>>: Okay, so now next up we have Richard Anderson. I have known Richard for many
years. I think I met him when I was a grad student I think. So how many people have
heard of Classroom Presenter or heard of Classroom Presenter or have used it? So most
people here know Richard pretty well if not personally at least by his work which has
made a huge impact. So Richard got his PhD from Stanford, but ever since then he has
basically been at Washington University, maybe a 1 year break in between, but has been
a Washington University making a huge splash in the world of pen and pic computing.
His Classroom Presenter he started while combining with Microsoft and University of
Washington.
So he has always had a really close relationship with Washington. We are very lucky to
have him, because he is just down the street essentially. So quite exciting and Classroom
Presenter as I said before has made a huge impact. I know in my research it was stuff
that inspired a lot of what we have done in my lab for many years after. It is a work that
inspired many of you and many of you have used it in the classroom as high school
teachers and what not. So it has affected the lives of tons of thousands of students,
instructors and maybe even hundreds of thousands at this point. Who knows, over the
years that might be a reasonable number? So we are very excited, he is going to talk
about the reflections on that and we are going to try to encourage him to bring it back out
on live probably at the end, because it has made such a huge impact and it still is making
an impact. People are still using it in their research, so without further ado.
[Applause]
>> Richard Anderson: Okay, thank you very much. It is a tremendous honor to be
speaking here and I was certainly touched when I got the invitation and the opportunity to
talk about this. And this is a very honest talk in the sense that I really did reflect about
Classroom Presenter and when I put it together, kind of drudging through old notes and
old PowerPoint and old e-mail you are discovering that a lot of things happened around
Classroom Presenter. There were a tremendous number of different inputs, ideas and a
very strong community that when I am talking about it, even if I do talk about things in
the first person, Classroom Presenter represents work by a lot of different people. I think
there are a ton of very good ideas in Classroom Presenter because they came from my
students, they came from collaborators, and they came from random e-mails from
elementary school teachers around the world.
So this really is very broad. A lot of inputs made this happen. When I used to give talks
on educational technology I would often start with this slide and this is something that
one of my graduate students Steve Wolfman found somewhere. So Samuel May was an
obscure historical figure and in his memoirs he has this great quote that in 1813 he
attended a mathematical school, came across this incredible technology, a black board. I
think this is a fantastic quote because it captures so many important things. One thing
that it captures is we don’t think of a black board as being technology, as educational
technology, because it is so successful.
The other thing I think is amazing about this quote and thinking about it with respect to
education is, “Why is a black board so important for lecture and education? What does it
provide?” The black board compared to not having one is first a place that you can write
information for a shared perspective on information. It’s a way of providing an extended
memory. It’s a way of emphasizing. It’s way of stepping through a diagram and
animating. So it provides the teacher a lot of affordances that were not available
otherwise. That’s kind of what motivated us in our technology work, thinking about,
“How do we provide new technologies to use in the classroom?”
So Classroom Presenter is a very, very simple tool and idea that what it is, is a way of
putting ink on PowerPoint slides. It has a couple of views, an instructor view, a
presentation view; it has a set of ink based controls to make it easier for the instructor.
We found the film strip view was a nice way of making slides available, giving the
instructor control. One idea that was suggested to us was, “Why don’t we put notes only
available to the instructor on the slides?” So little cheat notes for the instructor, you
know some facts, proof, something that only appears to the instructor, a reminder on a
point to make, etc, so only appear for the instructor, and don’t appear on the public
display.
In Classroom Presenter we had three main scenarios for use of the tool, first as for the
instructor giving the lecture just writing on the slides and second as a tool for a
distributed classroom. So I am lecturing here and my slides are simultaneously shown in
a classroom at say University of Washington and then a final scenario of integration of
student devices with the instructor’s device.
