LSRI: Supporting Collaborative Learning with Interactive Tabletops

Jochen "Jeff" Rick
Open University

Interactive tabletops allow multiple users to interact with the same large horizontal display concurrently through touch input, pen input, or moving physical objects whose position and orientation can be tracked. Hence, there is growing excitement about this technology's potential to support small group work (2-4 learners per tabletop). For instance, SMART Technologies is already selling a commercial product aimed at the classroom.

In this presentation, I provide an overview of the major research to date on children's use of interactive tabletops. I provide concrete examples from my own research on developing tabletop applications and evaluating children's use of these applications. I will address several important questions: How does the age of the participants impact the use of the technology and the nature of the collaboration? What is the value of concurrent input? What models of collaborative learning apply? How can we alter a design to encourage a different form of interaction? What are the major barriers to interactive tabletops succeeding as widespread educational technology and how can research help to overcome these barriers?

This event will be live streamed via http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/live/