Imagine a class of 50 students, in physical or virtual space. Let's say it's a course in art history, literature, or physics.  What are some of the activities that instructors and students ideally should be able to carry out?

• in response to a question, students or faculty should be able to import and display information.  Sometimes the person will have anticipated the need for this information and prepared before the class session.  But sometimes the need is not realized until the class is meeting (assuming that the class meets in real-time).

• display two or more images (pictures, texts, videos, etc.) simultaneously

• show an object in their possession (a lab experiment, a jewel) that is quite small

• point to elements of one or more such images or objects while discussing them. (My thanks to Sumner Myers who, in the 1980s, pointed out to me how important pointing is, and how difficult for students to do in large courses, whether they meet in physical or virtual space.) This ability to point to two or more spots in a text, image, movie or sound track while discussing them is crucial, yet most learning spaces for classes of any size make it impossible, or quite difficult.

How can these activities be carried out in physical and virtual spaces?

Physical: An increasing number of classrooms are equipped to show many types of information: computer output, cable television, videotape, film, slides... Some rooms have cameras so that people can show objects, documents, or experiments with magnification. Sometimes the creation of the material occurs outside the classroom. The course may involve video recording a student's performance so that it can be critiqued by other students, outside experts, or the faculty member. "Performances" include, for example, dance, making a speech, facilitating a group, examining a witness in a moot court, teaching children, ...  Equipment and facilities ought to permit recording, editing (if needed) and viewing with a minimum of professional oversight, if all students are to be recorded.

Display: Most rooms have white boards and, sometimes, easels.  Some spaces employ large public screens for projection and/or multiple smaller public screens so that everyone can see multiple images simultaneously.  Some strategies (also) rely on students using personal computers (e.g., desktop machines, laptops, tablets). 

• Caution: in designing large screen projection, consider sight lines, both for students to see the screen and for faculty to see students (without being blinded by the beam of the projector or standing between students and the screen). Thanks to Larry MacPhee of Northern Arizona University for that reminder.

Pointing can occur if the person doing the pointing uses a cursor, laser pointer or other device. Pointing is usually easy for the professor but many spaces for large classes don't make it easy for students to point while speaking, especially in ways that a) everyone else in the class can see, and b) don't require the student to take class time to go from his or her seat to the screen.

Here are some examples of physical classrooms where the opportunities for students to import, display, and point to information are unusually rich. (Another set of strategies, described below in the virtual section, can also be applied in physical classrooms when faculty and students have computers and Internet connections.)

• Tablets: For an assignment in the analysis of electrical circuits, Prof. Joe Tront of Virginia Tech gave tablet PCs to pairs of students. Students download a problem to their tablet, use the tablet to sketch a circuit, then send their diagrams to Tront's tablet. Using Presenter XP software, Prof. Tront can then display selected solutions for a whole class discussion (click here to see an image of the display, showing one student solution on the left, and slides available for projection on the right.). This classroom arrangement makes it easier to involve the whole class in creating, comparing and contrasting different solutions to the same problem. 

• Wallenberg Hall at Stanford provides some nice (though currently high-priced) examples of how a single room can provide several computer and physical display spaces that are easy to manipulate.  This slideshow by Dan Gilbert of Stanford, presented at the January 2004 National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) conference in San Diego (USA), gives a nice picture of the facilities and equipment at Wallenberg. One nice feature: Stanford's iSpace software enables students sitting with wireless laptops to grab files from their own machines and 'drag' them onto a projection screen so that the whole class can see them, then use cursors to point to what they're talking about in an image or document.  Dan explained to me that one of the problems facing designers of file management systems is where to store the student's work, especially if, over time, students are going to work together using different computers in different physical spaces. Imagine being in a room with twenty students and laptops, and three screens on which files belonging to different students are being projected.  How can file architectures make it easier to drag a file from the "screen" to a new laptop, or from one screen to another?

• I've not used SMART whiteboards or other products, but the company's web site has some nice videos of products like these in action.

The discussion to this point has focused on classrooms for formal instruction.  An increasing number of institutions are also developing facilities to make it easier for students to access and use visual information in informal learning spaces, including couches in hallways, library study rooms, and cafes. Here are some slides (slide1 slide2 slide3 slide4)  from MIT's Phil Long (a TLT Group Senior Consultant) illustrating some of the possibilities.

Virtual:  When using common course management systems, it's difficult to easily point to a spot in an image or a document. It's also usually difficult to link a threaded discussion directly to such a spot in an image or a document so that participants can go directly from the spot to the conversation, or from the conversation back to the spot. 

• Beth Harris at the Fashion Institute of Technology has used Flickr in her class to provide a medium for students to annotate and discuss images. Click here to see an example of such an image, and how students point to different elements as they analyzed it, asynchronously.  Flickr provides better tools than Word (pasting a picture and using drawing tools) or the shared whiteboard of conferencing software such as Adobe Connect, Elluminate, or HorizonWimba, Harris argues. When using those other tools, students' arrows and comments can obscure the image(s) they're analyzing. In contrast, as you'll see in the linked illustration in Flickr, annotations are only visible when the viewer's mouse points to that element of the image. Otherwise the image is clearly visible. One limit of Flickr, however, is that the student can annotate only one image at a time; comparing and contrasting elements in two or more images is more difficult.

Can you send us an example of asynchronous communications systems that make these kinds of pointing easy?

In synchronous communications systems (e.g. Elluminate, HorizonLive, Macromedia Breeze, and many others) application sharing and shared whiteboards are coming into wider use.  If you are acquiring such a system, find out what's involved in giving students the power to show their work and point while they discuss it.

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