Comment 2: http://csce436-nabors.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-4-role-of-tangible-technologies.html
The Role of Tangible Technologies for Special Education
Taciana Pontual Falcão
CHI 2010 Doctoral Consortium
This paper covered how technology can enable us to better facilitate the learning needs of different kinds of children with learning disabilities. In the UK much of their study has been on how learning with interactive screens has facilitated in the learning process of children with learning disabilities. It talks about how there has been lots of programs written that work on a flat television screen but very little work has been done as far as tangible devices. This paper is the introduction to a dissertation that aims to explore this. She wants to use some recently developed tangible learning devices created for children with learning disorders and document their effectiveness in child participation in learning and how well they combat the main learning difficulties such as: short attention span, verbal memory and abstract thinking. The experiment will use children from 11-14 and will have them using devices that are specifically aimed to assist with multimodal activities that the children are having a hard time grasping. Much of the study will be recording of data in interaction time, content learned, number of times having to repeat the assignment and other factors. She also hopes that the biggest use of her study is going to be information sharing and the results of this will inspire others to look into this field and do further studies.
This paper was rather short and did not give me a lot of information to really work with. Essentially the author just set up what she wants to do and did not talk much about any past research or any of the work she plans to do. She didn't even give a description of what kinds of multimodal systems she is going to give the students and what she expects them to do with them. This may be perhaps because there will be different ones based on the child but even a few examples would have helped a lot. She also didn't give any strong evidence for what she aims to show with this or how she will know if her experiment was a success or not. I clearly see why this is an important HCI factor as again we as programmers need to think to write for as many different kinds of people as possible but I am at a loss here as the actual experiment is very vague. In all the paper was very dry and even though I feel it is an important topic I was very put off by the lack of information about the experiment. I honestly lost track and wondered if there was a page missing as there was so little information provided. I would liked to know if she had performed any similar experiments and what the results were or if she aims to show with her results.
I also felt there was a lot of set-up and not quite enough substance, but if you visit the url she gives for the London Knowledge Lab, there's a little more information.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lkl.ac.uk/research/tangibles/
The light table looks dull compared to the 100x cheaper laser pointer. Imagine asking Santa for a Rubik's Cube and receiving a Rubik's Revolution.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a good point of wanting more detail on the results of her experimentation. If we are dealing with children with learning disabilities, how can we assure they will respond better to technology as opposed to a human?
ReplyDeleteI think at some point she talked about using empirical data (from other authors I suppose) in order to design the classroom activities.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the light table was a cool little invention, but I am curious as to how it will be in the long term.
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