research

Murphy pointed me to this: Ravin Balakrishnan's website. He's a professor at the University of Toronto doing some great work in interface design and HCI.

Related to a previous post on the effects of internet on collective knowledge and wisdom, I just came upon this article in Wired by Brandon Keim: Is the Internet Bad for Science?

"The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient ... but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

SmartTiles - Room-Sized Artifacts (2005) - download pdf
These guys have developed a very modular setup for a tiled room -- 1 computer per tile -- for educational purposes. It seems they choose high modularity because they want students to be able to program individual tiles. Haven't read all of it but they sound pretty smart and have a forward-thinking perspective on education. There's not too much talk about hardware, but it looks like it has some good sources in the bibliography.