Eight Touch-Screen Gestures That Increase Comprehension | WPN World People News

The Georgia Institute of Technology has modernized traditional active-learning techniques for touch-screens by crafting a set of gestures for electronic media--including highlighting, commenting, extracting, collapsing, magnifying, linking, outlining and bookmarking.

Smarter touch-screen gestures let users add highlights, insert comments, excerpt content, create groupings/outlines, zoom in for details or zoom out for overviews, aggregate so only highlights are visible, pinch a document together to see disparate sections at once or to hide irrelevant content, and manipulate multiple text elements with both hands.

The traditional way of optimizing knowledge acquisition from books is to write in the margins, take notes, and produce summaries and outlines with pencil and paper. Many electronic book readers permit you to simulate these manual operations with pop-up windows, and in some cases even multimedia collages of text and graphics.

With the widespread use of the touch-screen, new active-learning techniques are made possible. These eight new touch-screen gestures promise to upgrade electronic media for the 21st century.

Links: Most of the touch-screen operations described below involve links that are created automatically when other operations are performed, allowing users to create their own unique matrix of connections among the salient points in a document.

Collapse: Using a pinch gesture called "collapse," a reader can hide irrelevant content by temporarily crumpling up the electronic paper between two disparate sections, so that both can be seen at once.

Excerpts: By dragging a finger across text, excerpts can be defined and a copy of them detached from the original so that it can be pulled off into the margin and remain in view as the user scrolls further along in the document. A link icon on the excerpt can later be touched to instant scroll to the original location so its context can be easily reviewed.

Comment: Many non-touch-screen e-readers like the Kindle permit comments to be added, but by touch-enabling comments, they can be coupled to as many pieces of text as needed with links allowing instant access to one or all of their referents.

Connect: A connect gesture allows excerpts and comments to be grouped together, in order to make outlines and other organizational structures that would be difficult if not impossible for paper media.

Georgia Tech doctoral candidate Craig Tashman is not waiting for others to profit from his research, but wants to cash in before he even graduates. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Georgia Research Alliance, Tashman has founded startup LiquidText, which is promising an iPad application this fall.

Source : Smarter Technology