Using Collaborative Activities on Tabletops to Enhance Learning and Knowledge Transfer

Digital tabletops are gaining increasing relevancy within commercial and educational sectors. These devices, with their multi-touch surfaces, can support collaborative activities while maintaining natural face-to-face communication. However, we still know little about possible learning outcomes and the situations they favor. We have conducted a study to explore how group activities on tabletops could potentially encourage collaboration on tabletops. We have particularly focused on the potential of tabletops to favor knowledge transfer, which can be translated to the question how knowledge might be assimilated, understood and transferred in the best way. This paper presents a comparative study of a learning session using concept-maps on tabletops and a learning session using traditional paper and pencil tools. The comparison revealed a tendency for the tabletop-environment to effectively support knowledge transfer.