So for Classroom Presenter I actually have a very, very clear memory of where it came
about. You will really understand the whole Genesis of the idea. So in 2001 I had a
sabbatical from the University of Washington. I had the opportunity to join the learning
science technology group here at Microsoft in Redmond in a distributed classroom
project. So the idea was to create a classroom that would link together multiple
universities for computer science courses. I had also been supervising our distance
program at University of Washington in computer science, had to deal with the
instructors and my colleagues just hated to teach the distance courses.
So as formative work for the distributed classroom project I sat down with colleagues,
looked at their lectures, talked with them and John Zahorjan really articulated the
problem of teaching the distance classes with the critique that it wasn’t the distance class
it was the overly structured class that came about by having a strict PowerPoint lecture.
Then I noticed that in some of our classes we had an electronic white board setup along
with the slides and notice that whenever someone used the electronic white board it was
in the context of the slide that was being used so based on that it just seemed, “Let’s try
and integrate the slides with writing.”
So it was a very clear Genesis of the idea for a classroom presenter as building a tool to
use in a distributed classroom, allows the instructor to write on his/her PowerPoint slides
to create flexibility in giving the lecture. When I was at Microsoft in 2001 this was when
the tablet PC project a Microsoft was still under wraps. There was a group inside one of
the buildings at Microsoft that had started the tablet PC, but they had some initial
hardware that it was actually very hard even to get a prototype device inside of Microsoft
that we were felt very happy that we were able to get a single one of the tablets that we
could work on for the project prerelease. So in terms of hardware available it was the
initial ACER machines that were the first of the tablets that some of the older people in
the room might remember, devices such as the HP –. What was the number on this?
>>: TC 1100.
>> Richard Anderson: TC 1100.
>>: It’s still a great machine.
>> Richard Anderson: Both the battery powered one and the one with the active screen.
So, right when I first heard of the tablet PC at Microsoft the idea just immediately came
that we really should be having better experiences for inking on top of slides. So that led
to the development of Classroom Presenter developed inside the distributed classroom
project that they first version of Classroom Presenter, which demonstrates my UI design
skills and actually demonstrated some of my programming skills as well.
So we launched Classroom Presenter as part of Conference XP for the distributed
classroom. I spent a full year at Microsoft that at my end of the year at Microsoft I
moved back to the University of Washington to continue in the computer science
department and Microsoft did something very honorable at the end of my year. Of course
when I signed on to do a sabbatical at Microsoft I signed away everything for six
generations. Microsoft had absolutely no obligation to let Classroom Presenter outside of
its organization, but when I left the code for Classroom Presenter was released to the
public and in particular it was released to me.
So I have always appreciated that Microsoft did make the appropriate step of making it
possible to continue this project by supporting it and also the legal steps. Back at
University of Washington we continued development of Classroom Presenter. There
were versions 2 and 3 and stepping between versions 2 and 3 there were a lot of under the
hood changes to get to version 3. There were also quite a few things just in terms of
usability and workflow that turned out to be very important even though they weren’t
significant from a technical standpoint.
So for example in the initial version of Classroom Presenter we had this deck builder
tool. So the workflow was you took your PowerPoint, you ran it through deck builder,
you got a CSD file and you loaded the CSD file into Classroom Presenter. And just the
step of brining deck builder inside of Classroom Presenter so you were loading at
PowerPoint was a significant change in the workflow that really removed a big barrier for
operation. Of course in the computer science department I couldn’t really say my major
research this quarter has been moving deck builder inside of Classroom Presenter so we
can load a doc ppt, but it is the type of very, very significant change that was necessary
just to move Classroom Presenter into something that was usable.
So I learned a tremendous amount of engineering and leading the project for quite a few
years. A lot of it certainly is things that people who are developing products, people who
take a user center design in developing software understand and it just can’t be
underestimated how much the simple workflow was essential to getting Classroom
Presenter to work. I think there were a lot of good ideas in Classroom Presenter and I can
comfortably say this, because most of these ideas came from other people and I have
actually been frustrated that some of the ideas haven’t been just picked up and run with
by other products.
