Page 22 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### January, 1994 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 2, Number 1, pp 22-39 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as NORMAN IPCTV2N1 on LISTSERV@GUVM ---------------------------------------------------------------- AN EVALUATION OF THE ELECTRONIC CLASSROOM: THE AT&T TEACHING THEATER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND An Evaluation of the Electronic Classroom: The AT&T Teaching Theater at the University of Maryland Kent L. Norman and Leslie E. Carter Department of Psychology and the Human/Computer Interaction Laboratory The University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 email: klnorman@umail.umd.edu Phone: (301) 405-5924 FAX: (301) 314-9566 ABSTRACT This report summarizes reactions to the AT&T Teaching Theater at the University of Maryland. The AT&T Teaching Theater is an electronic classroom outfitted with a high performance workstation at each student desk and the instructor's podium. Networking and video switching allow for interactive communication, file sharing, distributed control, and collaborative learning experiences. In addition, large screen audio/visual displays are integrated with the system to allow for smooth transitions from one presentation to another. During the Fall Semester of 1991 six different courses were taught in the classroom. Instructors were asked to relate their best and worst experiences in the room in order determine what works, what doesn't, and what needed to be Page 23 changed. In addition to the use of the room for computing and audio/visual events, the best uses of the room included sharing of student work on the large screen monitors, collaborative note building, student polling, and collaborative problem solving. The major drawbacks had to do with the need for a more seamless flow of events, the need for pedagogical examples of how best to integrate technology and instruction, ackward and complex connectivity to out of class computer facilities, problems with computer software and hardware, and problems with room architecture. INTRODUCTION The classroom is changing because the world is changing. Computers are pervading business and industry; telecommunication is becoming more extensive and more intense; and video images are being used more and more engage and instruct the audience. The electronic richness of the technological world is pressing on the door of the traditional classroom. But the introduction of electronic technology into the general classroom has been slow and fraught with problems (e.g., Holden, 1989; Kearsley & Seidel, 1985). Nevertheless, computer technology will influence instruction and will eventually force its way in to the classroom itself. As electronics flood the classroom of the future, we need to know how to manage the environment, how to take full advantage of the computer medium, and how to enhance teaching effectiveness. Research is only beginning to answer these questions (c.f., Hiltz, 1988; McDonnell & Raymond, 1987; Newman,1988; Singer, Behrend, & Roschelle, 1988; University of Guelph, 1987, 1990). In this report we take a preliminary look at some of the factors that will be involved in the computer classroom of the future by describing and evaluating the introduction of such a classroom into a university environment. In the Fall of 1991 the AT&T Teaching Theater opened its doors to students at the University of Maryland. Five different courses were taught in the room during that semester. This report is an attempt to summarize the initial experiences of the students and instructors using the room and to delineate the emerging issues involved in introducing electronic technology into the classroom. While more formal, quantitative evaluations are planned, the initial reactions and evaluations of the first semester will help to identify general problems involved in mixing technology and education in the classroom, to establish the higher level conceptualization of the electronic classroom of the future, and to provide preliminary feedback and guidance to instructors using such rooms and to designers of such facilities. Page 24 The first part of this report briefly describes the room and our objectives. The second part discusses a number of preliminary issues and concepts that were addressed during the design of the room by the steering committee. The third part summarizes the reactions of instructors and students to the classroom. The final section gives recommendations for change and attempts to provide guidance to future instructors and students using the room. THE ELECTRONIC CLASSROOM AND ITS OBJECTIVES FACILITIES The Teaching Theater was initially funded by a grant from AT&T to the University of Maryland. The room contains 20 student workstations constructed to accommodate up to two chairs per workstation if needed. Each workstation is supported by an AT&T 25 MHz 386-based computer with a 17S high-resolution color monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The system units are housed in an adjacent room to reduce noise. No printing or floppy disk facilities are provided to the students in the classroom. The cabling for the monitors, keyboards, and mice is routed through a signal switching system which provides the following capabilities: 1. All student screens can be blanked when desired by the instructor. 2. The instructor's screen can be broadcast to any or all of the student monitors. 3. Any screen on a student workstation can be displayed on the instructor's monitor and broadcast to all of the students' monitors. 