An example of part of the subject index of Kids Web. Images and icons are used to make the pages more visually appealing to children.
The Living Textbook creates a unique learning environment enabling teachers and students to use educational resources on multimedia information servers, supercomputers, parallel databases, and network testbeds. We have three innovative educational software applications running in our laboratory, and under test in the classroom. Our education-focused goal is to learn how new, learner-driven, explorative models of learning can be supported by these high bandwidth, interactive applications and ultimately how they will impact the classroom of the future.
The Living Textbook is a multidisciplinary project designed to demonstrate leading technologies in the K-12 classroom of the future. Using state of the art information technologies, The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC ) and the School of Education at Syracuse University are delivering video, images, and text to the classroom and integrating interactive, information on-demand systems and applications in K-12 curricula. The Living Textbook combines teacher teams, software developers, education researchers, computational scientists, vendors, and information content providers to demonstrate technology and applications of the K-12 classroom of the future. Three innovative interactive education applications requiring high bandwidth and parallel database and compute servers now run in the laboratory and are under test in the classroom. Development workshops and in-school meetings with teacher teams are used to guide software development.
The Living Textbook is a multidisciplinary project to demonstrate leading technologies in the K-12 classroom of the future. Using state of the art information technologies, The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC ) and the School of Education at Syracuse University deliver video, images, and text to the classroom to prototype interactive, information on-demand systems and their integration into K-12 curricula.
The Living Textbook creates a unique learning environment enabling teachers and students to use educational resources on multimedia information servers, supercomputers, parallel databases, and network testbeds. We have three innovative educational software applications running in our laboratory, and are beginning to test these applications in the classroom. The future NII will likely evolve from testbed networks such as NYNET, a wide area ATM gigabit network. Living Textbook applications are designed specifically to exploit NYNET. Downward compatibility with widely available network alternatives such as ISDN is a secondary goal.
Over the past six months, we installed the project hardware infrastructure, conducted well received and quite successful teacher training workshops and developed running prototypes for three software applications. We are now setting up a process for teacher and student feedback into software development.
Our education-focused goal is to learn how new, learner-driven, explorative models of learning can be supported by these high bandwidth, interactive applications and ultimately how they will impact the classroom of the future. As an education testbed, the Living Textbook addresses training school staff in new skills and issues of changing school culture. From a technological standpoint, the project is a multiple use application similar to other National Challenge applications such as small business, economic development, and health care. The base technologies, tools, and system integrations we are developing in the Living Textbook are used by our InfoMall partners in telemedicine (State University of New York Health Science Center), tourism development with New York State (InfoMall), a web based travel business (TravelVenture ), and a web based education information service ( Education Showcase ).
The promise of a future National Information Infrastructure (NII) delivering high bandwidth to the classroom offers new opportunities for educational reform. The base technologies are available, but many obstacles to applying advanced information technologies in K-12 schools must be overcome. The Living Textbook is building three educational software applications requiring state of the art technologies: an interactive journey of New York, video on-demand, and cached Internet resources for K-12. Our joint-project development model follows our InfoMall model for technology transfer. We describe how the components of our project are designed to support development of new models of learning.
The future NII promises to deliver multimedia information, full-motion video, voice, and data to some 100 million homes, offices, businesses, government agencies, and schools. Precisely how the NII should be used in education is not clear, but some excellent experiments are in place. Many of these have been funded by government agencies including NSF, NASA, Dept of Education, ARPA and others. Our vision of the NII is based on a wide-area, high-performance, client/server model. This model includes large parallel database and compute servers, high-speed networks as well as alternative network solutions (e.g., ISDN), and distributed networks of personal computers in the classroom.