So one that I just loved and maybe Beth Simon suggested it, Beth gave a lot of good
ideas to this project, instructor notes. And our implementation of instructor notes was
inside of PowerPoint to provide a macro that would allow you to tag regions as instructor
only. So then when slides were displayed if you were in instructor mode you could see
them. If it’s student mode or presentation mode they would not show up. I have got
some colleagues who just relied on them extensively for putting cheat notes on their
slides that I found it really very useful going from one instructor to another to be able to
make these types of notes and make them visible on the slide.
Another idea that turned out to be very successful is the idea of being able to shrink the
slide to provide some extra writing space. So this is an example of the display of a slide
that has been shrunk. So the top part would initially display as a full slide. A button in
presenter shrinks it by 33 percent, providing this boundary to write on. This is something
that just fits with instructor practice. You start writing on a slide, you need some extra
space and shrinking it, keeping the context, providing the extra writing that we tried
many more complicated ideas of extra space, but this simple idea has been just a very
good match.
Separating the instructor view from the display with easy to use ink controls that I have
always been flabbergasted at the difficulty of using the pen in PowerPoint and the
challenge of changing the color of the pen in PowerPoint, it boggles my mind. Slide
previews that inside the film strip moving the pen on top of the slides to get a blowup
view of what the slide is just facilitating looking ahead that this is something we were
able to get to work in a way that it is fairly smooth and does not trigger accidental slide
transitions. Another final idea which has been very helpful is just to have a simple way
of exporting all of the slides in ink to HTML. So after a lecture it takes me just a couple
of minutes to put up my inked slides on the web. So you can review where the writing
was on the slides.
I remember quite often getting the comment of, “If you post your slides with ink why will
students come to lecture?” I always thought that was a ridiculous comment to make as if
the incremental value of coming to lecture was to see the ink going on the slides and
second looking at the ink is only really useful if you were there. Almost always the ink
put on slides is really pretty incoherent. It might have been useful at the time, seeing it
will trigger what was going on in the classroom, but just seeing the ink is not that
valuable outside of the entire context. So I see this type of archiving is really enhancing
and strengthening experience to the people who were present as opposed to this view that
there is kind of a magical capture of the class that will short circuit the process.
There were also some bad ideas in Classroom Presenter. The worst idea of all was one
that I pushed for a long time and felt was brilliant at the time and it was a really, “What
was I thinking” idea. So in version 1 of Classroom Presenter we had this idea of
scrollable mylar inspired by the overhead transparencies. So as an instructor I had spent
a long time lecturing to write on this roll of transparencies and then you would turn the
crank and move the writing up and create space below. So the implementation in
Classroom Presenter was fairly easy in that we just attached a scrollbar to the ink window
so that you could move the scroll bar down to move the ink up and I thought you would
keep some of it in the context of the slide and you would make more space. Any
reactions as to why this idea might stink?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Richard Anderson: So it certainly violated how people used the ink.
>>: PowerPoint is usually not this linear.
>> Richard Anderson: Right, so the scrolling didn’t fit, when you scrolled up ink over it
would no longer align, it wouldn’t fit and there were also usability things that it was
never clear whether you should scroll down to move the ink up or scroll up to move the
ink up. The real disaster was just with respect to pen controls and seeing a lot of people
having accidentally scrolling the ink. So the scroll feature was something that might be
valuable in 2 percent of the instances, but it misfired far more often than that. So it’s
kind of an edge case that weakens the core scenarios. So this was dropped for the second
version of Classroom Presenter.
Another idea that we pursued was for integrating with student devices to be able to have
students highlight areas of the slide of interest or make direct comments on the slides to
draw attention to particular areas. And this might be away of making it easier for
students to describe where they were having trouble and what points needed to be
emphasized. In classroom experiments this also did not work particularly well. One
problem was just very hard for the instructor to react to this information and then there
was just the concern that it would be abused or distracting. On the technical side one of
the things that we struggled with for a long, long time was just the distribution of slides to
student devices and we used multicast networking which was not reliable and spent
tremendous time trying to get it to work.