4. The keyboard and mouse on any student workstation can be "taken over" by the instructor's workstation. Effectively, the instructor can take over control of any workstation in the room. 5. Any monitor's display can be shown on the rear projection screens All of the computers in the AT&T Teaching Theater are linked via an AT&T StarLan* network, which in turn is linked to a local Novell* server, which in turn is linked to the campus optical fiber-based network, which is finally linked to the Internet. The network allows students and instructors to transfer, run, and Page 25 print files outside of the classroom in other campus facilities. Windows 3.0* is the usual operating environment in the room. It provides a host of software accessories, as well as file, program, and network management functions. In addition, a number of Windows compatible software are available for use by the students and the instructors. A variety of video sources are available for display on either of two 4.5 ft. by 6 ft. rear-projection screens. They include an S-VHS tape player, a laser disc player, a television receiver, and the campus video network, and the images on the instructor's screen. Selection of the video signal is controlled from the instructor's desk using an AMX touch-screen controller. Finally, the room is acoustically engineered to optimize speech communication with minimal ambient noise. A large number of lighting moods can be created and controlled by the touch-screen controller at the instructor's desk. OBJECTIVES A number of computerized rooms exist for a variety of purposes (e.g., Foster & Stefik, 1986; Mantei, 1988; Valacich, Dennis, & Nunamaker, 1991). The principle use of some of these rooms has been for group decision support in business and management, while others are more similar to computer labs designed for instruction and training on computer applications and computer programming. While the AT&T Teaching Theater supports collaborative group decision software and computer training, the primary purpose is more general: to support a general model of education in an interactive, collaborative, multimedia environment. The steering committee decided that the AT&T Teaching Theater was not to be just another computer lab on campus. They intended that it should not be restricted to merely teaching students _about_ computers or training students how to use computer software. In a similar vein, the room was not intended for any one discipline or merely for group decision making by business and industry executives. Instead, the classroom was intended for general education. The intent was for the computer to have a low profile. The course content and the educational process were intended to be the primary focus. The technology was intended to provide the supporting environment for education and the channel for collaboration between instructors and the students. The objectives of the classroom were originally stated in a design document by Clabaugh, et. al. (1988) and restated by Norman (1990). They are as follows: Page 26 1. to provide a more interactive learning experience than is generally possible in traditional lecture and seminar courses at the college level. 2. to provide interactive and hypermedia technologies during lectures and seminars. 3. to increase student-to-student and student-to-faculty collaboration and group problem solving. 4. to provide students with an integrated learning environment with access to hypermedia databases, communications, and simulations. These objectives stand as a sort of disembodied list of potentials. It has been the challenge of the Steering Committee and the first set of instructors teaching in the room to weave these potentials into reality. In doing so we have had to address a number of additional issues which are introduced in the next section. ISSUES AND HIGH CONCEPTS OF THE ELECTRONIC CLASSROOM In this section we lay out a number of thoughts about the classroom. These ideas reflect issues that come into play when electronic enhancements are introduced into the classroom and help to determine how we will evaluate the success of the electronic classroom. THE THEATER METAPHOR The theater metaphor was adopted by the Steering Committee in the design of this room in order to emphasize certain differences from the traditional classroom and similarities to the theater. The theater metaphor has already been effectively used by Laurel (1990) as a model for human computer interaction. In the present case, we extend the metaphor to the whole classroom. The teaching theater emphasizes interactive, multimedia presentations. These require a thoughtful staging of presentations with lighting, viewability, and a carefully planned out script. The theater emphasizes live performance over the non- interactive movie or video. Similarly, the teaching theater incorporates a live instructor; and it is not meant for instructional television or the mere screening of canned materials. The theater metaphor has had its drawbacks. Some have inferred from this metaphor that students are a passive audience. Just the opposite is true. The students ARE an audience, but Page 27 they are more like a studio audience that is engaged in a production or an audience of cast members waiting to come on stage for their part in the production. This is often highlighted when one or more of the students "step into the limelight" and become the focus of attention while the instructor and the rest of the students assume the role of the audience. A second drawback is that the theater metaphor implies entertainment rather than serious