Abstract:

One of the growing phenomena in contemporary university education is the growing presence of notebook users during class. observing the students we found that of course many of them employ the online computers for communication (instant messaging, chat, email etc.) or 
playing games. At the same time, many of them use google, wikipedia or similar services to search for additional information, different views and relevant links regarding the matter at hand.

In an ongoing project, we try to find ways to offer interesting ways for the students to make productive and meaningful use of the fact that they are online during class. also, we want to introduce systems that allow them to benefit from the fact that they are all attending the same lectures. Since we have a number of very large classes at our university (>500 students), our goal is to benefit from one of Tim O'Reillys web 2.0-memes: "software that gets better the more people use it".

In the talk, I will show the systems we designed and tested, and report from the experiences we made.
 

Biographical Information:

Peter Purgathofer is associate professor at the design and assessment of Technology Institute, Informatics Faculty, Vienna University of  Technology. His work centers around the significance and value of  design within the software engineering process, in theory and practice. Also, he works on aspects of the interplay between  technology and society. He approaches e-learning problems from the perspectives of an university teacher and an interaction designer.