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Towards a classroom ecology of devices: interfaces for collaborative scripts

The ShareIT Project has been investigating how interactive tabletops can support co-located collaborative learning. As interactive tabletops are still in their infancy, basic questions of how these interfaces support collaboration are still unanswered. To address these, we have been conducting conventional psychology experiments, where a small intervention is run with a significant number of groups and statistical comparisons can be made across conditions. While that is a useful research paradigm for understanding the potential of interactive tabletops by themselves, a different perspective will be needed to integrate them into a working classroom. This position paper is about bridging that gap by envisioning interactive tabletops as part of a larger classroom ecology of devices. It examines the potential of different devices and different interfaces on those devices to support different parts of a collaborative script. Based on our work on interactive tabletops, I present three examples of how different interfaces can enable, encourage, and enforce collaboration. A better understanding of these interfaces ultimately leads to better tools to instantiate collaborative scripts.