Computer-based interactive systems provide support to an ever widening range of educational activities like enrollment, report card acquisition, and even lecture-taking. Basically, the function of analysis in an interactive design process is to perform a systematic exploration of the way things are and the way they should be. The PACT Analysis of the LOSt system, which is a software package that is used for organising, creating and editing lecture notes and other academic information that would help students capture all of the information that they gather from inside a class, consists of the scrutiny of:
People who will use or be affected by the system
Activities that the system will support (functionality)
Context that the system will be used in (and whether this will affect what you can design)
Technologies that can be designed or brought together to support the Activities (Technologies provide many opportunities for doing things differently).
PACT FORM
People. The LOSt system will be used mainly by students after they have installed the software package in each of their individual laptops. They will also be used by the school’s administration, as they would have to maintain a server which would deliver audio notes, OHP lectures and other information to the students’ laptops. Also, university lecturers will become users of this system, as they are the source of information where the server will get the information that they will transfer to the students’ system from. The use of the system will affect both the students and the school administration. For the students’ part, they will have easier time getting hold of important class lectures and organising them into something suitable to their studying needs. As for the administration and the lecturers, they can be assured that what wealth of knowledge they are trying to impart to their students will now have higher chances of getting through to the intended recipients.
The students would not have special requirements, as their usage will basically be the same for every one of them, in that they will have their written notes, scanned paper-based information and internet links fed directly to their computers and the audio notes and OHP lecture notes transferred to them from the school server. The administration, of course, will need to install the LOSt server to their system for them to be able to transfer their lecturers’ notes from their system to the system of the students. Their major tasks are
to program changes in inputs or control routines and to serve as
backup in case of failure, monitoring computers, which, in turn, integrate information flow from various lecturers. The lecturers would have no special requirements from the system. Each of the users could extend what can be designed for the system, as the educational environment is one open to innovation and progress. Another people aspect of the analysis involves such considerations as the users’ knowledge of computers, the nature of their role in the use of the LOSt system, their underlying abilities, and their semantic and syntactic knowledge about computers would largely affect the design of the interactive system. There is now the need to design it so that it would be user-friendly.
Activities. The temporal aspects, co-operation, complexity, safety and the nature of the content of an activity affect the effective and efficient implementation of a system design. LOSt would support such activities that would promote better lecture organisation for the students, activities as downloading notes from the university website, recording lecturers’ speech, linking slides to speech, support for summarising revision information, uploading assignments to the lecturers’ website, importing scanned paper-based info, taking notes live during lectures, acquiring audio recordings and OHP lectures and downloading content from the University LOSt server. The host of possibilities that the system can do would help in the process of the formulation of a design. The activities that the students do now are the traditional methods of taking down lecture notes, not interactive as they would have liked. Linear notes and patterned notes are what they mostly use. In the linear form of taking down notes, students use a numerical system for paragraphing or an alphabetical system which helps with cross-referencing and organising their notes for revision later. Patterned notes are also used by the students, or those which make use of nuclear, spider-grams, diagrammatic, mind-maps and other note-taking tools which are produced from standard lecture notes so that a student could clarify the key points of the lecture. These notes were produced in the first review after the lecture and were added to throughout the semester. Consequently, students then used the notes for exam preparation. Lecturers almost always make their slides available online, which the students go to the trouble of downloading instead of being sent to their laptops. Students, lecturers and administrators alike would have liked more interactivity when it comes to the lectures issue, thus the LOSt system.
Context of use. The educational realm is an ever-developing arena for interactive systems design. Thus, a sensing mechanism can be designed and embedded in the system to detect and capture indexes of changes, so that the system effectively changes its operational modes and characteristics to optimize its interfaces to users. There is a need for interpretive filters to detect signs of contextual changes that need to be used as triggers for appropriate transformations of the system or interface configuration. In order to support particular student lecture-absorbing activities, the appropriate setting of contexts is necessary for the enhancement of user interactions with artefacts. The context in which the LOSt system exists paves the way for faster dissemination of text and graphic information as well as motion video materials and image data to the students. By incorporating high quality video and digital sound in lecture notes and making it available to the students for their use, it makes the learning process more interesting and stimulating, while at the same time greatly increases the rate of learning and knowledge retention.
The environment in which the system will be mostly used will specifically be inside a classroom, the environment would not require any special design for the system, just the assurance that even though the students are outside the particular class, they can still get hold of the information that they need from their class lectures. The environment would be that the lecturer provides all learning materials, demonstration, tutoring, testing, administrative and advisory guidance, interpersonal motivation, discipline and counselling to individual. Each student would have his/her own laptop, feeding the laptop with notes as the lecturer delivers his/her presentation and later downloading additional lecture materials from what was presented in class during the lecture from the University server.
Technology. Input, output, communication, and content is important in making the last part of the PACT analysis. The hardware, in this case the students’ laptops, should have the capacity to download and upload lecture and assignments and should have audio recording hardware (microphone, sound card) which would record the lecturers’ speech delivered in class and all other audio materials necessary for learning the lessons, and a high-speed wireless internet connection to download and upload lecture files from the University’s server to the students’ system in their individual laptops. Alternative input devices such as light pens and touch panels, which will be particularly useful to students with disabilities. A hardware issue concern is the potential complaints of University students who would have to work in front of their laptops for considerably longer periods of time. It is important to know what effects are attributable to the laptops or to other studying factors.
The software would basically have to make sure that it could support what the hardware could offer. The core functions of the software will consist of editing, publishing, exchanging documents and messages, data management. Other applications such as those specially tailored for particular types of analyses, or for checking through text for spelling errors, or for doing the text-graphic document typography in a special area of technical portrayal, and so on may also exist. Connections of laptops to the shared LOSt system will be via high-speed wireless internet. The software should allow for students to download any portion of the lecture that they find relevant, enabling students to go back at any time to previous screens of the presentation. Students can then concentrate on the material being presented, rather than focus on taking notes.
Through these technologies, activities outlined above would be realised entirely to the benefit of all the target users. The existence of laptops for every student in the University would provide the opportunity for the LOSt system to be fully utilised. The ease of typing lecture notes and the organisational benefit of knowing notes are archived in files in the internal memory of their laptops and for easy retrieval from the University server. Using the LOSt system for note taking is an example of technology rightly applied. Beyond a mere productivity tool, a computer used in this way becomes technology that facilitates understanding.
0 comments:
Post a Comment