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and inspired us, such as the NIMIS classroom (Hoppe et al., 2000), personal
response systems, classroom scenarios based on handhelds (DiGiano & Patton,
2002; Zurita & Nussbaum, 2004) or even on multiple mice (Infante, Hidalgo,
Nussbaum, Alarcon, & Gottlieb, 2009)
Our goal in presenting these examples was to show that the orchestration model,
although being somewhat abstract and metaphorical, can be turned into concrete
implementation choices. We hereafter list several technological choices that are
more or less directly connected to the orchestration model.
1. Orchestration technologies are different from distance education since they are
designed for classroom life. They may include on-line activities but the most
salient part of the scenario occurs in face-to-face interactions.
2. A part of e-learning technologies are document-centric, whereas the orches-
tration technologies mostly support activities (e.g. the simulation for
TinkerLamp) and overall diverse forms of interactions (as in ArgueGraph or
Lantern).
3. Orchestration technologies should have a high usability for the teacher. Of
course, the usability also concerns the students but the idea of orchestration is
that teachers may easily interact with the technology despite being overloaded
by other tasks such as managing groups, lecturing, etc.
4. These technologies make orchestration quite physical, i.e. they have to cope
with the spatial organization of the classroom and other spaces as well as
with the location and movements of students and teachers. The development
of human-computer interaction (HCI) towards location-aware services is hence
also pushing learning technologies towards orchestration.
5. These technologies make orchestration very concrete, i.e. something that can
be manipulated by the actors (the tangible aspects) and also something that can
be perceived by all actors (the ambient dimension). The development of HCI
towards concrete elements (tangibles, roomware) is supporting the pedagogical
evolution towards orchestration.
6. Since orchestration technologies have to integrate different activities into a
scenario, they need to include some workflow functionality, i.e. the storage
and reuse of data between activities. These activities can be performed with
heterogeneous software which makes the workflow more complex to implement.
7. Combining the two previous points, when these digital data are represented as
physical objects, the workflow management becomes a public task and hence
becomes easier. This applies to the TinkerSheets but also to explain why walking
to someone with a personal digital assistant (PDA) to share is richer than sending
him the data by WiFi (Roschelle & Pea, 2002).
8. Implementing flexibility is a complex design issue. First, a learning environment
that would be completely open, where teachers can change everything, would not
convey anymore a pedagogical idea. For instance, in ArgueGraph, changing the
group formation criteria from “pair students with opposite opinions” to “pair stu-
dents with similar opinions” is technically easy but pedagogically meaningless.
We refer to this as intrinsic constraints because they correspond to the core idea