How will the promise of the NII be delivered to the classroom? Technical issues to resolve include integration of system components (e.g., parallel databases, ATM networks, classroom interfaces) and scalability (e.g., storage and retrieval of large video archives). Project development issues include developing joint efforts between government, university, private industry, and the classroom (New York State funded startup of the Living Textbook, NYNEX donated a $3M testbed network, NPAC computational scientists and School of Education researchers, and project teacher teams are developing applications). Classroom user requirements include ease of exploration, the opportunity to learn from many types of linked visual - language materials, and extensive resources that can be called upon to answer learner-generated questions and solve curiosity-driven problems along with problems posed by the teacher to ensure an integrated educational context.
We propose the Living Textbook as a prototype Education Information Infrastructure of the future. Our software development and delivery model is based on the vision of multiple-use services. Our K-12 education applications take advantage of technologies previously developed for large scale scientific simulation and parallel database applications. Our delivery model takes advantage of bandwidth installed for other purposes. We are sharing software (e.g., NASA terrain rendering) and expertise with related applications (e.g., MPEG compression) and re-using a rich high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) base infrastructure.
Due to budgetary constraints schools typically lack a modern technology infrastructure. Only a small fraction of classrooms have access to interactive technologies, and where video is used it is a passive medium. Where computers exist in the classroom, they are used as electronic workbooks unless extensive re-education of teachers, students and often administrators and parents has taken place. Schools are conservative institutions with highly regulated and constrained financial resources.
When an infrastructure exists, teachers require training on how to use the equipment and the Internet, as well as the type of training that will enable teachers to creatively incorporate network and computer-based resources into a curriculum and to develop curricula of their own. Moving away from students as passive recipients of knowledge, where the knowledge to be memorized is strongly correlated with the requirements of national achievement tests, is resisted by parents, students, administrators, and universities. There is no clear substitute method of assessment that is in a position to win general acceptance.
Despite these obstacles, there is evidence that information technologies can improve educational performance. Computer based networks in schools increased student to student and student to teacher interaction, including increased teacher to lower-performing student interaction. Technology based methods improved learner motivation, achievement, and saved instructional time and costs. (See additional references).
We designed the Living Textbook to support information-on-demand for education, and follow certain guiding principles agreed upon by the national HPCC community. We use community standards whenever possible such as High Performance Fortran, Message Passing Interface based software development models, and MPEG viewers within standard web interfaces into multimedia libraries. We build applications on top of pervasive and commercially viable base technologies. HPCC technologies are intrinsically cost-effective as they are replications of mass produced components. We emphasize scalable technologies and strategies that work across a range of current and future systems and technologies such as scalable software standards, parallel architectures, and communication strategies from ISDN to ATM digital delivery. The educational services we are building in this project have multi-use value and can be generally applied in other National Challenge applications such as health care.
We developed a multimedia client-server system using a distributed computing model where nodes can be either sequential or parallel computers. Information access leverages World Wide Web technologies. We integrate users friendly applications on the client side (e.g., WorldView Inc. 3D Macintosh navigation environment) with special data production services (e.g., parallel terrain rendering modules on the server side). Our server model includes stand-alone Macintosh or PCs in the classroom accessing subsets of the Living Textbook project via CD-ROM storage. The full client-server system connects workstations in the classroom via an ATM Gigabit network to parallel multimedia servers with terabytes of hierarchially arranged storage. Several smaller clients connected by ISDN bridge these two solutions.
NPAC is able to develop this model in a highly demanding and diverse environment with facilities that include Thinking Machines CM5, Intel iPSC 860, two DECmpp's, IBM SP2, and nCUBE 2, and clusters of high performance workstations (IBM RS6000's and DEC Alpha's) (see NPAC infrastructure) NPAC also has a number of high-end database products installed on our MPP platforms, including Oracle's Parallel Server running on the nCUBE and SP2, and Oracle's Parallel Text Server, running on the nCUBE2. We implemented our own video pump software on the nCUBE2 and use this platform as a Video--on--Demand server.
