Building Convivial Educational Tools in the 21st Century: a Proposal based on the Ideas of Freire and Illich

Abstract

Ivan Illich famously coined the term «tools for conviviality» in which he refers to tools that encourage individual creativity and expression, and that can be adapted to people's needs and situations. This paper describes the design of an interactive adaptable tool, whose applications include education and game play, and contextualizes it within Illich's framework. The Collaborative Interactive Tabletop for Education (CITE), currently being developed at SUNY Polytechnic, allows users to manipulate digital information through the manipulation of hand-held tabletop objects. Such interfaces, known as Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), are believed to have significant advantages over traditional screen-based interfaces. For example, they have been shown to measurably increase collaborative behavior among users. However, TUIs have not been widely adopted, perhaps because most current TUI designs require some kind of specialized hardware. Our approach is to instead create a system, a set of verified instructions along with open-license software packages, for adapting any combination of standard computer hardware into a highly customizable interactive tabletop.