study. But the intent of this room is to engage the student in the excitement of the production, to boost motivation and mental involvement in the material, to raise the salience of the material, and to heighten its memorability. A positive spinoff of the theater metaphor is to bring out the best in faculty members and to challenge them to use new methods and techniques in teaching. Teaching in the electronic classroom will involve instructors in rethinking lecture material, in creative thinking about how to use the facility, and stretching to meet higher expectations on the part of the students. THE CLASSROOM METAPHOR It may be tempting when moving into the electronic classroom to break the whole mold of traditional pedagogy. However, experience in cognitive psychology tell us that both students and instructors need to maintain, to a certain degree, the familiar schemas from their pasts and to use those schemas to shape their future interactions. Norman (1990) argues that metaphors from the traditional classroom should and can be carried over into the electronic classroom. These include the familiar concepts of the syllabus, the textbook and lecture notes, blackboards, class discussion, exams, and gradebooks. New, electronic media needs to support these foundational concepts while at the same time enhancing them electronically and enlarging the concepts of collaboration, communication, and computation. To support these concepts Norman (1990) proposes that the resources of the electronic classroom be implemented as a computer collaborative hypermedia database divided into three types of objects: course materials (e.g., textbooks, lecture notes, audio/visual presentations), course interactions (e.g., questions, discussion, group exercises), and course products (e.g., student's notes, papers and reports, exam results). The hypermedia nature of the database provides links that allow students and instructors to build links from one object to another. For the instructor, the links may go from the lecture notes to questions that might, in turn, be linked to an exam. For the student having completed an exam, the links may lead from the Page 28 questions back to the textbook and lecture material. The classroom metaphor,,with all of its associated objects should be visually apparent to the students and instructors by the use of graphic displays on the screens. Textbook objects should look like textbooks and exam objects should look like exams. The entire layout and structure of the hypermedia database should hearken back to the familiar images of the traditional classroom while at the same time provide powerful new tools. THE ROOM ITSELF A second factor that seemed important after having surveyed existing technology and traditional classrooms was the design of the room itself. A learning environment can be either austere or rich. The steering committee clearly decided to optimize comfort, feeling that a positive initial impression of the room would have a beneficial effect on all those who would use it. Consequently, the AT&T Teaching Theater deliberatly does not look like a typical, traditional classroom nor does it look like a typical computer lab. The acoustics, the lighting, and the furnishings are designed to project the atmosphere of a conference room or an experimental theater. Human comfort, high visibility, and good acoustics have been emphasized. The lighting is extremely versatile with the controls allowing the instructor to set the mood and to focus on different areas of the classroom. The room is tiered to provide good visibility from all points in the room and monitors are set low in the desks to preserve visibility. The computers' processing units are housed in an adjoining room to reduce noise, minimize heat, and to preserve physical closeness among the students. SYMMETRY OF COLLABORATION AND RESPONSIBILITY Collaboration and shared responsibility for learning are primary objectives for teaching in the AT&T Teaching Theater. However, in order to collaborate each party in the interaction must have something to bring to the table. The instructor, being an expert in his or her field, brings a rich set of issues, theories, facts, illustrations, and applications. At an introductory level, students may only be able bring their personal opinions, questions for clarification, and examples from their own experience. At another level, advanced students may bring critical analysis, counter or confirmatory evidence, and constructive thinking. Instructors must discover what they can expect from their students when it comes to collaborative learning. In introductory classes, the instructor takes the Page 29 responsibility for the course content and organization. In advanced classes, the students may take increasing responsibility for guiding the direction of material; and at the graduate seminar level, the students and instructor may take on nearly equal roles in exploring the subject at hand. An additional and controversial issue in the use of technology classrooms has to do with anonymity and freedom during collaboration. The electronic classroom can provide varying levels of anonymity for both students and instructors. In generating ideas or giving feedback, anonymity may increase the students' honest expression of their ideas because they need fear neither ridicule nor reprisal. On the other hand, anonymity may also provide for a channel for students who want to vent their hostility, indulge themselves in minority bashing, and irresponsible, destructive comments. Ultimately, the instructor must assume responsibility for the