1. An Educational Web Environment based on the
metaphor of the electronic schoolbag
Christian Martel (*)(**) & Laurence Vignollet (*)
(*) Equipe Systèmes Communicants, Université de Savoie, 73011 Chambéry, France
(**) Savoie R&D, 73376 Le Bourget-du-Lac, France
Résumé: L’environnement éducatif présenté dans ce papier est développé dans le cadre d’un projet ambitieux
appelé “ Cartable Electronique®”. Nous montrons combien cette métaphore est utile pour expliquer, concevoir et
développer de nouveaux services éducatifs. Nous tentons de faire une analyse des bénéfices liés à l’utilisation du
cartable électronique à partir des bilans des expérimentations menées dans les collèges et à l’Université de Savoie.
Nous concluons enfin cet article par des réflexions prospectives sur notre projet.
Abstract : The Educational environment presented here is being developed in the context of an ambitious project
called “Cartable Electronique®” project (“electronic schoolbag”). We will show how this metaphor is very useful
to explain, design and construct new educational services. We will also attempt to analyse the benefits of the use of
our electronic schoolbag through the description of experiments carried out with schoolchildren and with university
students. Finally, we will address the future prospects for our project.
1. Introduction.
Begun in 1999, the “Cartable Electronique®” project combines the efforts and resources of the University
of Savoie “Systèmes Communicants” laboratory and “TICE” team, the Savoie General Council “Savoie
R&D” and the National Education Institution's rectoral and departmental services. They work jointly on
the definition, design and creation of new educational services intended first of all for schoolchildren and
university students, but also for all of the players in the field of education (teachers, administrators,
sociocultural partners, etc.) and the families.
The ambition of our project is to contribute to the development of new educational practices introducing
information and communication technologies in the educational area, from school to university. For the
schoolchildren, one of the objectives is also to increase the links between the institution and the children's
families, and between the institution and its traditional sociocultural partners. For the students, we are
witnessing a mutation of education practices: students have quite different learning curricula, with a
mixture of distance and traditional teaching. We have to take into account the different needs of each
individual, their various backgrounds and the variety of courses they follow. Moreover, during the course
of their scholarship, the student belongs to different communities: institutional, cultural, sports,
organizational, etc.
We have to offer a unique environment letting children and students organise their mobility. The new
2. education tools have to address this, allowing the creation of multiple communities, giving users the
power to introduce and assign roles to participants. The electronic schoolbag is the cornerstone of all the
educational activities, from school to university.
The Electronic Schoolbag project (“Cartable Electronique®”) is supported by the French National
Education Ministry and by the Technology Executive, the Savoie General Council, the University of
Savoie and the Caisse des dépôts et consignation.
2. The metaphor
The metaphor of the "electronic schoolbag" is inspired by the debate that reigns in France on the weight of
the schoolbags of the schoolboys/schoolgirls. Since many years, with each school re-entry, this weight all
alone crystallizes with him all the criticisms towards the school institution. Are the programs too
ambitious, the school rhythms little adapted to the children and the teenagers, the handbooks too heavy
and too many? The schoolbag is the object of common resentment, and some of the questions the French
society asks regards to its school accumulate in this object.
In this context, it was trying to benefit from this situation to offer to the object another future: to become
the means by which Information and Communication Technologies are introduced into the school and the
symbol of their utility within the school framework. These technologies, applied to the schoolbag, can at
the same time neutralize criticisms most virulent on this object and on these technologies themselves.
Its transportability?
Untransportable because of its excessive weight? It is enough to dematerialize it, and the question does
not arise any more.
Its capacity?
Does this object contain plethoric things, excessive, with possibly contestable learning utility as of the
handbooks whose teachers say the difficulty they have to use them with the detriment of the really useful
things which "in any event" do not hold in a schoolbag? It is not necessary to worry about: a school
report, a correspondence notebook, an encyclopaedia, a dictionary, an address notebook, documents under
writing, exercises ready to use, one or two pages of a followed story, a laboratory of physics, a museum
and the works of art it gathers, a symphony and its transcription, some bedside books and the map of
France with its rivers and its mountains, etc. It can all contain, and much more still.
