Anne Spalter - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Anne Spalter

Introducing a dynamic medium for artistic expression and graphic communication "This is ... more Introducing a dynamic medium for artistic expression and graphic communication "This is a seminal contribution-a must-read for anyone interested in how computers are used in art and design. Spalter masterfully presents the principles and practices of this vital and rapidly growing ...

Digital visual literacy (DVL) is a set of skills that enable students to function in an increasin... more Digital visual literacy (DVL) is a set of skills that enable students to function in an increasingly digital and visual workplace. DVL draws on a range of disciplines in the sciences, arts and humanities to enable student engagement with computer-based visual materials on four key fronts: Cultural Context, Communication, Computer Graphics, and Commerce. The goal in designing these DVL modules

IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) environments naturally suggest hands-on approaches to learning, b... more IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) environments naturally suggest hands-on approaches to learning, but the success of such virtual "direct experience" depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. Although IVR may suggest ease of use and obvious, transparent interface designs, the opposite is, unfortunately, true: IVR presents surprisingly difficult interface challenges and the study of interface and interaction design for educational IVR use is just beginning. In this paper we discuss three issues that we encountered in the creation of an IVR-based educational project: the use of architectural spaces for structuring a sequence of modules, the trade-offs between metaphor fidelity and convenience, and the use of IVR to interact with visualizations of abstract concepts.

Theory Into Practice, Apr 23, 2008

Like other literacies (textual literacy, numeracy), digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability ... more Like other literacies (textual literacy, numeracy), digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability both to create and to understand certain types of information, in this case visual materials created with a computer. DVL is now essential in many daily life and workplace tasks, from looking critically at newspaper images or TV evening news to using a digital camera, making a Web site, creating presentations, and modeling and visualizing data in virtually all of the sciences. DVL is, of course, also now essential in all visually oriented disciplines. Defining the underlying principles of DVL and integrating it into established curricula presents many challenges. This article describes some of these and the authors' responses, using experiences from an innovative course at Brown University and a larger-scale community-collegebased project, Digital Visual Literacy.

works with Professor Andries van Dam to design and teach an intensive three week Workshop held at... more works with Professor Andries van Dam to design and teach an intensive three week Workshop held at Brown University. For the past three summers, local high school teachers have attended the Workshop to learn about concepts in 3D graphics and ways in which computer graphics can be used to motivate the teaching of math, science, and art.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, May 1, 2004

Leonardo, Feb 1, 2002

Imme rsive Virtual Reality (IVR) [1] has exciting potential for educational applications, enablin... more Imme rsive Virtual Reality (IVR) [1] has exciting potential for educational applications, enabling students to interact with ideas in new ways. In an IVR environment, students can engage in simulations of real-world environments that are not accessible due to nancial or time constraints (high-end chemistry laboratories, for instance) or that are simply not possible to experience, such as the inside of a volcano or an atom. IVRs also enable students to interact with visualizations of abstract ideas-for example, mathematical equations and elements of color theory. The hands-on, investigative learning most natural to IVR is an excellent way to train new scientists and engineers. In addition, because such an environment is computer-generated, it is an ideal future platform for individual and collaborative distance-learning efforts. IVR lends itself naturally to a constructivist pedagogical approach, that is, one that builds on Piaget's view that knowledge is created by learners through interaction with others and with the world around them [2] and is characterized by rst-person, non-symbolically mediated interactions [3]. But the success of such virtual "direct experience" depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. Although IVR may suggest ease of use and obvious, transparent interface designs, the opposite is, unfortunately, true: IVR presents surprisingly dif cult interface challenges. Even techniques as seemingly straightforward as object selection and navigation are the subject of dozens of research papers [4]. The design of IVR interaction that feels natural and promotes learning is an almost entirely unsolved problem. We have been tackling some of the interface and interaction challenges of using IVR for education in a Museum of Color, in which students can perform a number of science museum-like experiments [5]. Although IVR environments are still too expensive and fragile for mainstream educational use, the use of VR in training is well established [6] and its use in entertainment is growing rapidly [7]. Moore's Law [8] can be seen at work in the use of commodity 3D graphics in games and edutainment (the recently released Sony PlayStation 2 has more graphics power than most of today's high-end workstations), suggesting that today's esoteric, immersive environments will become commodi ed classroom xtures in the future. We feel, therefore, that it is critical to conduct educational IVR interface and interaction research today, so that educators can take full advantage of IVRs in the near-and long-term future.

Educators who wish to integrate interactive computerbased learning experiences into established c... more Educators who wish to integrate interactive computerbased learning experiences into established courses must contend not only with the difficulty of creating quality digital content but with the often equally difficult challenge of reconfiguring their courses to use such materials. We describe our experiences with the Exploratories Project at Brown University [8] and the use of exploratories in an introductory computer graphics programming course [4]. We offer examples of both success and failure, with the goal of helping other educators avoid both painful mistakes and lost time spent coping with unforeseen logistical and pedagogical concerns. Among the lessons we learned: planning can't begin too early for the integration of such materials into an established curriculum, and all possible methods of integration should be considered before committing to any specific approach. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Software components for distance and just-in-time (JIT) learning are an increasingly common metho... more Software components for distance and just-in-time (JIT) learning are an increasingly common method of encouraging reuse and facilitating the development process[56], but no analogous efforts have been made so far for designing hypertext components that can be reused in educational offerings. 1 We argue that such structures will be of tangible benefit to the online learning community, serving to offload a substantial burden from programmers and designers of software, as well as allowing educators without any programming experience to customize available online resources. We present our motivation for hypertext structure components (HTSC) and then propose a set of pedagogical structures and their building blocks that reflect the categories of lecture, laboratory, creative project, playground, and game[36].

Abstract To be a “literate” citizen one must increasingly be able to critically evaluate digital ... more Abstract To be a “literate” citizen one must increasingly be able to critically evaluate digital visual materials, make decisions using digital visual representations of data and ideas, and use computers to create effective visual communications. To be literate in this sense ...

Problem Solving is an important part of learningComputer Science. Yet, the choice of problems off... more Problem Solving is an important part of learningComputer Science. Yet, the choice of problems offered intextbooks, the traditional source of problems, is limited, static, non-interactive and lacks animation. In order toaddress these issues, we have proposed Java applets thatautomatically generate problems, provide necessaryvisualization and animation, solve problems and providefeedback to the user. They are also capable of loggingusage. We refer to such applets as problets. In this paper wewill discuss the issues involved in the ...

This paper reports on early progress with the use of immersive virtual reality technology for tra... more This paper reports on early progress with the use of immersive virtual reality technology for trauma surgery training. We discuss our technical goals and the application area, and then describe our work to date. The need to create a system that can be used by overworked, highly time-constrained surgeons and surgical trainees has affected many of our decisions, from the type of displays used to the focus on time navigation (to let trainees experience important moments and skip well-understood ones) to the use of easilylearned traditional 2D interfaces (vs. more demanding innovative 3D interfaces) for some of the interaction methods. This three-year research project, which is just entering its second year, is supported by a National Science Foundation Information Technology Research grant for collaborative research between groups at Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 2020

Technology-Based Re-Engineering Engineering Education Proceedings of Frontiers in Education FIE'96 26th Annual Conference

ACM SIGGRAPH 99 Conference abstracts and applications on - SIGGRAPH '99, 1999