I was happy to see some new faces pre­sent­ing at last month’s Inter­net Librar­ian con­fer­ence, with one of them being Will Kurt. While I had a bad cold and couldn’t attend all of the ses­sions I wanted to, I’m glad I was able to make it to his ses­sion because it rep­re­sented what I hope is one grow­ing trend.

Will’s first pre­sen­ta­tion at #il2009 was about the anatomy appli­ca­tion he’s devel­oped for med­ical stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Nevada Reno, using a Microsoft Sur­face table. Both DOK and the Darien Pub­lic Library are using Sur­face tables to present infor­ma­tion visu­ally (and Gretchen Hams gave a great talk after Will’s about Darien’s expe­ri­ence), but Will’s app is the first learn­ing appli­ca­tion that I’ve seen that was cre­ated by a library. Stu­dents are respond­ing pos­i­tively, and usage sta­tis­tics are going up. It sounds like a win-win sit­u­a­tion all the way around, assum­ing you can afford a Sur­face table ($12,000+).

In addi­tion, you can watch a video of Will’s pre­sen­ta­tion.

I also saw a pre­sen­ta­tion about an inter­est­ing project at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land, Bal­ti­more County about “inter­ac­tive learn­ing rooms” they’ve cre­ated for stu­dents, which are essen­tially study rooms with inter­ac­tive white­board walls. The white­boards are added for the incred­i­bly low cost of one Wiimote (about $40) using Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote hacks. If you don’t have a Sur­face table, this is an inter­est­ing and much less expen­sive step in that direc­tion. I love the idea of inter­ac­tive spaces in libraries, and I hope this trend grows, too.

Libraries are all about enhanc­ing learn­ing, and this seems to me like another step towards get­ting away from pure lec­ture or text-based instruc­tion. Along with technology/gadget “pet­ting zoos,” instruc­tion that incor­po­rates gam­ing prin­ci­ples, and the recent crop of “23 Things” pro­grams for the pub­lic, I have hope for more expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing expe­ri­ences cre­ated by libraries, not just using tech­nol­ogy and tools as new ways of pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion and maps.

I’d love to hear about any­thing your library is doing to imple­ment inter­ac­tive learn­ing expe­ri­ences and environments.

My notes from Will’s talk:

Ubiq­ui­tous Com­put­ing and the Microsoft Sur­face at UNR – Will Kurt, Appli­ca­tions Devel­op­ment Librarian

Com­put­ers should plug in to us, not the other way around
MIT’s Sixth Sense project

We bring our com­puter with us now (smart­phones), not go to it
Microsoft Sur­face table – okay for cof­fee and even chang­ing babies on it
Play­ing with pic­tures has been rel­a­tively pop­u­lar on their Surface

Their admis­sions office really likes the concierge appli­ca­tion that gives you cam­pus infor­ma­tion
have 5 min­utes to impress prospec­tive stu­dents and their par­ents
Kids *love* this and they always rush to it

Shows how intu­itive the inter­face is
Most peo­ple thought this was a ridicu­lous expense
Had to go in to cre­at­ing in-house appli­ca­tions
“suc­cess­ful new tech­nolo­gies need to be per­ceived as valu­able, not novel”

Put The Tree of Life game on it
peo­ple didn’t like it at first because it’s not a tra­di­tional game but then they got into it, exper­i­ment­ing with the rules and play­ing with their friends

Then Microsoft released a sec­ond set of apps
Check­ers, chess – Sur­face lets you visu­al­ize the rules on the board

Don’t try to emu­late web browsers on a Sur­face because it has one tiny screen as your whole world and one touch point
You can bring all kinds of con­tent from the net into the Sur­face environment

They built an app of high-resolution anatomy images
Sur­faces are multi-touch *and* multi-user
Add some­thing to where the stu­dents already are, work­ing together, in a nat­ural way
They can put their lab on the table and it has data about it
This has been hugely suc­cess­ful – have 2 units avail­able and it got more than 70 hours of usage in just the first two weeks
Every stu­dent he’s talked to absolutely love it – it’s use­ful, so it tran­scends just novelty

My notes from The Wiimote IWB and Library Instruc­tion – May Chang, Shu Qian, Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land, Bal­ti­more County (UMBC):

All they need to do this on the cheap is a wiimote, Blue­tooth down­load, and inter­ac­tive pen – that’s it!
Wiimotes cover a 45 degree angle, so if you have two, you can pretty much cover the whole area

This type of setup is portable, too, whereas an Inter­ac­tive White Board isn’t
Cre­ated “active learn­ing rooms” – auto logins when they book the room
Chem­istry and art stu­dents love it – draw­ing with a pen is much more nat­ural than using a mouse

2 options for instruc­tional soft­ware for Wiimote Inter­ac­tive White­board
– Activein­spire stu­dio ver­sion
– can also use Microsoft tools like OneNote and Pow­er­point with the shar­ing tools

Did pilot instruc­tion ses­sions for the inter­na­tional stu­dents at the Eng­lish Lan­guage Center