Its accessibility?
Is this object the trace of a immutable school time, rythmed by the division of the discipline and of the
labour which reigns in particular in the junior schools? It is enough to make it everywhere available, at
any moment, without particular difficulty, in class, in the library, the house? This locality recovered
allows the returns, the experience and knowledge confrontation, and the memory game.
Its opening?
Is this object the symbol of the distance which exists between the school and the external world? It is
enough to place it in the centre of a vast communication network which articulates the school with its
various interlocutors and the family in her various organized forms.
Its persistency?
Is this object the symbol of the adult desire to see the schoolboy/schoolgirl acquiring quickly all
knowledge? It is enough to enrich it gradually, at the rhythm of the trainings carried out in class and apart
from the class. Nothing irremediable occurs: all can always be re-examined, revised, be revisited.
3. Conversely, can Communication and Information Technologies also take benefits from this meeting with
the schoolbag?
Their pedagogical utility?
Are they useful for teaching, educating, trainings? Insofar as they can simplify the diffusion of the
educational contents, their treatment and their use by the teachers and the pupils, these technologies are
completely adapted to the increasing request of the individualisation of the work expressed by the
educational actors. The schoolbag in its electronic form allows a work of proximity which would require
to be achieved by traditional ways, by means much more significant.
Can they contribute to improve operationality of school?
Accent put on the services brought to the pupils, to the teachers and to their families makes it possible to
clearly locate the handles of introduction of technologies of information and communication within the
school framework. To improve the school life, access for all to information, reinforcement of links of the
educational community, contribution to team work, objectives on which most of the school community
agree with, and which pains sometimes with being reached within a traditional framework, are reached
thanks to the flexibility offered by Communication and Information technologies.
The frontier of metaphor resides in user intension. It is particularly the case of the desk metaphor, which is
well-formed only for tertiary workers.
It can fell of the frightening traps. Thus, pure and simple assimilation of the electronic schoolbag to a
computer, appears to us to be a mistake. It is necessary to prevent it, if the question of access simplified to
the contents must be solved. Indeed, teaching utility of a computer is problematic because of the
complexity of its implementation and its very great interactive richness. The face to face teaching rests on
elementary acts and on some simple gestures, to indicate, alert, insist which do not drown knowledge fish
in mediatization disorder.
3. The environment
D. Kaplan in [3] points out that in the United States, E-learning companies and Universities have placed
their trust in the quality of content delivered to students. Today there are doubts about the relevance of this
choice. Even in Europe, some experiences of giving a priori built content are not so convincing.
Our point of view is quite the opposite. Indeed, who knows of a teacher who will use a single manual the
whole year with a class? Also, University teachers always personalize the courses they find on the Web
for instance, and never use them as found. Editors have to modify their way of building manuals, and
consequently, their economic model before we should generalize the use of electronic manuals. Another
point of view is to use the Web as a source of content, and to consider the teacher as a guide in this
inexhaustible source of information: a guide who locates the resources, and who teaches how to use them.
At the beginning of our project, we defined the educational web environment with no content, but with
collaboration functionalities: priority was given to the face to face teaching support, improving exchanges,
sharing and communication between teachers and students/children after the courses.
3.1 Functional description
The electronic schoolbag is the cornerstone of all the educational activities. In our Educational Web
Environment, the electronic schoolbag is central. It contains personal belongings (figure 1) such as:
4. • Simple documents of any type (doc, pdf, ps, xls, html, xml, …),
• Structured documents: photo album, annotated links, news, questionnaires, short cuts, …
• Documents from services: personal school reports, attached documents received by emails, …
• Any other files.
Only the user can put his/her “things” in his/her electronic schoolbag. However, someone could want to
send a file to him/her. He can do it via email, but it takes time and he may have quota limitations.
Moreover, if the file is a structured document, it will lose its structure. We have introduced a new
metaphor: the “pigeonhole” (“casier” in French). Anyone can send any file to anyone else's pigeonhole: it
is optimised, the user has no size constraint, and the structure of the object is maintained. Then the
pigeonhole owner is free to cut and paste the file in his/her schoolbag.
