Fred Videon’s research while affiliated with University of Washington and other places

In this paper, we describe preliminary work on an ink editing application that allows an instructor to correct mistakes to digital ink written during a presentation that is to be archived. These corrections are then seamlessly reintegrated into the digital archive so that when the presentation is replayed the corrected ink is displayed instead of the original incorrect ink. We base our results on a system we have developed and prototype the work flow from initial presentation, through correction, updating the archive and playback. We show that a simple mechanism for correction is effective and low effort for the instructor. A key technical challenge that is addressed is the substitution of strokes by matching of the original and corrected ink.

We present a case study of an international distance education course involving two sites in the US and one site in Pakistan. We use the case study to examine the elements of the distance learning environment, and specifically how those elements can be best used to promote classroom interaction. In particular we discuss the effectiveness of two software tools for distance learning that we have developed: ConferenceXP for video conferencing and Classroom Presenter to facilitate interaction across sites. We bring special attention to the use of student artifacts including digital ink and text, and their use in the presentation of design proposals, the facilitation of critiques, and in the promotion of general interaction.

This paper describes a novel offering of a US- based course in Computer Science at a Chinese university. A senior-level Algorithms course from the University of Washington was offered at Beihang University in Beijing, China through Tutored Video Instruction, whereby lectures recorded in class at the University of Washington were subsequently shown at Beihang and facilitated by local teaching assistants. In this mode of instruction, the Chinese teaching assistants conducted interactive classes using both the video materials and a classroom interaction system (Classroom Presenter) for electronically supported student activities. These activities were done using a system of networked Tablet PCs, which allowed the students to electronically submit their work to the instructor, and enabled the instructor to display student submissions as well as ink on the lecture slides. This work has two main contributions: it demonstrates that Tutored Video Instruction coupled with classroom interaction technology is a viable strategy for offering asynchronous distance versions of courses while maintaining the interactivity of classroom environments. It also shows how language and cultural barriers can be overcome by combining recorded materials with facilitated delivery.

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based interaction system that supports the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students. Initial deployments show that using the technology can achieve a wide range of educational goals and foster a more participatory classroom environment.

In this paper, we present a study of how instructors draw diagrams in the process of delivering lectures. We are motivated by wanting to understand challenges and opportunities for automatically analyzing diagrams, and to use this to improve tools to support the delivery of presentations and the viewing of archived lectures. The study was conducted by analyzing a large group of examples of diagrams collected from real lectures that were delivered from a Tablet PC. The main result of the paper is the identification of three specific challenges in analyzing spontaneous instructor diagrams: separating the diagram from its annotations and other surrounding ink, identifying phases in discussion of a diagram, and constructing the active context in a diagram.

In this paper, we report on an empirical exploration of digital ink and speech usage in lecture presentation. We studied the video archives of five Master's level Computer Science courses to understand how instructors use ink and speech together while lecturing, and to evaluate techniques for analyzing digital ink. Our interest in understanding how ink and speech are used together is to inform the development of future tools for supporting classroom presentation, distance education, and viewing of archived lectures. We want to make it easier to interact with electronic materials and to extract information from them. We want to provide an empirical basis for addressing challenging problems such as automatically generating full text transcripts of lectures, matching speaker audio with slide content, and recognizing the meaning of the instructor's ink. Our results include an evaluation of handwritten word recognition in the lecture domain, an approach for associating attentional marks with content, an analysis of linkage between speech and ink, and an application of recognition techniques to infer speaker actions.

We are interested in understanding how digital ink and speech are used together in presentation. Our long range goal is to develop tools to analyze the ink and speech channels of recorded lectures. As a first step in this process, we are making a detailed study of instructors' digital ink usage in real university lectures. This work is being done in the context of a Tablet-PC based pre- sentation system we have developed, but is applicable to other systems which record digital ink and speech. In this paper we concentrate on how instructors draw and use diagrams in the process of lecture delivery and identify phenomena which are important when automat- ically processing the diagrammatic ink.

Synchronous distance education can partner students and professors from different geographic or cultural regions, allowing them to share and learn from each other. Technology must support the sharing of ideas and materials. Using an iterative design approach, we investigated challenges in synchronous distance learning environments through observation of masters-level courses connecting two learning sites. Through observations, interviews, and surveys we learned of two major challenges: (1) low-quality audio/video makes interaction difficult; and, (2) presentation technologies in distance learning environments make extemporaneous teaching difficult. We developed and deployed a new distance learning system using Internet based video conferencing and a pen computer based presentation system. We studied system use in a masters level course. Analysis of qualitative data (observation notes, surveys, interview transcripts) collected in the course suggest that technological interruptions increased the feeling of separation between the sites, while the integration of natural handwriting with slides increased flexibility and was perceived positively by students and instructors.

We have developed and deployed a lecture presentation system called Classroom Presenter in which the instructor uses a Tablet PC as a presentation device. The system has been deployed in courses at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, and the University of San Diego, and has been favorably received by students and instructors. In this paper we present an overview of the system and discuss particular uses and advantages of the system in small and large lectures as well as distance education scenarios. We discuss two system features in greater detail, a facility for supporting multiple versions of slides for instructor notes, and a facility for delivering student feedback in real time to the instructor. We report on in class use of these facilities.