We are building a scalable, balanced model for delivering interactive multimedia software to the classroom. We currently focus on ATM delivery, with future extensions including widely available network solutions such as twisted pair, ISDN, T1-T3, and possibly cable/fiber hybrids. Our testbed includes systems which differ in performance (computer power, network bandwidth, storage capacity) and cost by several orders of magnitude.
Our classroom interface is based on standard web browsing software (NCSA Mosaic, Netscape). Developments efforts underway at NPAC to extend the level and kinds of interactivity supported by the Web server and client will be incorporated into the Living Textbook as these tools become robust. We envision a future classroom interface built on top of web tools tailored for educational use, including tools such as a book reader, video clip editor, and tools for managing information collected from the World Wide Web.
The Living Textbook draws upon a number of related projects which contribute expertise and provide lessons learned, making our approach in education more robust. Related education projects at NPAC include The Young Scholars Program, KidsWeb, and a public kiosk linking Living Textbook materials via ISDN lines to the Onondaga County Public Library. Other related projects include key collaborators in other NII applications: health care (SUNY Health Science Center Telemedicine) defense (U.S Air Force Rome Laboratory Video on Demand), business (NYNEX Multimedia Applications and Technologies), entertainment and news (Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communication prototype digital wire service), and community networks (small business, community organization pilot projects).
The Living Textbook is an exemplar of NPAC's InfoMall model of project development through virtual partnerships. Living Textbook partners include project teacher teams and students in three upstate New York schools and three New York City schools (curriculum integration, feedback for software development), NPAC (application development, technology integration), Syracuse University School of Education (learning model development, assessment), The Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia (learning model development, assessment), and NYNEX (ATM network infrastructure).
A number of outside project partners include the U.S. Air Force Rome Laboratory (network support), the U.S. Department of Education funded AskERIC program (partnerships with educational content providers), Education Showcase (web information services for the education industry), WorldView Inc (software development), Discovery Communications Inc (video content for the classroom), The New York City Opera (opera in the classroom multimedia content), and NewsBank Inc (text databases for K-12) (see project partners).
The new national standards for math (NCTM) and science (NAS goals 2000) emphasize improved problem-solving abilities and cross-disciplinary studies that address basic science and mathematics in real world problem solving situations. The explosion of resources and users on the World Wide Web has created a vision of the information world of the future. This information infrastructure must effectively become integrated with content-rich interactive learning environments. These environments must (a) provide a basic framework of knowledge, (b) support and encourage interactive experimenting by the learner, typically including various processes that initiate simulations and other computations or processes that gather information or manipulate data, and (c) operate as windows into relevant information and databases on the global Internet. We will require multiple representations of data and information to enable knowing about something in multiple and complementary ways (eg, through sound, 2-D and 3-D imagery, text descriptions, statistics and graphics of properties, and both static and dynamic representations). The integrated learning/information environment of the future will support the ways that learners obtain real experience, do science, explore, create their own environment, ask questions, find resources, solve their own problems, and answer their own questions.
One of the current issues for which existing technology supports exploration is linking related data, information, and knowledge in a more information driven fashion than the WWW supports. This issue is being addressed in a different context, for example, by the NASA EOSDIS group that is devising methods to maintain links between data and the metadata needed to make it meaningful in addition to the methods used for different types of analysis and manipulation of the data. The Living Textbook applications will become more than just visual or visual-audio elements.
A group of Living Textbook teachers who now have the requisite technology in their classrooms, have been introduced to many of the interactive technology capabilities of desktop-video equipped Silicon Graphics Indy machines and Apple PowerMacintoshes (connected by NYNET to NPAC). This training was interesting to observe, because both machines have interfaces to the application and networking tools that are intuitive to use. Little time was spent in rote learning of key sequences or steps to initiate an application. Most of the time in our teacher workshops is spent exploring the interactivities supported by the application/technology.