Another idea that I am negative on, and you can certainly disagree with this, is that we
initially looked at integrating student note taking with the classroom presentation. So
students would have the slides on their devices, could take their notes on the slides and
after having experimented with it, developed it, linking the note taking with the instructor
did not seem to provide that much value in my opinion.
One of the things that we were very successful in, in Classroom Presenter and I have
Ruth who is in the audience really helped on promoting the idea of student submissions.
So we had various ideas of how do we get information back from the students into the
presentation? I am very proud of what the mechanism eventually turned into. There
were a lot of internal discussions around the mechanics of this. So the broad idea is that
we want to be able to have the students do active learning exercises in the classroom and
we want to get them back to the instructor and the instructor to be able to then react to
that in the class.
So the way that student submissions works is instructor goes to a slide and the slide
appears on all of the student devices. The students then solve the exercise, they hit a
submit button which sends their solution to a slide deck on the instructor machine, the
instructor then will receive all of the student submissions and then can review the student
submissions visually and decide which ones to put on the public display. So first talk
about the square and then talk about the circle. In doing this we did have this very
structured way we thought of incorporating student devices into the classroom. So it was
around having active learning exercises built into the lecture. So give students time to
reflect, get the information back to the instructor so the instructor can analyze and assess
and then give the instructor the ability to share the results and discuss them with the
students, so this kind of three part process.
From this there were a wide number of faculties around the world that utilized this in the
classroom. Here are a set of activities that I use in a senior algorithms class. So for
example in talking about topological sort I give an example of the graph, a graph and ask
the students to number the nodes in topological order. This is designed so that it actually
is one that they cannot find a topological order because it has a cycle. So there is a
discovery process in the exercise, they discover it’s impossible and for example this
particular student identified the problem and turned that in with their submission.
Another type of exercise was to give a somewhat challenging problem to solve so that
students can kind of compete to see who can find the best minimum cut in this graph.
These exercises do take a moderate amount of work to come up with of just hitting the
right level of difficulty so that it is not too hard and not too easy. So there is advanced
work in preparation that we have a fairly big archive of different classes, different
approaches, different settings that have used the in class activities for Classroom
Presenter.
So, one of the things that we recognized quite early about Classroom Presenter is that we
were actually going against the grain in a lot of the discussions of education and
pedagogy. You know it’s doing something basically reactionary. So I have been to
many education conferences and sat through big talks, presented in PowerPoint about
how awful lectures are as a pedagogical approach and proposing flipped classrooms and
many, many learner centered approaches of dismissing the lecture as just being an
outmoded, evil, useless, reactionary plot. Yet, lectures have quite a bit of resilience. So
we were really trying to make lectures better. So thinking about how do we improve the
lecture and our view was improving the lecture, give the instructor more flexibility during
the class, give the instructor structured ways of interacting with students and so really
thinking about how to improve the slide based lecture.
Another thing that put us at odds with a lot of people is we really did embrace
PowerPoint was a tool and think about the really important positive aspects of
PowerPoint and slide based lectures. In particular PowerPoint is very significant because
it provides a structured representation of a lecture, something that can be refined and
iterated and we are very excited about thinking about how do we put better content and
better mechanisms for presentation in an educational setting into PowerPoint and really
viewing the slide artifact as a significant representation of educational content?
So there were of course many challenges in the Classroom Presenter project and
challenges that led to a lot of time being spent quite unproductively. The biggest
technical challenge that we faced was we had this vision of distributing slides to 30 or 40
laptops in the classroom and this was years ago with 802.11b and if you just multiplied
the size of the slide deck times the number of students and divided by the bandwidth you
would see that you might or might not get everything to everybody by the end of the
hour. So it was just this challenge of how do you get the bits to everybody.
We spent a long time, used multicast where instead of sending one at a time to people
with error correction you would send the bit simultaneously to everybody, but in the
wireless environment some slides, some data would be lost. So slides would appear at
different periods to people and they would have this kind of blank slide where eventually
content might or might not appear. The frustrating thing was just how much time was
spent on this. This is kind of an example of a problem that if you wait long enough it
goes away. For the robust versions of Classroom Presenter 3 it was just setting up point
to point communication between the instructor’s machine and each of the students too.