tone of the discussion when anonymity is allowed. He or she needs to act as an editor or moderator of student input before it is disseminated to the class as a whole. LOCAL VS. DISTAL DISPLAYS In the traditional classroom there is a choice of attending to local information at the desk/workstation (e.g., notes, textbook, screen) or to distal information on the blackboard or large, display screen at the front of the room. In the AT&T Teaching Theater there is the additional option of transfering the local display to the distal or the distal to the local. Not only does this choice affect the viewability of information, it also affects the sense of ownership, privacy, and personal space. There may be times when an instructor will choose to present information on the distal display so that all eyes are focused on the same physical location rather than on the local display, where all eyes are still focused on the same information, but within student's own personal space. This choice will probably affect the students' sense of collaborating as a synchronous group or their group participation as asynchronous individuals. WE BRAKE FOR CREATIVE IDEAS AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK The AT&T Teaching Theater is an experiment. Consequently, we wanted to encourage both the faculty and the students to experiment and to take chances by trying out new ideas and methods of teaching and learning. We felt that experiments might include ways of integrating the material and the technology, collaborating over the network, or switching video signals to exchange information for discussion. Creativity entails risk. What is planned may not work. Innovators must understood that Page 30 failure and negative feedback can be just as interesting and informative as their sucesses. We often learn more from failure than from success. Consequenly, we should not be afraid to invest in new ideas nor should we be afraid to have the class session bomb. Ultimately, the gain will be greater. MANAGING FOCUS: ONE TO N-RING CIRCUS An electronic classroom with workstations, multiple displays, and a hypermedia database is vast jungle of information. It supports unlimited exploration, creative diversity, and a factorial explosion of outcomes. The instructor must manage the scope and provide the focus of information covered in the course. But the concern of the student remains: "Is it on the exam?" This traditional academic nemesis actually hits the nail on the head. The question is really, "What is important; what should be remembered?" The instructor may grab the focus by broadcasting his or her screen to all student workstations. An advantage of hypermedia is that it allows students to investigate topics on their own. However, students may get lost in the hyperspce of instructional software. The instructor can provide a focus by giving guided tours through the information. At any point in the tour students may be allowed to branch off on their own or move at speed more comfortable for them. INFORMAL REACTIONS OF FACULTY AND STUDENTS The AT&T Teaching Theater opened for operation in the Fall Semester of 1991. Six regular courses from a variety of disciplines were scheduled to use the room. It was decided that during the first semester an informal, initial evaluation would be conducted to assess whether the objectives of the classroom were being met. One consideration we discussed was that the evaluation was not to answer the question of relative performance benefit between the traditional classroom and the AT&T Teaching Theater. Rather, we would examine how to use this new classroom and how to use it in the most effective and proper way. Consequently, our initial evaluation of the AT&T Teaching Theater does not attempt to show that students learn 33.3% more in the electronic classroom than the traditional classroom or that they retain the information 2.4 times as long. Instead, we were interested in eliciting from both students and instructors their views on what worked well and what did not, both in the instructional method and the technology itself. Both faculty and students were polled informally during and after the Page 31 semester to get their reactions to the classroom. The following are excepts from the discussions that ensued. % What did you hope to accomplish by using this facility that would not have been possible in traditional classrooms? Demonstrated use of software. % What activities were SUCCESSFUL or helpful in the Teaching Theater? Walking up and down the aisles to get students to look back at each other rather than at the front of the room all the time. Exposing students to each others' work. % What activities were NOT SUCCESSFUL in the Teaching Theater? No one identified any activities that were not really successful. % How well did the available SOFTWARE serve your needs? Many students were not familiar with DOS and/or Windows. This was sometimes a problem. Some files were deleted by accident and should have been read-only. Multi-media control through the software was lacking. % How demanding was TEACHING in the Teaching Theater? The logistics of managing the equipment (monitors, overhead, etc.) was quite demanding. It would have been nice if the assistant for the theater was up front with the professor instead of in the control room. % How demanding was PREPARING lectures for the Teaching Theater? Preparation was considerably more demanding. Preparing for two classes seemed to take most of my time this semester. % What additional ADVANTAGES did you discover the Teaching Theater held? The level of engagement among students