Dressing up for School Work? Supporting a Collaborative Environment with Heterogeneous Technologies

This paper approaches heterogeneity and heterogeneous technology as assets, rather than limitations, in the development of computer supported cooperative work. We demonstrate how heterogeneous technologies sustain teachers’ and students’ school work by presenting four different prototypes (the HyConExplorer, the eCell, the iGameFloor and the eBag) that complement one another because they offer different functionalities and are, at the same time, designed with the wholeness of school activities, particularly group-based ones, in mind. Thus, they provide teachers and students with a broad range of IT support to aid them in and outside of the classroom. We take the school domain as our point of departure, but argue that the focus on heterogeneous technologies is applicable for the general area of CSCW.