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SI students' projects among top GROCS contest winners
(Nov 2005) Three School of Information students have each won a $2,500 award for the winter 2006 semester as a result of a campus-wide contest to find innovative uses of rich media in collaborative learning.
Andrew Paulsen and Mark LaRosa are part of a multidisciplinary research team working on "GoogleBuddy: Collaborative Environment for Learning and Sharing Search Knowledge." Nika Smith is part of another team working on "Blue Puddle."
Five U-M teams were selected in the competition, which was sponsored by the Digital Media Commons at the Duderstadt Center. The competition, called Grant Opportunities (Collaborative Spaces), or GROCS sought out projects involving rich media to enhance collaboration in an academic activity. GROCS defines "rich media" as "any digital media that includes a time-based component," such as audio, video, animation, virtual reality constructions, or other data visualized over time.
GROCS projects explore ways that rich media might be integrated in a future academic environment, where the limitations of current infrastructures and practices don't exist.
GoogleBuddy
Working with Paulsen, who is GoogleBuddy team leader, and LaRosa are Warner Washington, an undergraduate in the School of Art and Design; and Adam Ward, and undergraduate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering. Assistant Professor Suresh Bhavnani of the School of Information is the project adviser, offering advice on interface design, implementation, and usability testing. Professor Eliot Soloway of the School of Education, the College of Engineering, and the School of Information, will offer informal advice on the project.
The GoogleBuddy project aims to solve the problem many Internet information-searchers share: trying to understand how information is organized in unfamiliar domains.
The project team says that without extensive shopping experience, it is difficult to know that there exist product-review sites, price-comparison sites, and coupon sites, each of which are important to visit when searching for a high-quality product at a low price. Such information organizations may not be obvious by using Google or Froogle alone.
GoogleBuddy provides an environment where users can learn and share search knowledge in different online domains such as shopping, health care, and academics.
GoogleBuddy will consist of three major components:
- A learning interface to provide users with a motivating Flash and audio animation to teach them how to organize a search plan, and to learn how
to implement that search plan through direct interaction with Google
- A sharing interface to provide users with a wiki interface where they can add new search plans and vote on the success of existing search plans and queries
- A database so that the sharing interface will store a user's shared knowledge and votes and display results automatically in the learning interface
Blue Puddle
For the Blue Puddle project, Smith is working with Zack Denfeld and Brent Fogt, both graduate students in the School of Art and Design, and Kyle Mulka, an undergraduate student in the College of Engineering. Their team advisors are Mireille Roddier, assistant professor of architecture, and Nick Tobier, assistant professor of art and design.
Blue Puddle is an innovative Web-based software application that allows users to post text and images about a specific location on a map of their city. This software serves as a tool for exploring and understanding the built environment in new ways, and may help capture some of the personal landmarks, overlooked histories, and street art that is undocumented in maps used purely for way-finding.
Users of the Web site will tag their text and image posts with specific latitude/longitude data (if they have GPS devices) or simply point to a space on a city map with their mouse using Blue Puddle's interactive Web interface. This allows users multiple ways to situate their posts in real as well as virtual geography. Additional features may be rolled out as the project progresses, such as commenting or rating particular entries, or asynchronous communication tools such as message board style threads that can be appended to existing posts by new users.
The project takes advantage of the Internet's distributed authorship capabilities to create maps that draw on users' collective memory and subjective experience of a city. As the project takes shape, the team plans to gather comments from users in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Detroit.
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