An upcoming workshop is designed to obtain teacher input on how to begin integrating Living Textbook applications and technologies into their classrooms. Our model includes introductory workshops to allow teacher exploration and feedback on the applications. We examine how the application is conceptually useful, practical issues, and what gets in the way.
We will be in a position to evaluate whether the Living Textbook facilitates introduction of curriculum material in related areas and how it affects interest. Students will use Living Textbook tools to create their own multimedia resources. We can evaluate what they create, study how they use resources, and obtain feedback on additional support the tools might provide on effective location and integrations of resources.
One measure of success will be to see computers in the classroom used NOT as electronic typewriters and spreadsheets, but as research tools. Another will be to see teachers integrate lectures with student interactive learning, and learn how to intermix them effectively. A schematic view of the Living Textbook learning model and software development plan is illustrated in the linked diagram.
We have three innovative educational software applications running in the laboratory, and under test in the classroom. These applications are an interactive journey of New York State, video-on-demand, and cached Internet resources for K-12.
Much of the world's data and information, physical, social, or political, is spatially located. The interactive journey is designed to take advantage of the spatial locality of information by combining a spatial database, (currently the planet Mars, and New York State), real time navigation through three dimensions (based on parallel terrain rendering algorithms), and linked multimedia databases.
Results of scientific simulations, news wire material, and documentaries are examples of video content that are immediately useful in the classroom as reference materials. Advances in digital video technology make it possible to construct on-line video archives and retrieve selected clips on-demand. Access and dissemination of video content is a first step. To impact learning, video on-demand archives must be interactive. We must be able to link video with reference materials in other formats, and allow learners to load their own video content into the archive.
The World Wide Web represents a rich source of information, but most information is not relevant to K-12 education, nor is it easy to find what one is looking for. Access by kids to inappropriate material over the web is a growing concern in the educational community. The recent explosion in Web traffic has slowed network performance which has implications for teacher preparation of web materials for use in the classroom. For these reasons, caching resources available on the Internet locally, and connecting this cache with high speed links to the classroom is an attractive alternative.
All three software applications exploit high performance multimedia computing and communications systems, which the Living Textbook is designed to exploit. Interaction between students, teachers, software developers, information content providers, and domain experts is required to build interactive multimedia collections with links to related information over time (e.g., the history of a neighborhood, or the time evolution of a physical system), several grade levels (e.g., middle school student's understand of money and banking, high school student's understanding of currency markets and simulation models to price foreign currencies), and over a spatial region (e.g., students across the state constructing journeys of their region and loading these into a database of the state).
The interactive journey is a framework for students to create a journey of their region and allow others to experience this journey. Students learn to construct their own knowledge of a region by creating videos and photographs, conducting research, and interviewing others to build an on-line multimedia data organized by spatial location.
The interactive journey of New York State is based on a spatially organized multimedia database built and maintained by distributed groups. The user navigates through the three-dimensional environment generated from digital terrain and land cover data, and terrain rendering software.
We are developing a portable real-time 3-D terrain rendering program, using a texture-mapped polygon approach. The goal is to render realistic 3-D terrain models at interactive frame rates. The algorithm will be scalable, with the image quality being varied depending on the available computational hardware, so that the algorithm will run interactively on any platform, from a personal computer to a scalable parallel supercomputer.
Computer models of terrain can be constructed using satellite image data to provide the basic two-dimensional image of the terrain, which is overlaid onto digital elevation model (DEM) data, and shaded to provide a realistic three-dimensional view of the terrain.
The original application for the terrain rendering program is
New York State - The Interactive Journey,
a real-time interactive simulated flight over New York state.
The flight simulator will be interfaced to
spatially referenced educational information for the
region in view. This will be multimedia information accessible via
the World Wide Web. The rendering program will be interfaced to the Web
browser so that the browser can be operated by ``remote control'' to
display the appropriate documents.
This can be done using Applications Programming Interfaces
available with new versions of Web browsers such as Netscape.
