The Chawton House Project

The project covers the following areas:

• Overview
• Co-design of pervasive experiences
• A persistent infrastructure
• Tools for authoring pervasive experiences
• Record and reuse

Overview

Chawton House Library is an Elizabethan manor house that once belonged to Jane Austen's brother Edward but is now owned by a charitable foundation that operates it as a study centre for early English women's writing. The site is ideal for developing pervasive experiences as it has a wide variety of visitors including academics studying at the Centre, coach parties from bodies such as the Jane Austen Society of America, and groups of children on fieldtrips.

Starting the activity outside the house

Initial work on the project involved engaging the curators of the house in the co-design of a “visitors’ experience”. Through the use of focused workshops and in-situ capturing of anecdotal audio content, we have looked at the process of eliciting content from the curators to inform the design of new authoring tools. The content created has been repurposed by teachers from Whiteley Primary School to construct a literacy based fieldtrip.

Recording information on the device

A group of Year 5 students from Whiteley Primary School in Hampshire was the first to trial the new technology. As a result of an experience constructed by their teachers, the pupils were guided in the art of storytelling. The teachers left instructions which flashed up on their PDAs (personal data assistants) at various places in the grounds of the house, such as the walled garden or on the main drive. The instructions asked the pupils to undertake one of a variety of contextual activities, such as making observations, role-playing a scene, or just moving on to a new location. The pupils could also play audio clips describing parts of the grounds and record all of their own annotations. All this information could be replayed in the classroom at a later date.

“ This is a good example of using new technology to improve our children’s learning. The ICT tools have allowed adults to help develop the children’s literacy skills and the children have been highly motivated by the approach. ”

Mrs. Pat Bradley, Head teacher from Whiteley Primary School

As Professor David De Roure commented: “The main emphasis has been on using the landscape as a writing aide. This is the first time that we have worked on deploying such advanced technology to improve literacy rather than science.”

In addition to the aim of providing a novel augmented field trip, the following research goals were addressed by the project:

Co-design of pervasive experiences

An essential part of our work has been acquiring an understanding of the specific nature of Chawton and of the work of curators and teachers that we seek to support and extend. Questions that have arisen include: How can we augment the grounds of an historic house without disturbing its atmosphere? How can we enable curators to create new experiences that attract and engage visitors? How can very different types of experiences be created, possibly by different “users” of the house? And how do we engage in co-design?

Capturing content using a map of the grounds

Eliciting content from curators is done most naturally in-situ. We decided to capture their stories and anecdotes as they took us on a series of guided tours. An ongoing issue is coping with the fact that curators do not think of content in terms of categories of information, yet we wish visitors to be able to specify their interests to more specifically target the audio presented to them on the automated tours.

Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M. J., Millard, D. E., Michaelides, D. T., Cruickshank, D. G. and De Roure, D. C. ( 2006 ) The Literacy Fieldtrip: Using UbiComp to Support Children's Creative Writing . In Proceedings of 5th International Conference for Interaction Design and Children , pp.17-24, Tampere, Finland .

Hornecker, E., Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M. J., Millard, D. E., Michaelides, D. T., Cruickshank, D. G. and De Roure, D. C. ( 2006 ) UbiComp in Opportunity Spaces: Challenges for Participatory Design . In Proceedings of Participatory Design Conference (PDC '06) , pp.47-56, Trento, Italy .

Halloran, J., Hornecker, E., Fitzpatrick, G., Millard, D. E. and Weal, M. J. ( 2005 ) The Chawton House Experience - Augmenting the Grounds of a Historic Manor House . In Proceedings of Workshop - Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: Towards a New Understanding of People's Experience in Museums , pp.54-65, Limerick, Ireland .

A persistent infrastructure

The Chawton project architecture has been designed to support a wide range of different users to persist at Chawton House Library over a long period of time, and to grow dynamically as needed. We needed to look at how we might create an extensible and persistent infrastructure that can be extended in terms of devices, infrastructure, content and types of experience.

The basic infrastructure is designed to be installed at the house and exist as a permanently running system that evolves over time as new information is added and new experiences are created. The overall goal is for it to be maintained by the curators of the house with IT support where necessary. The infrastructure can be broadly divided into two parts, the physical infrastructure and the information infrastructure.