So individually sending the slides to each student worked out.
Another pain point was keeping up with Office and as just as kind of longevity of
Classroom Presenter the versions of Office. So each change of Office would lead to
some required changes of Classroom Presenter. The key thing in Classroom Presenter is
we had to export the Office content into an image and send the images to the different
machines. One of these versions of Office added a whole bunch of new fancy shadow
fonts and glitter that was completely useless, but when these were exported even
something that just had a simple banner turned into a hundred megabyte slide image. So
these types of things had to be fixed at each level. There were bugs introduced, the
instructor notes actually stopped working with one of the versions and we were never
able to resurrect them, which I was very sorry about.
So challenges in the software, but there are some challenges that have to be recognized
about using something like Classroom Presenter in the classroom. One is just this issue
of cognitive load while lecturing. It’s well known that your IQ drops by 50 percent when
standing up in front of people and just kind of the simple affordances such as keeping
track of what color the ink is on the pen and the slides. I have seen interesting things
such as people who have one slide which will be dark blue background and so they have
chosen a yellow to be writing on advance to the next slide which actually has a white
background and keep writing on yellow. Yellow on white is not the best inking style. I
have seen this go on for kind of multiple slides before it’s observed or noticed.
So just the cognitive issues that I think we have been quite successful in having the big
colored buttons and simple interface, but complicated things to do in an interface while
lecturing are dangerous. Another thing that I have found to be really tragic is watching
some people give a lecture from a tablet PC and the lecture is given like this with heads
down, facing the tablet and so focusing on the writing with no eye contact. I have felt
really guilty when I have watched people who sacrifice the audience interaction to just
focus on the heads down writing.
>>: You compare that to standing at a white board or a black board with your back to the
class.
>> Richard Anderson: Yes, I have certainly had instructors who I didn’t see their eyes for
3 long proofs; yes a point taken Andy, thanks. Another lecture environment challenge is
there is often this picture of some guy in a nice suite lecturing in front of a large lecture,
holding a tablet PC, kind of writing neatly on the slides as he is walking across audience.
I am often kind of shaky enough and nervous enough in class that the last thing I want to
be doing is holding my laptop and just the fear of dropping it. So, kind of the physical
affordances are certainly an issue that comes up.
In the course of Classroom Presenter we did lots of different things with the tool, but one
of the things that was really fun was spent a tremendous amount of time just studying the
ink people wrote on slides. I have watched many, many lectures that in our masters
program we would record our lectures so I would have the lecture as well as the ink and
stepping through them. One of the key things about how people use ink in class is that
it’s integrated into the slides and often if you see the ink and the slides and weren’t there,
you know what are Church Boolean’s? During the lecture the ink is very important for
identifying where the attention is, making key points, emphasizing points, but it is a very
transitory experience.
We did a lot of analysis of diagrams in lecture and very often a diagram would have a
series of phases. So draw a little, make a point, draw more and make a point. So we
started to experiment with ways of representing this and if you are going to show an
archive of the ink come up with appropriate snapshots of when the different pictures
occur. It actually seemed to be quite easy just based on timing to figure out how to phase
and draw the diagram. You know we spent lots of time understanding how different tick
marks were used for where things are and kind of linking to show things are connected
and had this theory of annotation marks.
Another thing that is going to shock nobody, but there are a lot of mistakes on slides. So
just looking at the ink in Classroom Presenter and seeing where people correct mistakes
on their slides. So seeing the number of these I thought a very useful tool for an
instructor would be just something that would allow an instructor review the slides after
lecture and then make updates to the slides for the next time the course was offered. I
think it’s a good bet for all six of these mistakes next time the course is offered they are
going to be there again. So thinking about how the inking can actually feed back into
instructor review.