NPAC's development of parallel terrain rendering software to support real-time navigation of New York State is based on NASA's tour of Mars.
To use this application, the student navigates through New York State, stops in a region of interest, clicks on a button that links available information for that region, and links multimedia libraries organized as web sites.
For example, the user might navigate to a region of interest, stop, and select a clickable map. Through this map, one might browse images of a selected region. We have a digital collection of New York State tourism photographs (a spin-off of this project may be a set of kiosks supporting New York State's tourism program).
Well known examples are Niagara Falls or the New York City skyline. Ordinary sites are also important. For example, a journey through Syracuse might take one along Erie Boulevard, the site of the former Erie Canal. Links between local maps local maps, images, video clips, and textual information illustrate the ability of the journey application to build interactive, multimedia databases where students in the Living Textbook create their own journey.
This example journey emphasizes landmark buildings which tell the story of development of downtown Syracuse. The first bank, county courthouse and therefore the county seat, development of a nearby commercial district where all sited adjacent to the Erie Canal. The physical world represented in the journey is one starting point for student's inquiry into how physical resources such as salt deposits and the transportation infrastructure created wealth in region and led to the development of Syracuse as a city.
How does the transportation, communication, and information infrastructure of a region lead to establishment of industry, economic development, and create wealth in this region? How have other communities with similar resources, adjusted to a changing environment? What lessons are available from other cities in region, or other countries of world?
A physical journey is a first step, useful in illustrating the concept of spatial database with linked multimedia libraries. Information on the physical world is relatively easily accessible. Building a richer journey requires the input of many distributed groups which can be linked to the journey framework. Possible next steps include a journey into ethnic, cultural, or arts communities to examine the experience of immigrants, histories of neighborhoods, and art workshops in the classroom.
The interactive journey emphasizes the links between physical location and the many dimensions that make a community. We view the interactive journey as a powerful learning tool that may be useful in creating a global view of a community through access to global information and links to other communities. Travelers (learners) interactively access information, create their own information, and put their results back into the framework for others to experience.
The Living Textbook currently uses a high-end PC system providing analog video to digital conversion and compression in MPEG format in real time. This PC system includes a hardware MPEG 1 encoder (based on two cCUBE chips) and hardware decoder, an industrial quality VTR (frame accurate, programmable from a PC), and a Silicon Graphics (SGI) Challenge server with 40GB disk storage. We have related video on demand system integration projects underway to scale our video server technology to parallel systems (nCUBE, SP) with large backend storage (400 + GB). SGI Indys in the classroom support standard network browsing software which links MPEG movie player software. We are working with Apple Inc. to provide the same functionality on classroom PowerMacintoshes.
Our goal is to make network delivery of digital video transparent to the end user in the classroom. This is essential to incorporating video on demand into K-12 curricula. The Living Textbook has as a unique resource in network delivery capacity. NYNET directly connects the Living Textbook schools to NPAC's servers, providing end-to-end ATM network support of OC3 (155 Mbit/s) bandwidth. We also incorporate ISDN network delivery of video as an alternative approach. Research in ATM network protocols, network management, scheduling algorithms, and ISDN technology are related ongoing projects at NPAC that will be incorporated into the Living Textbook NYNET.
To use video on demand in the classroom, teachers and students must be able to efficiently select short clips (few minutes in duration) from large video archives. Our current approach to indexing video is based on text indices. We use two approaches, text captioning, and professionally written content summaries. Text captioning is used by broadcasters to communicate dialog in the audio track to the deaf and is generally available for professionally produced educational video. Text captioning represents the content we expect continuous speech recognition technology to provide in the near future.
