Check the official homepage for the ischool
project : http://www.interactivespaces.net
Vision
The vision of this project is to develop software infrastructure, GUI’s
and spatial concepts for new interactive school environments. The project
aims to develop an open and “fluent” information technology
with sufficient accessibility and robustness to support learning in and
outside the physical limits of the school.
The projects aims to create a learning space where the everyday cultural
competences, the curiosity and the narrative skills and desires of children
and adolescents meet the outside world that surrounds them, the teacher
and the school.
Also both students and teachers are provided with the means of
experiencing coherence between the use if digital and physical materials
across school libraries, classrooms and on fieldtrips.
Background
The combination of architecture and with a range of computer science disciplines
(hypermedia, pervasive computing, human-computer interaction and augmented
reality) creates unique new ways of integrating IT-technology into school
environments.
Architectural the purpose is to move away from IT being something to “be
placed on a desk” or “hung on the wall” in the classroom
towards a much more natural and spatial integration of IT into the learning
environment.
Done correctly IT-technology can support modern learning principles demand
for physical and use centred flexibility in the school environment of
tomorrow.
On a technological level the use of advanced IT highly integrated in the
learning situation can create physical and virtual relations between people,
physical objects, places, spaces, and the digital information found on
the Internet and in digital libraries.
By making IT omnipresent at school, it can be used as an integrated part
of communicating knowledge, of working individually and in groups and
of communication between students, teachers, parents and external partners
e.g. museums or private companies etc.
The project
Using thorough studies of present day school environments as input the
project aims to create prototypes of the future school environment in
the Interactive Spaces laboratory.
In an iterative process several school classes will use the prototypes
to “simulate” working on school projects.
The project is running until May 2005.