The electronic schoolbag also gives access to adapted and personal services like WebMail, address book,
personal diary. These services interoperate with the electronic schoolbag in the sense that any document
produced by or associated with a service can be stored in the electronic schoolbag (attached document of
an email, personal school report, …).
Figure 1: Example of “things” in an electronic schoolbag
The electronic schoolbag is the private space of the user. But a user moves in several communities: the
group of his/her class, the group of users with whom he works on a project, a talk, the ones with whom
5. he/she shares passions, etc.
Our environment allows the creation by users of groups: instutional ones (the class, the group of all the
teachers, …), organisational ones or thematic ones. Nearly all the institutional groups can be created
automatically, regarding to the data stored in the electronic directory of the establishment (usually in
LDAP1 format).
Group users can have different roles. In the current version, they can have one of the three predefined
roles: manager, moderator or member, giving to him/her different rights.
The group manager can also establish the group policy, choosing policy attributes:
• Public (in opposition to Private): Information will be accessible by non-members,
• Open (in opposition to Closed): Everybody can subscribe to the group, and a member is free to
leave the group,
• Can be reached (in opposition to can not be reached): non-members can send documents to the
group.
Finally, each group has a virtual space called “workspace” (“Atelier” in French), in which members can
store any file, use collaborative tools: Chat, Forum, Collaborative Editor.
3.2 Technical description
We use Zope (Zope Object Publishing Environment) [9] to build the working environment. Zope is an
open source framework for building web applications, initially developed by Digital Creation. Instead of
publishing HTML files, Zope publishes objects which are able to publish themselves. Zope is multi-
platform and extendable. A very active community works to improve the available components, called
products.
The Zope server plays the role of a Web server, everything is an object, from document to methods. It
contains an object oriented database, it runs as an ORB (Object Request Broker), a plain text search
engine is proposed, and the administration is done via the Web.
One of the distinguishing features of this framework is the availability to define local roles associated
with each object. We mainly use these local roles to organize the CSCW: it is the basis of the regulation in
the shared workspaces.
Local roles give an API to the regulation of the collaborative work. We want to extend them, to allow
users to define self-position to their own activity and to others group participants. We also want to propose
a way to define hierarchical places in the group.
4. The experiments
Today, this platform is being experimented in the University of Savoie (http://www.univ-savoie.fr) with
more than 5000 students and teachers and in junior schools (K-12) with 150 children and teachers
(http://www.cartable-electronique.org). These experiments allow us to present results.
The few sets of services proposed in the experimental platform are currently in real and intensive use (100
000 LDAP hits per month for environment connection alone). The volume of document exchange and
storage is also very high. The electronic “notice board” has replaced the mural one. Many thematic groups
have been created by end-users.
1
LDAP : Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
6. The main results after one year of experimentation in junior schools are listed below:
• The children appreciate the facility to communicate information to all the class.
• Children and teachers have mentioned that some work has become easier to carry out. For
instance, the availability in the work space of the class of the documents used in the children’s
talks is a great improvement.
• They all regret the small number of interactions with the families, on both sides (no information
sent from the school to the parents, nor requests from the families).
• The teachers want to suppress some paper documents, such as the homework notebook and
correspondence notebook (which ensures the liaison between the school and the family).
• The teachers need to improve their interactivity with the children.
• The teachers have proposed to become more involved in the design of the services of the
environment.
After a one-year experience with more than 5000 students, teachers and administrators from the
University of Savoie expressed other remarks and expectations:
• The main added value unanimously recognised is, for every kind of user, the possible creation of
communities. Users have the power to introduce and assign roles to participants. However, in the
current version, they can only choose between three roles (manager, moderator, member) and few
group policies. We are making an effort to improve these functionalities.
• If the current environment is not dedicated to e-learning, the metaphor used and technology
employed facilitate the integration of existing platforms or learning objects or learning services.
