Gregory Abowd’s innovation makes note-taking automatic, freeing students to interact with the teacher

By Shawn Jenkins

Abowd says his Classroom 2000 is a student’s godsend: “I wanted to save people from having to write down verbatim notes.”

Gregory Abowd was one of those annoying, straight-A students. He could easily retain and recall important facts and figures, free from the pain of those poor, less-gifted souls whose hands gnarled from frantically scribbling notes in fear of missing some nugget of wisdom.

Now a 34-year-old assistant professor with the College of Computing, Abowd has developed an interactive computing application that could eradicate writer’s cramp from the halls of academia.

With initial seed money from Georgia Tech’s Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, and the College of Computing, Abowd created a revolutionary technology called Classroom 2000 that incorporates video, audio and the Internet to record and recall every detail—sounds, gestures, notes—of a lecture.

“I am not really considered a researcher in educational technology,” Abowd says. “But, being in a university, an obvious application was to do this in the classroom, because that’s a situation where people are trying to experience a rich multimedia experience, capture it and record it so they can go back and visit it later on. It was an application that was just begging to be supported by my idea of automated capture and access.

“I had a fairly intuitive notion that what I wanted to do was save people from having to write down verbatim notes. I thought, ‘It can’t be a good thing that people sit there with their heads down writing down everything that’s going on in the class simply to have a record to go back and look at later on.’”

The answer is a system that takes the instructor’s lesson—in the form of a graphic representation, like slides—and adds hand-written notes from the class lecture that are captured on an electronic whiteboard. The audio and video are automatically synchronized and recorded, and relevant Web pages and recommended readings can be thrown in for good measure. For students, it’s a one-stop reference library that never closes.

“Teachers can become true ‘knowledge navigators,’ in that they can find relevant information that supplements their message, and they can point that out to students,” Abowd says. “Once class is over, you just close down the software and everything is done automatically from that point. Within minutes, the notes for that lecture are available in a searchable form for the students.

“That was a priority with this project. This had to be done in such a way that the lecturer did not incur extra effort—because they might not use it if that were the case.”

The Abowd File

Born: Sept. 12, 1964, in Detroit. Education: BS, mathematics, University of Notre Dame, 1986; M.Sc., computation, University of Oxford, 1987; Ph.D., computation, University of Oxford, 1991. Achievements and Honors: College of Computing Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award; Sigma Xi Young Faculty Research Award; recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Grant; Georgia Tech Award for Innovative Use of Eduactional Technology. Personal: wife, Dr. Meghan Burke; son, Aidan. Leisure Interests: basketball—”either as a spectator or a participant,” Abowd says; reading popular mathematics, popular science, science fiction and Stephen King novels.

Kennesaw State University has been using Classroom 2000 for almost two years, and Georgia State will soon follow. Montreal’s McGill University has had it since January 1999, and one of Abowd’s doctoral students recently set it up at Brown University for use in some of their undergraduate classes.

“I’ve had about five calls from various companies and universities wanting to start using it, and I don’t know how I’m going to handle that,” Abowd laughs.

“The way it was built was not to be a shrink-wrapped commercial product; it was a research prototype, and I would have to go into a different mode if I wanted to turn this into something that could be adopted on a wider scale.”

But Abowd’s “mode” is to “predict the future by inventing it,” he says.

“Rather than sit there and think about what it would be like, build some slice—albeit a small slice—and live it so you can learn and show people what that’s like.”

In the next 10 to 15 years, he foresees an educational environment that will fully incorporate “context-aware” computing, another aspect of his current research that would allow environments to know what’s going on inside of them, who’s there, who spoke when, and what they were talking about.

“A classroom could take a very ill-structured or extemporaneous discussion and produce an artifact that could create a five-minute summary for people,” Abowd says. “We could also provide the ability to link previous experiences with current ones.

“Imagine, after a lecture, being able to say, ‘If you want to follow up on this, here are some other courses you have taken in the past that talked about this or that led into this, or things that other people have taken that would be related to this.”

With Abowd’s capture technology acting as a surrogate student, some would question the need to attend class at all.

“That’s a valid critcism,” he explains. “But, there’s so much that a good teacher adds to an experience—their ability to interact and to reach you in this physical environment. It’s going to be a tool to augment what we can already do physically, and free us up to get greater benefit out of face-to-face interactions. The details will be there for you to access when you want them.

“It’s like engineers out in practice. When they want to learn how to calculate some integral or something, they don’t memorize all those rules—the ones that they use a lot tend to become second-nature—but they have handbooks that they go to. I would like this to be a handbook of your personal educational experience.

And once his handbook liberates students from the shackles of copying and gets them to look up from their desks, he wants to reach them.

“I’ve been inspired by teachers I’ve had in the past, and I want to be inspiring to those whom I teach,” says Abowd. “One of the most important things about educating people is that you come across as sincere and very motivated. You should express to them that you’re excited about the material, and you’re excited about the potential they have to learn it.” GT