was very high. Students worked hard on their multi-media presentation Page 32 assignments and were very creative. The technology offered so many ways to express playfulness in group interactions. Allowing students to see each others' work seemed to lead to a better expression of ideas among them. The technology seemed to capture students' imaginations. It served as a motivating force. % What additional DISADVANTAGES did you discover the Teaching Theater held? It seemed that there was a quite a distance between the front and very back of the room. Those in the back had a hard time hearing everything. Students were not always successful accessing their files while using external labs. Support staff in these labs were not familiar with the file sharing system in the AT&T Teaching Theater and were not always able to give help. The lighting was a problem (especially for people in the back of the room) in that if it was dark enough to see the projection screens, it was too dark to see the board. Some colors of markers (e.g., red) were particularly hard to see in low light. Having to go elsewhere on campus to get one's files seemed very artificial. Not having files available there in the room created a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience. We only completed about half as much material as normal. % What will you (would you) do differently NEXT TIME you teach there? Let the students loose to do what they wanted. Let them think of creative uses of the technology. RECOMMENDATIONS AND GUIDANCE In this section we set forth a number of recommendations on changes needed in the room, changes in the use of the room, and we seek to give guidance to future instructors and students using the room. These recommendations are only suggestive since the results are preliminary and based on a small sample at this point. Page 33 THEATRICAL DEVICES Every theatergoer knows that the playwright makes use of a number of theatrical devices to get his or her point across. In the same way, in the traditional classroom, instructors have a collection of techniques that are used for pedagogical purposes. These include the straight lecture, didactic questions and answers, small group discussions, short in-class writing assignments, etc. What are the electronic theatrical devices that instructors may use to engage the students, to drive the point home, and to make the information stick? During the Fall Semester of 1991, the instructors experimented with some of these. Some devices were generalized from the traditional classroom, such as the presentation of lectures, discussion, presentation of slides, etc. Others were devices transferred from computer labs, such as the demonstration of software and the students then trying it on their own workstations. And still others were devices that could exist only in the new electronic media, such as electronic polling, screen grabbing, and hypermedia. During this semester we encouraged instructors to experiment. Our future recommendation is the same: EXPERIMENT. We also recommend that a taxonomy of different, successful devices be assembled for faculty use with concrete examples supplied from the courses that are being taught. Such a catalog of successful examples from previous courses will help to train subsequent teachers and inspire them to new ideas. STAGE MANAGER Besides the actors, a theater needs a stage manager and a number of stage hands. The AT&T Electronic Teaching Theater allows the instructor, the teaching assistants, and/or the computer to perform these functions. The instructor can start and stop events, change backgrounds, lighting, and music by manual control. In general, this is not only too taxing on the instructor, it is distracting to the students. They may feel that instructors are paying more attention to the technology than they are to their students. While the instructor is expected to initiate focal events (e.g., start a discussion, show a video clip), the instructor should not have to manage intermediate or auxiliary steps (such as setting the appropriate lighting, switching the output to the appropriate display). Either an assistant or the computer should manage these processes. Seamless, effortless control of the total learning environment is essential. During the Fall Semester of 1991 the audio/visual and lighting had to be switched through a separate Page 34 controller box with a confusing and inconsistent touch panel menu interface. In the future, control of the audio/visual devices should be computer controlled to mesh with the script for each class. The instructors' computer monitor could display the lecture notes and their selection of audio/visual options related to those notes. Clicking on one of the options would start the appropriate macro command to, for example, start the video tape, route the signal to the left monitor, lower the lights, and set the sound to medium. If the instructor can script his or her lecture outline with macros, then the instructor need only press one button to present a canned sequence of events. CONNECTIVITY TO THE REAL WORLD Theater is somewhere between fantasy and fact. The playwright draws from the world to create characters, plots, and settings. Faculty members do this and hopes their audience takes what they have learned, seen modelled and experienced and applies it to their day-to-day lives. There must be this connectivity and relevence to real world experience. This has always been an important issue in education. Students and faculty draw examples from the real world, apply and practice their theories, and extend the results back