Ph.D. Program News

An award from HP is demonstrating the power of technology to improve classroom interaction between students and teachers, and moving the School of Communication and Information toward a dynamic approach to mobile computing.

Assistant Professor Jacek Gwizdka (pictured, right, with students) and Department Chair Claire McInerney are working with 20 HP tablet laptop notebooks provided by the technology company as part of an $86,000 grant. ITI students taking “Human-Computer Interaction” have used the tablet notebooks to follow along in class lectures, critique one another’s work, and design interactive and engaging class projects.

The award includes 20 tablet notebooks, about $20,000 in funding, and software needed to foster collaboration in the classroom.  Potentially hundreds of SC&I students will benefit from using the computers, and numerous SC&I faculty in the Department of Library and Information Science will receive training on how to incorporate the tablet computers into their classes. Future courses that are likely to benefit from the grant include “Information Technology and Learning,” “Retrieving and Evaluating Electronic Information,” “Hardware Basics,” and “Networking.”

The use of the notebooks in class has shed light on learning behaviors when mobile computers are introduced to the classroom.

“In the 1990s many of us in higher education thought that giving students a laptop would encourage quality learning. Then when students began to bring laptops to class, we found that their minds were often in cyberspace, checking email and surfing the web while class was in progress,” McInerney said. “The new tablet laptops offer substantive opportunities for engaging faculty and students in active learning.”

Use of the tablet notebooks in class has led to curriculum adaptations. Courses have been redesigned to allow deeper interaction surrounding annotation, model creation, and other information activities.

“On one side, this technology impacts how instructors deliver lectures. The tablet functionality allows you to draw on your slides and to have the annotated slides available immediately to students,” Gwizdka said. “You can also collect student responses in real-time and show them immediately to students.”

The tablets allow students and instructor to record the classroom interactions. “Whatever you draw on this and however you draw can be captured as a movie essentially,” Gwizdka said. “You can capture as you deliver the lecture to students, and they can replay the process of information retrieval.”