I School assistant professor Kimiko Ryokai has been awarded a $150 thousand grant by the National Science Foundation for the two-year project "Expanding the Accessibility of NSDL for Mobile Learning," in partnership with Professor Alice Agogino of the mechanical engineering department.
Kimiko Ryokai
The project will explore nontraditional mobile interfaces for accessing digital libraries; it builds on the NSF's support of digital libraries for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STE&M) education, and the National STE&M Education Digital Library (NSDL) in particular. To fully exploit the benefits of NSDL collections, the project plans to support learning opportunities using wireless devices that meet the needs of different users, learning configurations, heterogeneity of small wireless devices (such as mobile phones, iPods, and PDAs) and various dynamic communication links.
Educational digital libraries are becoming mainstream tools for learning and research for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STE&M) education at all levels, and Ryokai and Agogino see new opportunities for digital libraries in structured out-of-classroom inquiry-based and project-based learning activities as well as for informal learning activities in homes, museums, and after school clubs. They hope to discover what design features will enable mobile devices coupled with a digital library infrastructure to improve STE&M learning.
Kimiko Ryokai is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Center for New Media. Her research has brought information technology and computational methods to K–12 education and children's museums. She teaches courses on interface aesthetics and theory and practice of tangible user interfaces.
Alice Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. She directs the Berkeley Expert Systems Technology (BEST) Laboratory and the Berkeley Instructional Technology Studio (BITS).