into the practical world. However, in the electronic classroom there is a technological edge to connectivity that has both an up-side and a down-side. Connectivity has to do with the transferability of the information itself from the out-of-class world into the classroom and from the classroom back out. In the traditional classroom, the students and instructors merely carry books and papers in and out the door. In a multimedia information environment, the course materials and products are electronic. The information is virtually ubiquitous and can be accessed anywhere on the network. Consequently, one does not need to bring materials to the classroom. Information can be entered elsewhere and accessed in the classroom. Nor does one need to bring materials out of the classroom. Files can be copied or printed at other facilities. In light of this and the logistics problem of providing printouts and floppy disk access in the AT&T classroom, the steering committee decided to restrict the use of disks and to not provide paper printout. Unfortunately, students had major problems accessing files and printing out what they needed. This was a major source of frustration for those who tried it and was a deterrent for others who did not. In at least one class the instructor found it necessary to provide hardcopy printouts of all of the lecture notes that were presented electronically. However, rather than reversing the decision of the steering committee, our recommendation is enhance connectivity and make it effortless and fast. Network pathways need to be transparent to Page 35 the students. Support staff in the campus computer labs need to be trained in accessing the AT&T Teaching Theater. Finally printing needs to be easy and speedy. During the interim, instructors will need to be cautious in assuming that connectivity exists; students will have to be patient; and both instructors and students will have to explore makeshift solutions. Instructors may need to provide hardcopy hand outs to the students. Assignments and exercises may have to be limited to the room itself. Students may have to take notes with pencil and paper. SPECIFIC HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PROBLEMS Hardware and software problems always abound in new systems. Although we experienced some during the semester, they were fewer than anticipated, thanks to the efforts of the support staff. Over the semester we discovered that some equipment just hadn't been wired up yet, other pieces were wired incorrectly, and still others just malfunctioned or broke. Some software ran too slowly because of memory configurations. Some software crashed. However, in general, things worked better than expected. Nevertheless, we have a number of recommendations regarding hardware and software: % We recommend the purchase or development of more software that runs over the network. Additional packages are needed for communication among the workstations. % We recommend a common look and feel to all of the software so that both students and faculty will maintain a sense of familiarity with the user interface across all applications. Windows 3.0* with Program Manager proved to be a sufficient platform for the classroom, although it was not flawless. It was slow and had some problems with the networking software. % We recommend that for each class the computer desk top arrangement of groups be carefully thought out to provide the students with common starting point of tools. Norman (1990) provides an example of such a screen arrangement that makes use of the objects in a traditional classroom as metaphors in the electronic classroom. % We also recommend that instructors and students routinely use hypermedia stackware for lectures, notes, demonstrations, and collaboration. One instructor in the Fall of 1991 used Spinnaker Plus to create stacks for lectures that included graphics, demonstrations of experiments, and word processing fields for collaborative note building. Page 36 SPECIFIC PROBLEMS WITH THE STAGE AND SEATING There is an optimal depth/width ratio for auditoriums. We may not have achieved that ratio with four rows of five workstations in the AT&T Teaching Theater. Due to physical constraints of the space that was available for construction, the room is too deep and not wide enough. The distance from the last row to the large displays at the front of the classroom is too great. The instructor's podium presents a barrier between the instructor and the students. Our recommendation is that the instructor should, when at all possible, stand in front of the podium. When needed, a teaching assistant may sit behind the podium to control events. Furthermore, the instructor should mingle with the students. One instructor found that it was very useful to stand in the back of the room so that the students would turn around and have a sense of group interaction. In other cases, it is useful for the instructor to walk up and down the center aisle looking at the workstation screens rather than standing behind the podium polling screens electronically. Students continue to need an area on which to take pencil and paper notes, but sometimes the keyboard is now in the way. We recommend that a storage area be devised for the keyboard when not in use, or additional writing space be provided by a pull out shelf. CONCLUSION The Fall Semester of 1991 provided an opportunity to gain first hand experience in the AT&T Teaching Theater. The overall impression of the instructors and students was that the Teaching Theater was a success and that electronic classrooms are the direction