Professionally written content summaries as a second source of text for indexing video. Video sources such as news wire material include content and sequence descriptions (shot lists) written by professional journalists. We see the combination of captioning/speech recognition and professionally written content summaries as a powerful approach to indexing video. Image content algorithms are an interesting future technology. While text indexing is an integral part of video on-demand. text on-demand represents another form of information on-demand in the classroom. In a related project with AskERIC , NPAC developed a web interface to a full text retrieval engine applied to the U.S. Department of Education ERIC database (see form , sample results ). As part of the Living Textbook project, we are conducting a trial with our InfoMall partner NewsBank Inc. to deliver full-text newspapers, scientific journals, popular magazines, and historical documents to Living Textbook classrooms.
For the Living Textbook project, we have negotiated access to video content from diverse sources. Current examples include Discovery Communications "Assignment Discovery" cable broadcast designed for classroom use. Note the use of text captioning which is linked to video clips in this example. A second project with Discovery involves The Promised Land cable broadcast series which is complemented by a web site providing teaching materials, discussion groups developed by our AskERIC project partner. Other examples of video content include New York City Opera workshops in the K-12 classroom.
Other sources of video content we are now developing with our InfoMall and Living Textbook project partners include foreign news broadcasts from the Syracuse University Maxwell School Global Affairs Institute, film archives of New York State, Think Media a New York City based documentary film maker, and several sources of local video content including productions from a Public Broadcasting System affiliate, and the public library.
Ownership of video content is an extremely important issue in the Living Textbook and education in general. Content providers are often interested in exploring digital network distribution and new ways of delivering their content to existing K-12 markets, or opening education as a new market for their information. However, legal, ownership, and financial issues remain as significant obstacles.
An important source of video content is material produced by students, teachers and community groups. The interactive journey is designed as a framework for delivering learner contributed materials to others and overlaps with the interactive and participatory goals of our video on-demand project. An early example is a local journey down the site of the former Erie Canal in Syracuse which contains text, images, and video content.
Kids Web is a World Wide Web digital library for school children. The ambitious goal of the World Wide Web project is to make available all of human knowledge through global computer networks acting as a vast distributed electronic library. The Web already contains enormous amounts of information, and is growing incredibly rapidly. However only a small fraction of that information is useful, intelligible and interesting to school children. Searching for such information using existing Web digital libraries and search engines can be very time-consuming and frustrating, especially for children.
Ideally the students should be presented with a subset of the Web that is very simple to navigate, and contains information targeted at the K-12 level. This is the goal of Kids Web. Each subject section contains a descriptive list of links to information that is understandable and interesting to schoolkids. There are also links to external lists of material on each subject which more advanced students can browse for further information.
It is crucial that the material in the library be screened for content. The Web allows almost anyone to publish documents, which leads to widely varying quality in the content of Web documents. Rather than just including any documents on a certain subject, an effort is made to check the material and include only the better and more comprehensive documents.
An example of part of the subject index of Kids Web. Images and icons
are used to make the pages more visually appealing to children.
We are investigating the use of Web mirroring and caching techniques to automatically pre-fetch the documents on Kids Web, which exist on computers all over the world, and store them on a high-capacity centralized server at NPAC. Accessing these documents from computers in the north-eastern United States will then be much faster, especially for those schools connected to NPAC via NYNet.
Another major advantage of caching or mirroring this information is that it enables schools to easily address the issue of eliminating access to undesirable material on the Internet. Many schools are already connected to the Internet, but it is being used only by teachers, not students, due to concerns that students might access inappropriate material such as pornography. By allowing students access only to cached educational resources that are screened for appropriate content, such as the material in Kids Web, this problem can be overcome.
We propose the Living Textbook project as a prototype education information infrastructure. Our project has in place teacher teams, state of the art infrastructure, and three innovative software applications. We recently completed the first phase of linking project classrooms and NPAC's supercomputing facilities with end-to-end ATM connectivity. On-going teacher development workshops have covered web technologies, and project infrastructure. We are beginning the next phase of teacher team feedback into software development activities. Our goal is to learn how new, learner-driven, explorative models of learning can be supported by high bandwidth, interactive applications and ultimately how they will impact the classroom of the future.