the origins of their materials using digital references,
This is also a phase of student work that will involve dialog with the instructor, and possibly also with a collaborative group. So it will be necessary to have group annotation facilities, and Also include conferencing with teachers, as they see the different stages of development and advise.
Tools for authoring and synthesizing can be as basic as an outliner and word processor. The concept of the outliner can be developed into a broader organizational tool that allows students not only to organize their work linearly, but at the same time to keep track of their work flow, prioritize their tasks and work with information in a more intuitive way. ADIE might work with students, computer graphics researchers and human factors researchers to try and put together such a workplace, using existing tools.
A related issue is that of appropriate interfaces; can a 6th grader and a 12 grader work with the same interface? How are appropriate features discovered? What are appropriate features? This question applies as well to interfaces for different types of work and worker. We already know that a worker on a plant floor had very different information needs from a computer system than someone who is designing a new hull.
Collaborative systems become very important at this phase of a student's work. Students will need to collaborate in peer groups, while teachers will need to be able to view, annotate and make suggestions on student work. ADIE might investigate how to provide different levels of security and openness in a collaborative environment. For different projects, different levels of security and openness will be desired. For example, some projects will be done by individual students, suggesting greater security to prevent plagiarism. Other projects might be class projects, where students would share work freely.
At this stage, versioning tools will become useful as well. Students and teachers both should be able to keep track of the progress of projects. As changes are made, the teacher may wish to guide the student by showing how some changes were better than others. In large multimedia projects, a complete history of all changes can be quite complex, suggesting that supporting versioning well will require good user interface support.
Student work culminates in a final version, which is presented to a peer group and to the instructor for review, comments and evaluation. The authored work, together with its supporting evidence, may be placed into a repository, (the digital portfolio), as a record of the student's progress. The tools necessary for this are again derived from the authoring system described earlier, but rather than providing the ability to manipulate the information, and plan out a project, they will allow the creation of an effective presentation that will link together data in many media, but also need to take sequence and timing in to account.
The work may also have to be presented, in a physical or a virtual conference with other students, the teacher, and even outside outside experts. This requires conferencing systems like those that might be used for collaboration, but with the emphasis on presentation. The collaborative requirements may also be different, as the student presentation is in its finished form, and critique may take the form of annotation rather than transformation.
Finally, as the finished version will probably be the archived version in the student's portfolio, it will be necessary to ensure that it is stored in a form that will remain accessible in the future, as well as any supporting material that is stored with it. This brings back the issue of data standards, or of storing frozen "movie" versions of the presentation.
Presentation tools differ from authoring tools in that they are supposed to help others understand the student's argument or point of view. They may resemble a traditional hypertext system, with links and nodes, which a reader may follow, or they may resemble a traditional slide presentation, with narration and examples. The ideal is to combine features of the two, so that someone reading or hearing the presentation can move along a predetermined path, but at any point, diverge in order to clarify a point, or check evidence. ADIE would develop, together with teachers and other presenters tools that facilitate this kind of presentation.
A conferencing system may have been in use throughout a project, but most of its features would be called into play when a student or group of students present their work. ADIE might evaluate and enhance existing video conferencing and digital whiteboard activities using a ubiquitous technology like the WWW. It would have to be able to support live participation and intervention on data that is viewed in common. In addition, it is important to be able to record both what is viewed, and what is said or written. Most presentation-quality systems today are either prohibitively expensive for regular use or are lacking in these regards.
ADIE might, in the light of the standardization reviews and recommendations that it has made with respect to the infrastructure of the digital environment, also specify formats for storing "finished" presentations for future viewing. It will be important to try and store not only the richest, most versatile data formats, but also a less powerful version, even as simple as a hypertext slide show, for the student's record.
Assessment is an activity that occurs at several stages of a student's work. The teacher will be providing formative evaluation as students work on their projects, from initial suggestions on data gathering to help with develop conclusions and how to present them. At the end, the teacher and other experts will be providing a final, summative evaluation, which can be stored with the student's work in a portfolio or other archive.
Assessment relies primarily on being able to look over the student's shoulder, and collaborate with them, and on annotation. Teachers have to be able to "scribble in the margins" of the student work, although they may not be permitted to change it. Teacher's comments may also have to be kept private from others who might view the work.
Many of the research topics for assessment include some of the same topics as earlier areas. For example, versioning will be important, as a teacher progressively evaluates a project. Developing appropriate interfaces will also be important, both in the sense of being appropriate for the teachers and in producing content (i.e., the assessment) that is appropriate for the students.
An example of the versatility of the tools and research areas described above is that several of the tools described as being used by students can easily be used by teachers in order to create curricular materials. Teachers have to gather information, synthesize it, enhance and organize it, and then present it to their students in various ways.
This process of gathering, synthesizing, organizing, and presenting is a task that many professionals have to perform every day, whether they are writing reports in business trends or coming up with new biochemical products that have to be researched and tested. They have to build up their information repositories, search for new information, and then work with that information in order to understand and transmit it. Assessment is in fact a key part of this process: an employee's supervisor must not only judge the employee's work (providing suitable feedback), but must also make business decisions based on the conclusions.
We have outlined five task-centered research areas. Each of these areas includes a variety of specific research questions, questions whose answers will help make new, commercially viable technology available. ADIE is well-positioned to answer these research questions in a timely fashion, providing a steady stream of commercially useful results.