This theme is best understood through the Tabula Rasa project, an extension of eClass, but with an interactive focus (tools and participation techniques for distributed students and teachers). eClass was a successful prototype in understanding how technology might best be built and used in the classroom for capture and access.

Like eClass, Tabula Rasa seeks to revolutionize teaching and learning through evolutionary techniques. For example, the system should not force the lecturer (or students) to change their normal routines, but should instead encourage good practices and enable innovative teaching by augmenting traditional devices with computational ability.

Fundamentally, the act of giving a lecture can be considered authoring multimedia content [7]. Tabula Rasa will allow teachers and researchers to author multimedia content simply by doing what they already do: teach. We can also include naturalistic interactions between students and instructors as multimedia content, and we can provide these materials in an easy to use, ubiquitous interface [4] (see figures 1 & 2).

Unlike eClass, Tabula Rasa will also serve as a distance learning classroom for teaching distributed classes at Ball State and UCL (initially), enabling inter-collegiate coursework and collaboration. Also unlike eClass, the system will serve as a research testbed - a living laboratory - that will enable the exploration and evaluation of new learning ideas and technologies such as electronic student notes, distributed teaching, shared whiteboard spaces, virtual student interactions, and the effects of automated capture and access on learning and studying. Finally, it should be noted that Tabula Rasa is intended to be compatible with all makes of electronic whiteboards, computers, and projectors, and available for collaboration as open source.

We are nearing completion of the contruction of our new electronic classroom here at UCLIC. Shown here is our classroom and it's 8m electronic whiteboard display capable of output and input across the whole surface of the board.

Please check these pages for information on the progress of Tabula Rasa.