How a broken projector improved my class

I teach in the "smart" classroom shown here. The students sit at computers and the professor has a podium computer. I use the overhead display during every minute of every class -- for presentations and live demonstrations of all sorts of things.

Yesterday morning, I walked into the classroom and discovered that the overhead display was broken, so we had to improvise. I sat down at one of the student computers in the middle of a row (the one with the arrow) and the students crammed in behind me -- sitting on chairs, tables and standing. All of my teaching material is online, so I was able to use the exact same PowerPoint decks and do the exact same demonstrations as I would have used from the podium if the projector had been working. The material was 100% the same -- only the seating arrangement changed. I don't know whether you can picture the scene, but it was cramped and disorderly. (I wish I had taken a picture).

Why am I telling you this? I have been teaching on and off during my entire career, and it was one of the best class sessions I can remember.

I taught a second section of the same class yesterday evening in the same room. The projector worked fine for about half an hour, then broke again. We crammed in behind the student computer and continued. The class lit up. Students listened, spoke, answered questions I threw out, asked a lot of good questions, made relevant comments and wisecracked and teased. It was even better than the morning class.

I was able to do this because my classes are small. A few students were too far from my screen to see it comfortably, so they turned on a couple of computers in the same row and navigated along with me. (We could have automated that by starting up a Google Hangout and sharing screens).

The success of our re-arranged room would not have surprised Michael Wesch, an award winning professor of anthropology who has long noted the impact of room design on teaching. (For a taste of his thoughts on the topic, watch this 3m 46s excerpt I cut from a talk he gave upon receiving an outstanding teaching award).

I'm no anthropologist, but these class sessions felt better than a small seminar around a conference table. The ad-hoc seating arrangement turned the classes into focused bull sessions by breaking down social barriers between the students and me and, more important, between themselves.

The success of this small, ad hoc arrangement is ironic, because it comes at a time when I have been writing about massive open online classes, MOOCS, and have proposed teaching one.

MOOCs have the potential to be extremely cost efficient, but my small class gathered around a PC was extremely costly -- the California taxpayers would not sustain it and the students would get tired of standing up after a while.

Could we capture some of the enthusiasm and interaction of the live class I had yesterday and share it with a mass audience taking a MOOC at the same time? Maybe.

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For more on Michael Wesch:

• A video excerpt from “A portal to media literacy” (3m 46s)
  
• A portal to media literacy (the entire talk 1:06:12)
  
• A vision of students today (4 m 45 s)
  
• About Michael Wesch
  
• A blog post on the characteristics of today’s students
  

A hand-held projector -- for your cell phone?

Explay has demonstrated a hand-held projector that they plan to market in 2008. If the images are as bright as the one shown here, and the price is low, they will become ubiquitous. The display electronics fit on one chip, so your next cell phone (or the one after that, or ... ) might contain one of these projectors.

How could you use one of these projectors?

Miniature projectors

We discuss technology progress, which, when significant, can lead to completely new applications.

A year ago, we noted some newly developed technology for miniature projectors. 3M has now announced a projector using that technology. The list price is $359, the display resolution is 640 by 480, and it is reportedly bright enough to project an 11 inch image in a lit room. This projector is a stand-alone device designed to connect to a laptop or PDA.

Other companies are working on similar products. If that leads to continued technology improvement -- lower cost, smaller size, higher resolution and brighter displays -- we may see projectors bundled into phones and PDAs.

What technology barrier may keep that from happening?

Chromecast -- the $35 decision support room in your office

In an earlier post, I discovered that my old laptop was too slow to cast video to my TV set, but it worked well when displaying still images like a PowerPoint presentation on a TV set equipped with Google Chromecast.

It not only works for a presentation by one person to an audience -- several people in a room can actively share a heads-up display. Augmented meeting rooms in which participants have connected computers at their fingertips, were invented by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s envisioned and invented much of what we use today during the 1960s.

