What is the Tuple Spaces for Collaborative Learning Project?
The Tuple Spaces project is exploring the application of an architecture from distributed system research, tuple spaces, to the coordination of multiple learners in collaborative educational activities. Increasingly, learners are bringing mobile computing devices to class. Moreover, modern educational activities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curricula require learners to take roles, contribute ideas, solve aspects of a larger problem, and work together as a team. These activities imply systematic coordination of learner participation. Yet today's classroom technologies provide only ad hoc solutions to the problem of coordination.
Working with Virginia Tech and Christopher Newport University, we are testing whether the distributed computing concept of tuple spaces can provide a robust, flexible, sustainable solution to this coordination problem. Together, we are developing methods and knowledge that better align social needs and distributed computational techniques at their foundations, and testing this approach with documented scenarios from prior work published by our team and others. We are also designing new scenarios that leverage the architecture to engage learners optimally in cognitive, collaborative work. Our research explores the conceptual alignment, programming complexity, and classroom usability of this approach.
>>learn moreThe Tuples project is supported by the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program under grant #0427783.