How would you teach someone your favorite subject, how would you explain some difficult problem and create learning experience that is memorable, exciting, inovative, stimulating and it would take them less time than what it takes when you use some traditional methods? Are there some new skills that you could teach someone? A person (or people) that you would like to teach might not be at the same physical place as you. The data that you would need in your teaching might be also distributed at different places and systems but they might be accessible through either high speed, large bandwidth network, or wireless links.

Your task will be to imagine and describe a prototype of new learning experience - it may be in form of application, a system or even new device that could be used in variety of systems. We will call it "learning application" in the rest of this text, but as we said, this can mean many different things depending on the form that you choose.

Group learning versus single user learning
Is there some activity and learning process that is more powerful if you do it as a group? What happens if those people (or small groups of people) are at different physical places around the world? They can be in the same building or campus but again they may not be able to see each other. The nature of the task and learning experience might be also such that they should not be in the same place because that is the situation they contribute best in that learning application. Networks, whether they are broadband or wireless, would have very important role in connecting people here.

Large digital public data resources
Could you use large data sets like numerical/textual data, images, video/audio clips that might be distributed around the world? What tools would you use to explore some particular type of data? The data could be astronomy data collected from all world observatories, or perhaps data containing digitized works of art (imagine all pictures and sculptured in world galleries digitized).What useful learning experience you could have with such rich data sets?

Teaching new skills
Are there some skills that students do not learn but you see important to master? It may be that it was not possible with conventional methods and commercial Internet (due to its limited bandwidth and delay) but now advanced technologies and networking make this possible.

Adding new dimensions
Think about adding new dimensions into your system. This does not necessarily have to be geometrical dimension, it can be audio (or even 3D audio), smell, or touch. What are the applications where those things could be used for greater advantage in learning? Think about assigning some new dimension to the things that usually do not have it - you may create new experience and trigger processes that would be invaluable in learning. Could colors have scent? Could pleasant environment have nice, relaxing audio, and empty environment dull audio? Could smooth surfaces have "smooth" audio, and rough surfaces "rough" audio? Could you touch or smell audio? Let you imagination fly...

Wireless networking and PDAs
What are the powerful ways to use wireless networking and PDAs? People using your system could be in the same building but different rooms, and/or the data could be stored on a server and you retrieve them as you need them.

Visualization processes
Images and moving images bring more condensed information than text and numbers; they bring more power into learning process and make learning memorable.

Designing a new device or gadget
Your team may be interested in designing new gadget that can help you in learning some subjects. If this is what you would like to work on, think also about user interfaces (if that is applicable to your gadget), and also applications that would demonstrate the potential of your gadget in the best way.

Your end-user
Think about the way people will use your system. You would like their interactions to be more natural and intuitive. Learning should be made easier, and systems should not be overwhelming and comples so that they confuse the user.

Are there some new user interfaces that would provide that? Would you incorporate speech recognition system (we talk to each other, we do not type messages when we communicate face to face:-) )? Would you add some haptic device into your system (we explore the world by looking at it but also by touching it)?

System "overload"!
Make sure that all technologies you are coupling together have their clear purpose. Very often putting too many things together results in users' confusion and pose the difficulty in using some system, or they have to be real experts in order to be able to use such systems.