Another kind of cool play thing that we did is experimented with different varieties of
digital ink. We never put these into the production versions of Classroom Presenter.
Here is an ink that Craig Prince developed that allowed an illustration of how fast the pen
was moving. Here is an effect that Craig developed, which allows you to see overlap and
layering of the ink just with the simple trick of having the main solid ink with a slight
border and it is actually an effect that you see on a chalkboard where you can see drawing
new chalk on top of old chalk.
Another boundary case that wasn’t that important, but was fun to play with was that if
you were having multiple people write from different tablets displaying them on a
common screen how do you overlap the ink? So if I am drawing with a red pen, Jonathan
is drawing with a blue pen that we are drawing at the same time and trying to overlap
them appropriately. There are just funny things that come up if you start. It’s natural to
draw ink in layers and whatever layer is drawn on top wins. So how do you get shared
inking to do the right thing?
Okay, so for Classroom Presenter it was developed at University of Washington over
quite a few years. I started work at Microsoft, a large number of student developers, both
under grads and graduate students that I really do have to call out Fred [indiscernible], he
is the staff programmer at University of Washington who has provided some continued
maintenance on Classroom Presenter. For example he is the one who fixes Classroom
Presenter when a new version of Office comes out and a new build needs to be made, so
having him available for staff support.
Here is something that I think is really cool. How many people can read this? How
many people can see that they can’t read it? So since this is open source and having
random people saying, “I am teaching in Greece, can I localize it?” We actually had
done the right Microsoft localization methodology so it’s just putting together a
translation file. So there is a French version, a Portuguese version, a Greek version, a
Taiwanese version, a Mandarin and so outside software developers. The community
around Classroom Presenter has always been very significant in lots of ways of just the
people that have picked it up around the world, people got very excited about tablets and
using Classroom Presenter as one of the ways of using tablets that I would hear from
people who have made extensions around the world, many different places, certainly a
few, number of very key advocates for the project.
We had a number of workshops at University of Washington and Microsoft to bring
together a Classroom Presenter tablet PC community. For me it was actually incredibly
valuable at getting and working with people at a very wide range of educational institutes
around Classroom Presenter. Kind of in the research community there is this kind of R1
community, but a tremendous amount of exciting innovation was happening at smaller
schools and community colleges.
So personally it’s very enriching just the variety of educational institutions. You
probably can’t read this e-mail up at the top that I started to communicate with someone
at the University of Jos in Nigeria and somehow he had ended up with a donation of HP
tablets. So a university in north central Nigeria and even in 2012/2013 he was still using
the tablets. For me it seemed like this guy is one of the last people still using these
tablets, I have got to go see him. I actually had a visit to Nigeria and had arranged to visit
their university. Unfortunately I got mail when I was in Nigeria saying, “I’m sorry the
University is on strike, not safe to come.” So I missed my opportunity to see what was
going on in this University of Nigeria with Classroom Presenter and tablets, but just
exciting to see the range of adoption of technology.
One thing that has been just essential for this type of enterprise has been the support that
it has received and this is not the obligatory kind of comment at the end of a talk
supported by blah, blah and blah. In this type of work there is kind of an issue that it only
happens if resources are made available. There was a very substantial investment by
Microsoft and Microsoft Research in tablets, in tablets in education and in me. One
cannot employ graduate students without money to pay for them. So it was the resources
that HP also for years had a very generous tablet PC promotion program. So this type of
work does not happen without the right financial structures. So that just has to be
recognized.
Another thing that I am incredibly proud of is how other people have taken advantage of
Classroom Presenter, taken the early code base; even some people in this room and have
done amazing innovations on top of the code base. Beth Simon is someone who I got to
know around Classroom Presenter that she really wanted to take Classroom Presenter and
make it into a web based tool via ubiquitous presenter and did amazing things, a set of
innovations. Kimberly’s work I think is just amazing in going way beyond what we
thought of rich interaction on the student side and then tying it into a review cycle and
really understanding how tablets captures people actions and thinking and have
mechanism supported instructors understanding what’s going on. So I am just very proud
to see other people’s innovation. I think that points to kind of the right way to think of
technology in education of how it allows innovative things that are going to strengthen
the student instructor interaction.
