Advances in human-computer interface design: A report on the 14th Annual Symposium and Open House of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 1997 by Rough, Alan C

Learning Tools

The day's third set of papers reviewed learning tools. Researchers from the College of Education and the College of Library and Information Services presented the Baltimore Learning Community: An Interface Suite for Exploring and Using Learning Resources. This project, currently finishing the second year of its five-year life span, is being tested in three Baltimore City Public Schools. It is intended to assist teachers in developing multimedia units tied to specific outcomes. Components of the system include an explorer module providing dynamic query searching of videos, images, texts, Websites and previously constructed teaching modules. More than 1500 learning resources have been collected from several sources, including Discovery Communications, Inc., and the United States National Archives. Module construction incorporates instructional planning with the integration of available learning resources. The presentation component facilitates classroom instruction, the use of learning resources and video streaming. This project provides teachers with a powerful set of tools and collaboration options and researchers with numerous possibilities for future research.

The University of Maryland currently has two high-tech classrooms, or "teaching theaters," and a third under construction. Teaching/Learning in the High-Tech Classroom: Lessons Learned from Faculty and Students, reviewed the history and development of these facilities which were built to "transform the teaching/learning process, changing it from its traditional unidirectional information flow to a more collaborative environment." One important feature of these classrooms is the capability for students to ask questions anonymously. This seems to empower those students who are timid about asking questions verbally.

The final presentation of the day was a discussion titled Simulations in Engineering Education, Semiconductor Manufacturing Education and Training: Graphical User Interface Design Issues. The goal of this research is to construct a realistic model of time-dependent equipment and process behavior to train manufacturing operators, practicing engineers, undergraduate and graduate students. This kind of simulation is much less expensive and more flexible than physical simulators.

When the formal part of the symposium ended, the open house portion of the day allowed two and a half hours for visiting the various demonstration sites on campus. As the University of Maryland is a large campus, only the track team had time enough to visit all of the sites which were open. The facilities open for demonstration included most of the home sites for the research presented above, as well as the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility. This facility contains a human control station design for space robotics. Many HCIL projects from previous years were also available for hands-on testing.

The most impressive thing about this symposium is that all of the work described above was done by student and faculty researchers at a single institution. Much of that work is the result of the collaboration between many students and faculty members. Most of the papers were presented by the student members of these research teams. For some of the students this was the first professional presentation of their careers. They are performing cutting-edge research that will shape the way the world searches for, collects and manipulates data in all formats. And they are doing it well. The future appears to be in good hands.