The physical infrastructure includes the central server deployed in the house, easily deployable battery powered access points providing network coverage, and RF pinger location sensing technologies developed within the Equator project.

Easy to deploy wireless access points

The information infrastructure has been designed specifically for reuse across the different experiences. It is responsible for delivering information to the participants, either visitors to the house or children taking part in the literacy experience. The orchestration was based on participants’ current context, physical location, user preferences and the current state of the experience. The information infrastructure was developed around the Equator Infrastructure Platform (EQUIP) alongside semantic web technologies in part developed by the AKT IRC (Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration).

The development of the infrastructure addressed issues such as robustness, location modelling, coarse grained orchestration and the separation of the information layer.

Weal, M. J., Cruickshank, D. G., Michaelides, D. T., Millard, D. E., De Roure, D. C., Hornecker, E., Halloran, J. and Fitzpatrick, G. ( 2006 ) A Reusable, Extensible Infrastructure for Augmented Field Trips . In Proceedings of PerEL 2006, 2nd International Workshop on Pervasive eLearning in conjunction with PerCom 2006 , pp.201-205, Pisa, Italy .

Weal, M. J., Cruickshank, D. G., Michaelides, D. T., Millard, D. E., De Roure, D. C., Halloran, J., Hornecker, E. and Fitzpatrick, G. ( 2006 ) A persistent infrastructure for augmented field trips . In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, Ed-Media 06 , Orlando, Florida, USA .

Tools for authoring pervasive experiences

The Chawton project aims to continue to look at how to take the authoring and construction effort away from the researchers and place tools into the hands of experience builders who are not expected to be experts in pervasive technology.

Authoring tools that run on the pervasive devices allow the curators to add to the information content whilst walking around the grounds of the house. Automating the in-situ authoring of information is a continuing aim of the project.

Capturing content in the grounds using in-situ authoring tools

For the teachers we need to provide them with an authoring framework that allows them to make use of existing resources, and orchestrate the delivery of learning activates to the children but without placing undue pedagogical restrictions on their fieldtrips.

Weal, M. J., Cruickshank, D. C., Michaelides, D. T., Millard, D. E., De Roure, D. C., Howland, K. and Fitzpatrick, G. ( 2007 ) Supporting Domain Experts in Creating Pervasive Experiences . In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual IEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM'07) , White Plains , NY, USA .

Weal, M. J., Hornecker, E., Cruickshank, D. G., Michaelides, D. T., Millard, D. E., Halloran, J., De Roure, D. C. and Fitzpatrick, G. ( 2006 ) Requirements for In-Situ Authoring of Location Based Experiences . In Proceedings of 8th ACM International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 06) , pp.121-128, Espoo, Finland .

Record and reuse

Reuse of information has been an important theme running through the Chawton project. We have identified a number of stages where re-use can be usefully facilitated, namely authoring, during the experience, and post experience.

When authoring the literacy experience the teachers were able to make use of existing locations created for the visitor system by the curators. They could also appropriate anecdotes produced by the curators and use them to provide information to the children in the various locations around the house and grounds.

During the literacy experience the children were able to record their own annotations in response to activities constructed by the teachers. The semantic logging allowed the information gathered during the trials to be used in a number of ways after the day of the trials. The children could use a journal style rendering of the logs back at the school in their writing activities. The researchers could also use the logs, linked to the video taken during the trials, in the analysis phase of their work.

The replay journals provided for the children in the classroom

A specifically created “record and re-use” ontology provided the framework to facilitate the capture of the pervasive computing experiences and experiments. A base ontology defines a number of classes of objects that represent ‘things’ used in an experience – people, locations, devices, artefacts, software components, content, recordings, annotations – with associated relationships between them.

Weal, M. J., Cruickshank, D. C., Michaelides, D. T., Millard, D. E., De Roure, D. C., Howland, K. and Fitzpatrick, G. ( 2007 ) A Card Based Metaphor for Organising Pervasive Educational Experiences . In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Pervasive Learning (in press), March 19-23 .