So I stopped doing Classroom Presenter about 2008. We had a abortive effort to start
Classroom Presenter in 2009. I started writing some code, but did not follow through on
that. It is certainly very mixed feelings, because it was very exciting work in Classroom
Presenter, we were doing a lot of very interesting things. My one sentence description of
why I moved on was difficulty of continuing this work as part of a research enterprise.
One of the things that has been great about Classroom Presenter is a set of great graduate
students that have done thesis around Classroom Presenter that Steve Wolfman, Craig
Prince, Ruth Anderson, they all did interesting things with the technology and education,
but there is also a tremendous amount of the project of getting Classroom Presenter to
work with Office 2016. That is not going to be a PhD thesis.
So there are just inherent challenges in continuing this work under the guise of a research
enterprise at a university. I was certainly cut tremendous slack at University of
Washington to do non-traditional research and it was fortunately respected at University
of Washington, but that is just a limitation of how the university setting is hard to do it.
In this kind of semi-open source community project it also doesn’t fit with a commercial
enterprise as well, so there are challenges in getting the model right. In 2008/2009
Microsoft’s commitment to the enterprise was at best unclear and then there were also
resource problems that I was facing for keeping a set of software developers working on
the project. I freely admit that I underestimated the importance of low cost tablets. I did
not think that these low cost tablets would be as successful as personally owned devices.
So the 2003 vision for the project was that the instructor would be lecturing from a tablet,
slide deck style lecture, rich features to lecture with digital ink, but then all the students
would have a range of personally owned wireless devices where they could interact with
the lecture in different ways. When we did the work around student submissions we had
this cart of HP tablets that we would take them to class early, get all the slides transferred
to the tablets, pass out the tablets, students would do 1, or 2, or 3 exercises during class
using these special tablets on their desktops, but that was not sustainable at all. It was
good for experimentation, but certainly not the overhead.
So some schools had a mandate of uniform devices for all students, which maybe could
make it work, but we really felt that the way it’s going to work is that if people have these
devices that they want to keep charged because they really want to be texting to their
friends and incidentally they can use them for participating in the class. So we really
wanted it to be based on student devices. We wanted the devices to be ubiquitous. We
didn’t want to have a single device used. We wanted to have a situation where we could
count on content being distributed across the class seamlessly. That was kind of a crazy
vision in 2003, but absolutely feasible right now.
So there is kind of the irony that the vision for Classroom Presenter could be
implemented in 2015. I have actually been kind of surprised that some of the ideas have
not been picked up by Classroom Presenter and that there have not been kind of
commercial alternatives that put Classroom Presenter out of business. Throughout the
project I had kind of anticipated that there would be a clear commercial product that
would pick up and fill in the space. It has kind of surprised me that when I am going to
teach a class pulling out Classroom Presenter is still what I want to do.
So just to conclude this is a partial list of people who have been involved and supported
the project, but this has been an exciting enterprise just because of the wide number of
people that have contributed to this vision. So thanks very much for giving me the
opportunity to come today.
[Applause]
>>: We have very little time, we have one question we can ask, one single question and
you are first.
>>: I win, so more of a comment than a question. I am from [indiscernible], we were
tablet PC in 5th through 12th grade, and we did use Classroom Presenter when you had it
and multicast did kill us, but we switched to DyKnow. DyKnow found us so your vision
we have been doing that for the last 10 years. I want to let you know that it does exist
and you had a huge part.
>> Richard Anderson: I certainly give tons of credit for DyKnow, but they have always
been friends.
>>: I just want to make sure you knew. I am classroom teacher, computer science math
and you absolutely transformed the way that we are able to interact with kids and we
have been spreading the message for 10 years too, but it is still obscure unfortunately.
>>: All right. Let’s thank our speaker once again.
[Applause]