In the 1980s, local area networks became common, and the University of Arizona, Xerox Palo Alto Research center and others began experimenting with augmented meeting rooms with shared displays. Meeting participants could brainstorm ideas, rearrange document outlines, edit documents, vote and conduct polls, etc. and companies like Groupsystems marketed upscale decision support rooms like this one.

Those rooms cost a fortune and were used as corporate boardrooms, but interest in them has waned.

A large TV set with a Chromecast dongle is not as powerful or opulent as a decision support room, but for $35 it might become the decision support room for (small groups of) the rest of us. Below you see a simple test in which two users are editing the same Google Drive document with the result displayed on a TV set.

This sort of setup would allow several people in a room to share a heads-up display. I tested it with a simple Google doc, but one can imagine using it with the kinds of software found in expensive decision support rooms -- software with modules for voting, brainstorming, outlining, writing, etc. and features like selective anonymity and podium passing. We may find Chromecast displays next to those whiteboards in our offices in the future.

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Update 10/2/2013

Commenter Martyn Williams noted that the Chromecast will work with an HDMI-equipped projector, which would enable larger displays in your office or conference room.

Commenter Roger Jennings suggested that the Chromecast could save bandwith in casting pages if it had more "intelligence" -- for example being able to display PDF, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word files.

Together, these comments suggest a future where we have dumb displays with upgradeable, external intelligence. I have changed the TV set in my den 3 times in the last 35 years, but change computers every couple of years. I don't want a smart TV set, I want a dumb display with an upgradeable "chromecast."

The impact of classroom architecture on teaching and learning

Award-winning professor Michael Wesch writes and speaks on the influence of classroom architecture on teaching and learning. I saw a striking example of the impact of classroom architecture when the projector failed in my classroom.

I was reminded of this topic recently when I substituted for a colleague, Larry Rosen, who teaches in a large, half-full auditorium. I was struck by the fact that, as you see here, the students chose to spread out uniformly when there is extra room:

Professor Rosen in a 60 Minutes segment

I can understand that -- I too like space between me and my neighbors and the people in the back row can quietly sneak out of the auditorium if the lecture gets boring -- but it impacts classroom interaction.

Like many others, I encourage student interaction -- with me and among themselves -- during a lecture. One technique I use is to throw out a question and ask them to discuss it or compare answers with their neighbors. The purpose is not to find the right answer but self-diagnosis -- to help them see whether or not they understand the concept I am talking about. That does not work well when the students are spread out as in the auditorium shown above.

For a quick summary of Wesch's view of the implicit messages of traditional classroom architecture, watch the following short (3:14) excerpt from a longer (1:06:12) talk:

Tablet PCs will impact education, but it will take time.

Many new tablet computers were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.  Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal predicted that they will flood college campuses.

I agree that we will soon see students and professors carrying iPads and other tablets on campus, and, in the long run, I think we will view, annotate, discuss and share most of our teaching material on tablet-like devices.

But that is the long run -- they will not be part of mainstream education for many years.

Mainstream impact requires ubiquity.  Today, chalk and white-boards are ubiquitous.  We take them for granted and use them in every class.  Internet-connected computers with overhead displays are becoming widespread, and will also be taken for granted in the classroom.

Ubiquitous hardware is necessary, but not sufficient to drive major educational impact.  Standards are also needed.  The chalkboard works because we assume everyone speaks English or another language, and PowerPoint and Flash video are widely accepted standards for the classroom PC with a projector.

It will be some time before we can assume that nearly everyone has a tablet computer with a fairly standard hardware configuration.  It will take even longer to settle on standard formats for storing, annotating, and sharing teaching material.

Once the machines and standards are in place, we will see a significant impact on mainstream education, but that will not happen over night.

In general, we underestimate the time for a promising new technology to be adopted, but we also underestimate the extent of its impact on our lives, organizations and society when it is finally applied. I think this will hold true for tablet PCs in education.

(For an 18-year old article along these lines, see http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/uart.htm -- you can see what I got right and what I got wrong :-).