The hardships incurred by this decision were far outweighed by the ease of cross-platform distribution, a must for our student population. Our major contribution beyond this existing work is the concentration on in-class capture of information that is to be augmented through coordination with other classroom information via the Web. Several of the research prototypes cited above have been subjected to some form of evaluation to determine both usability and usefulness. The two most substantial evaluation studies have been conducted at PARC and Hewlett-Packard. The initial evaluation we report in this paper is based on a 10-week experiment in a live classroom and provides both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of student reaction to the technology.
Many researchers investigate the effect of technology in education.
There is an important distinction for research in this area, based on whether the research is focused on education or on technology. We have taken a technology focus in our work so far, as evidenced by the way we describe our work and evaluate its impact. Before we can honestly assess the educational impact of ubiquitous computing technology, we must first develop robust, though not necessarily perfect, prototypes that have been tested in real environments. In the wider arena of educational technology, there must be both forms of research.