For example, a request for integration of the Ulysse platform [8] was formulated by teachers at the
University (Ulysse allows the creation of training courses and their accessibility via the Internet).
This integration has now been carried out, but its effective use in a course remains for the moment
under study: the principal question being of course to integrate the use of such tools into a
renovated pedagogy.
• Users appreciate the integration of existing administrative services inside the education Web
Environment; however, they want any internal services to be included (e.g. the Intranet of the
University of Savoie's research board). They want the education Web environment to become the
single access point to all internal information, pedagogic and administrative ones.
Conclusions and prospects
Our project addresses many research problem areas, from many fields: education, sociology, computer
science, … From the methodology point of view, we work with end-users in the definition, design and
creation phases and through experiments. Usage specialists observe and give feedback which is taken into
account in the successive versions.
The current success of the use of the Educational Web Environment developed reinforces the choices we
have made, particularly the flexibility offered in the personalization of the environment and in letting
users create communities and define the organization of the work in these communities.
On the technical side, the implementation choices, using the Zope framework, have led to an open source
Web platform, easy to install, maintain and extend. Moreover, it allows easy integration of or
interoperability with existing resources and platforms.
This project introduces new challenges:
7. • Is the electronic schoolbag an object of equality? The question of the electronic schoolbag's
accessibility to all will obviously end up arising in a society concerned with the equality of
opportunity offered to its children and conscious of the risk of differential computer numeracy.
Achieving this goal will depend on many economic factors like the conviction of the educational
players that the Internet and the services found therein have a real utility and that they meet needs
which are not currently being satisfied. It poses especially the problems of the definition of
National Education establishment information systems, oriented towards services to teachers,
pupils and their families; of the permanent connection of these establishments to the Internet; of
their equipment with work stations permanently accessible to the people who attend them; of the
teamwork of teachers, keen to build a coherent methodological environment for their pupils, with
useful assistance and references; and of a simplified circulation of information between the
various players in education concerned with pupils' academic success.
• The activity around the standards of metadata associated with resources (cf IMS [4] and LOM [6])
shows the importance of the provision of content compared to the provision of services
accompanying traditional pedagogy. The schoolbag of a child/student gives him/her access to
other "references" than the content: planning events, house duties, methodologies of work,
evaluations... The current standards do not take into account certain specificities related to these
references. More generally, no standard of educational services exchanges exists, facilitating their
interoperability. But this addresses an important problem: the respect of privacy [7].
• The evaluation of the impact of the use of such environments on learning is quite empirical [3]. It
remains to be refined [1].
• At this time, the electronic schoolbag is being used only in the context of the educational
establishment. We want to consider other contexts. For instance, in the library context, the
children/students could have specific services. This would lead to more personalisation and
adaptation of this object. Finally, what would the use of this object be out of context?
References
1. G. Chabert, "le cartable électronique expérimenté : un autre regard sur les usages", XIIIème Congrès
Inforcom Les recherches en Information et Communication et leurs perspectives : Histoire, Objet,
pouvoir et méthodes Marseille Palais du Pharo, October 2002, to be published.
2. Groupe "e-Education" de la FING, "Electroniques, Virtuels, Numeriques : l’élève, le prof et leur
cartable dans l’école de demain", rapport de synthèse sous la direction de Daniel Kaplan, avec le
concours de Shahira Dalifard, February 2002.
3. D. Kaplan, "Le cartable électronique est une métaphore", la Fing, December 2001.
4. IMS : Instructional Management Systems, http://www.imsglobal.org.
5. A. Large, J. Beheshti, T. Rahman, "Design Criteria for Children's Web Portals: the Users Speak Out",
in the Journal of the American society for information science and technology, 52(2), 2002, pp. 79-94.
6. LOM : (Learning Objets Metadata), http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/index.html.
7. Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), W3C Initiative, http://www.w3.org/P3P.
8. “Ulysse, le serveur multimedia de formations de l’Université Bordeaux 1, http://www.ulysse.u-
bordeaux.fr.
9. Zope Object Publishing Environment, www.zope.org <http://www.zope.org>.
