Attending Microsoft Surface Focus Group/Think Tank
June 2nd, 2009
This shot is from Quantum of Solice in case you don't recognize it (a movie I liked, but Andy hated). Its basically a giant, fake, movie product placement version of Surface.
I'm attending a small focus group Thursday put on by Microsoft to help brainstorm uses of this technology in education. I was invited by a client at Johns Hopkins and I think I'm going to be the only person there without a PHD.
The idea is to get familiar with its capabilities, then brainstorm ideas for using it to support teaching strategies like cooperative and experiential learning. The cool thing about it (other than the multitouch capability) is it can identify optical tags (basically barcodes) and position graphics and menus in the location of the object the tag is on. The example Microsoft shows is a restaurant with their wine bottles tagged. You put a bottle on the table and you get a bunch of info to explore like which dinner menu items go well with that wine and other stuff. Kind of a lame example, but that's what they've got. So, that should be fun to play around with as a teaching tool.
It can also pull data out of your Windows Mobile phone and let you do stuff with it on the display, but I don't think many elementary school kids have those.
if I'm allowed to, I'll post about the ideas after Thursday.
