Supporting Classroom Information Management with SCOUT

INTRODUCTION The classroom of the new millennium will not look like the pencil-and-paper versions that we remember growing up. New technology promises to capture the information exchanged in a class and to make it accessible at later times. Blackboards and whiteboards will be replaced with liveboards and smartboards, cameras will be placed in the classroom, and students will use laptops and hand-held computers to ask questions and take notes. However, collecting the information is only a small part of the problem. Somehow, students and faculty must be able to manage this information and stay abreast of updates and changes. This problem has already found its way into the classroom because of the existence of course sites on the World Wide Web. A course Web site is a set of Web pages that typically contains information about class notes, assignment specifications, and examination overviews. In the not-so-distant future, these sites will contain recordings of the lectures, repo