Center for Information Technology and Society

Incorporating a significant amount of technology into a classroom is an important, but extremely difficult task. In this paper we describe the next generation of the UCSB digital classroom, called the Collaborative Technologies Lab (CTL). The primary goal of the CTL is to investigate the challenges of deploying technology for technology's sake. We feel that without the ability to deploy a large amount of technology and offer robust functionality, the whole idea of enhanced learning environments becomes marginalized. Therefore, it is critical to understand the challenges of deeply embedding technology in a classroom. Based on experience in building and using the CTL, in this paper we propose a demarcation point between program production and content encoding. This demarcation point offers the advantage of breaking a large technical problem into smaller, easier-to-solve problems. The demarcation point also has the advantage of being able to separate complex functions along common lines of expertise. One skilled in production need not worry about the technology of the encoding systems and one skilled in technology need not worry about the ascetics of program production