Designing an untethered educational digital library

Digital libraries, such as the SMETE Digital Library at UC Berkeley (www.smete.org), are quickly becoming mainstream tools for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STE&M) education at all levels. And while the vision exists for "anytime, anywhere" access to resources from educational digital libraries, the reality is that learners are tethered to these resources through connected computers in classrooms or homes. Because nearly 85% of students\´ time is spent outside a formal classroom, transforming coincidental, daily events into meaningful learning opportunities would be expected to impact the level of science learning for children. This paper reports on a workshop held at UC Berkeley on the use of multimedia, wireless technologies and other information technologies for educational digital libraries and knowledge management. The paper also describes a prototype solution for an untethered digital library used to stimulate a discussion at the workshop on nomadic inquiry and the potential for nomadic computing technologies to support the pursuit of personally-relevant questions and explanations linked to real world contexts and problems.