Behind the
scenes Ubiquitous Learning
Ubiquitous Learning Research Lab is a group focused on
researching and developing educational technologies and
experiences to meet the demands of an information driven 21st century society. Founded by a diverse group of
enthusiastic students and incubated in the Department
of Computer Science and Engineering, ULRL strives to
make an impact through its research projects and initiatives.
When the Frooti wouldn’t come up...
I can trace back the roots to when I was a
kid. I was on a trip with my family and we
were waiting for our train at a railway station. My younger sister (around 5 years old
then) was having trouble drinking Frooti
using a straw. Well, it was understandable,
since she had never used a straw before
then. She kept trying, but the liquid would
not come up. Now, being her elder brother,
I had to rise to the occasion. But how was
I to explain the mechanism of drawing out
air from the straw which would create a
low pressure inside and force the liquid to
climb up due to the atmospheric pressure
above the surface? It certainly wouldn’t have
worked at that age. I tried different ways
of teaching her to do so. Nothing seemed
to work. I asked her to imitate what I was
doing. But she ended up just moving her
cheeks inside, but not drawing out the air.
No matter what I did to explain the method,
it did not work. Then an idea struck me. I
asked her to put the straw inside her mouth
and do exactly what she would do in reaction to having eaten a raw spice. And, voila!
The frooti came climbing up the straw. I
still remember the excitement in her eyes,
and the innocence of those childhood days
amazes me.
As I prepare myself to take up a job as
a Teach for India fellow, I find this incident
as a reminder of something I love doing,
that is to teach and to think of ways to create better educational experiences. In retrospect, the Frooti incident might seem like
a trivial one, but without realizing it, I had
tried something called Imitation Learning,
which is how most species learn important
life skills - by imitating their elders. Though
it did not work in this particular case, what
did work out was Learning by Analogy,
a method through which we understand
many of the complex things about our
world. These along with many other methods form the fundamentals of the science
of learning.
52
The Shoreline
Research Lab
When the seed got planted...
The past four years in NITK have given
me ample opportunities to work on some
amazing projects which shaped the way I
think and will probably be the foundations
of everything I do for the rest of my life.
As a second year, I worked on developing
educational applications for the visually impaired students of Roman Catherine Lobo
School for the Blind, Mangalore. This gave
me a completely different perspective on
what learning actually is and how to focus
on the essentials. In my third year, I worked
on an online education platform to teach
school children about environmental science in an interactive way with real world
data. In my final year, as I prepared to wrap
up these amazing four years of college life,
I realized that there was much that I could
give back to college through the experiences
that I gained and the partnerships I have
fostered with some amazing people and organizations around the world. This is when
I decided to start a research lab that would
work on developing educational technologies for the future and create opportunities
for my juniors to build up on the work that
had already been done. I proposed this idea
to the CS&E department and they were
more than willing to promote such an initiative. I have been more than fortunate to
have brought together a wonderful set of
juniors who will carry forward our mission.
What is Ubiquitous Learning?
As the name suggests, ubiquitous learning
m eans learning that happens everywhere. So
how is it different from traditional methods
of learning and why is it important to start
thinking about its future?
To answer the first question, there is a
growing consensus among experts and educators that the traditional classroom model
is breaking. The world has changed so rapidly in the past 10 years that a model which
was developed to serve the needs of the industrial revolution no longer fits. It is not
to say that the system was badly designed.
It was a wonderful system in the time when
By Chandramouli Sharma
it was made, but as everything around us
seems to be changing so rapidly in terms of
technological innovation, this model doesn’t
seem to serve the needs of the information
revolution. A ubiquitous learning environment is one where learning happens by
the mere presence of the learner without
any conscious effort being put into it. In
the words of late Professor Randy Paucsh
of CMU, learning by “head fake”, where
you learn something by actually wrapping
it around another activity and obtain the
desired results subconsciously. With the advent of mobile and web technologies we are
getting closer to that environment.
The work we do..
At ULRL, our focus is to develop technologies that can lead to a better understanding
of the world around us. We do so by not
limiting ourselves to one particular technology or approach. Instead we focus on an
iterative design approach where we keep
making an idea better with constant feedback from researchers, students and teachers. We actively partner with schools to test
our hypothesis and produce work that can
change the way we think about learning and
teaching. We work with web and mobile
technologies, educational games and 3D
printing. We employ several gamification elements into our research projects.
Project CurioCity
Currently, around 50% of urban dwellers live in cities with between 1,00,000
- 5,00,000 people, and fewer than 10% of
these urban dwellers live in megacities. This
percentage will reach 60% by 2030. When
such a huge number of people live in cities, it makes sense to teach students about
how their city works. But unfortunately,
due to systemic issues and lack of a common platform, school children hardly get
to learn about their cities. Quick test: Can
you tell where all the sewage goes in your
city and how it is treated? Can you tell the
primary source of water in your city? What
is the electricity consumption of your city