for the future. Furthermore, the impressions of the instructors and students provided preliminary feedback as to what worked and what didn't, what is important and what isn't. Such diagnostic information helps to delineate the issues that need to be considered in greater detail. Some of these issues involve the physical design of new rooms. What features are essential? What features can be eliminated to reduce the cost of the classrooms? How can classrooms be designed to be more versatile? Other issues involve concepts of instruction embedded in the courseware. What interactions help to engage students in collaborative learning? What links need to be made between Page 37 course materials and products? What is ideal mix of instructor guided lectures and student exploration? In the coming semesters of teaching in the AT&T Teaching Theater we will be gathering more detailed, and quantitative information on its use, evaluations of teaching effectiveness, and assessments of its hardware and software capabilities. This information will help to chart the course of classroom instruction in the age of electronic enhancements, hypermedia, and collaborative networks. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AT&T Information Systems helped to support this project through a grant to the Computer Science Center of the University of Maryland. We are indebted to the following instructors who contributed to the evaluation and helped to review this manuscript: Maryam Alavi, Alexander Chen, Ian Flood, Paul Green, and Ben Shneiderman. In addition, special thanks to goes Glenn Ricart, Project Director; Walter Gilbert, Project Manager; and Ellen Yu, Team Leader of the AT&T Teaching Theater. REFERENCES Clabaugh, S. , Destler, W. W., Falk, D. S., Gilbert, W., McDaniel, C. K., Power, D. J., Ricart, G., & Shneiderman, B. (1988). The AT&T teaching theater: An environment for collaborative learning and research. College Park, MD: University of Maryland. Foster, G. and Stefik, M. (1986). Cognoter: Theory and practice of a Collaborative tool. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86), pp. 7-15, Austin, Texas, December 3-5, ACM Press. Hiltz, S. R. (1988). Collaborative learning in a virtual classroom: Highlights of findings. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '88), pp. 282-290, Portland, Oregon, September 26-28, ACM Press. Laural, B. (1991). Computers as Theater. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Mantei, M. (1988). Capturing the Capture concepts: A case study in the design of computer-supported meeting environments. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '88), pp. 257-270, Portland, Oregon, September 26-28, ACM Press. Page 38 McDonnell, D. and Raymond, J. (1987). Integration of the electronic blackboard and the electronic overhead projector. In The Second Guelph Symposium on Computer Conferencing, pp. 193-197, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, June 1-4, University of Guelph. Newman, D. (1988). Sixth graders and shared data: Designing a LAN environment to support collaborative work. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '88), pp. 291-305, Portland, Oregon, September 26-28, ACM Press. Norman, K. L. (1990). The electronic teaching theater: Interactive hypermedia and mental models of the classroom. urrent Psychology: Research & Reviews, 9, 141-161. Singer, J., Behrend, S. and Roschelle, J. (1988). Children's collaborative use of a computer microworld. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '88), pp. 271-281, Portland, Oregon, September 26-28, ACM Press. University of Guelph (1987). The second Guelph symposium on computer conferencing, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, June 1-4. University of Guelph (1990). The third Guelph symposium on computer mediated communication , University of Guelph, Continuing Education Division, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, May 15-17. Valacich, J. S., Dennis, A. R. and Nunamaker Jr, J. F. (1991). Electronic meeting support: The GroupSystems concept. International Journal of Man Machine Studies, 34, 262-282. ---------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Kent Leigh Norman Kent Norman is an Associate Professor of psychology and an affiliate of the Human/Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He has been instrumental in the design and evaluation of electronic classrooms at the University of Maryland and the development of electronic collaborative learning environments. His academic research has focused on the human/computer interface as a channel of information flow and control. A series of studies on computer menu selection funded by CDC, IBM, and AT&T resulted in his first book, The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface. Current research is on navigation in hypermedia, classroom interaction tools, and the use of metaphors for interfaces. Kent_L_NORMAN@umail.umd.edu (kn8) Page 39 Leslie E. Carter Leslie E. Carter received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology last year from the University of Maryland. Her research there focused on decision making and hypertext. Before completeing her degree, Leslie worked for several companies performing software usability testing. Currently, she is working for CTA, Inc. on an expert system for evaluating user interfaces (under contract with NASA) and on the new Voice Switching Control System for the nation's air traffic controllers (under contract with the FAA). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1994 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU