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 Opportunity
Vijay Kumar
vkumar@mit.edu
MIT
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 collaboration
NUS (Singapore, 13 time zones)
Since Fall 2000(20-30 students/yr)
iLabs at MIT
Flagpole (Civil Eng.,
deployed 2000, inactive)
Shake table (Civil Eng., to
be deployed early 2004)
Polymer crystallization
(Chem. E., deployed
2003)
Microelectronics device characterization
(EECS, deployed 1998)
STEF
Heat exchanger (Chem. E., deployed 2001)
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 students
MIT graduate and undergraduate courses
since 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
iLab Shared Architecture
Local Service
Broker
Campus
network
Internet
Lab Servers
Clients
Campus
network
Local databases
Field expedition to measure water quality in Australia
Robot World
Project based Collaborative
engineering design
•Curriculum for design
fundamentals
• Simulation tools
• On-line collaboration
environments
• Peer-review assessment tools.
Robot World
Principal Investigators: Alex Slocum,
Marty Culpepper, John Williams
Vision - 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
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)
IS Customer Survey Spring 2003
• 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
Continuation of trend toward
student laptop ownership
One-to-One Computing Issues
• 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
Electricity & Magnetism
with Studio Physics




Studio format
Visualization/simulation
Desktop lab experiments
Student teams
Educational Value Proposition
• Proximities
– First Hand; Learner-Teacher; ResearchTeaching
• 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…
Remote
ECL,
Fedora,
MERLOT
…
IDC
Institutional
OCW, DSpace
Local
IDC
iMac
I
BM
Many Protocols,
Data Specs & Standards…
Marc
DC
Remote
IDC
METS
SOAP
SRW
Institutional
IMS CP
LOM
Local
DRI
IDC
iMac
Z39.50
I
HTML
File
System
BM
SCORM
Service Abstraction for
Interoperability
Application Client
Applications
OSID
Implementations
Servers
Protocol A
Imp. A – Protocol
Connector (plus
Local Business
Logic)
App. 1
Data
Imp. B – Protocol
Connector
Network
Service A1
Network
Service A2
App. 2
Imp. C - Local
Connector
Local Service C
Protocol B
Network
Service B
Federating Repositories with
OSIDs
Application Client
Network Repositories
Tools
DR OSID
Plugins
Fedora
VUE
LOBSTER
Celebrate
Clouseau
Celebrate Broker
OCW
Other
ECL
Local XML
Edusource Gateway
iTunes
iPhoto
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