Active paper for active learning

Abstract

Paper documents have great advantages in readability, portability and familiarity, but are necessarily static and slow to update. Much recent research has concentrated on the dynamic demonstrations, immediate feedback, and easy updating that can be provided by electronic teaching material. Although an increasing number of teaching packages make use of both paper and electronic documents, the two are typically accessed by completely separate interfaces. We have been taking a different approach and investigating the use of a DigitalDesk (Wellner, 1991; Wellner, 1993) as a means of integrating normal paper teaching material with electronic versions of the same material. Many printed books also exist in electronic form, and our goal is to allow these books to be used as natural interfaces to any additional information that may be present in the electronic version.