| Last Modified On : | August 22, 2008 12:02 PM PDT |
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by Geoff Koch
By now it’s assumed that tomorrow’s technology landscape will be defined by mobility. So to glimpse the mobile future, ponder the institutions training those who will dwell there. That is, consider school classrooms, from kindergarten through college and beyond.
For the class of 2010* entering college and university classrooms, Google has always been a verb and text messaging is their e-mail, according to the annual Beloit College Mindset List*. Item no. 8 on the list, which considers the cultural touchstones of today’s first-year students, reads: “They are always wireless, yet always connected.”
Students in the K-12 grades find themselves in increasingly wired classrooms or on the receiving end of subsidized laptops through so-called “one-to-one” programs. One such the program, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative*, has 42,000 participating students, teachers and administrators, from elementary schools to high schools
How will the education market respond to ultramobile PCs? It’s a question worth asking since education is one of the most fertile proving grounds for mobile technology while UMDs (Ultra Mobile Devices) arguably are some of the most anticipated unwired products since the iPod.
Cyprien Lomas, a scholar-in-residence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, sees several possible applications of UMDs. In the immediate future, relatively spacious UMD screens may provide enhanced opportunity to access rich-media content, he believes.
“Most people are finding the iPod and phone still a little small for certain use cases,” says Lomas, whose work is funded by Educause, a nonprofit that focuses on information technology in higher education.
Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney echoed these concerns earlier this year in a speech [PDF 61KB] at the spring 2006 Intel Developer Forum. Non-PC devices generally have trouble displaying Web-based content “not because the designers of these products are incompetent; it’s because the codecs and software change too regularly for a static device to stay up-to-date,” said Maloney, also the general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group.
Further down the road, coordinated use of UMDs might turn the classroom of the future into a sort of multi-sensory theater, says Lomas, who maintains three blogs about teaching and learning – one each for his role as an Educause* researcher, university* administrator and personal* fan of social software-related technol ogy.
“In a lot of our learning spaces, we’re really big on user configuration and flexibility,” says Lomas, a cell biologist who has turned an abiding interested in computers into a second career studying technology-enabled teaching and learning. “Things like lighting are a start, but multiple displays and multiple channels of sound start to creep into what you might want to do here.”
With a UMD in nearly every student’s hands, one can imagine a science teacher simultaneously displaying several different elements of a rain forest ecosystem. Or a music teacher demonstrating the basics of three-part harmony or 5-note chords. Or a history teacher telling the story of Europe during World War II from the perspective a soldier, a politician, a schoolgirl and others.
Universities, insulated from profit pressures and mandated to promote discovery, are ripe environments to prove such someday-maybe mobile use cases. In 2003, the University of British Columbia completed a $30.6 million (Cdn) upgrade of its computing infrastructure. The project created* what was then Canada’s largest high-speed wireless network, with 1,200 access points spread across the Vancouver campus for the benefit of students, faculty and staff. A recent partnership* with Canadian Wi-Fi vendor FatPort opens the university wireless network to all guest users.
Many universities are busy making news related to mobile computing. Montclair State University in New Jersey is partnering with Rave Wireless to offer various wireless applications and services for students’ cell phones. Montclair student Patrick McGrory uses Rave to maintain “Bored in the Dorms,” a mobile blog that’s received coverage in Red Herring and The Chronicle of Higher Education (see the Nov. 11, 2005 issue).
“The biggest (mobility) trends I see nowadays center around convenience and accessibility,” says McGrory. “A gadget can have the best features in the world but if it’s not convenient for someone to carry or generally live with, then it is worthless to them.”
McGrory carries a laptop, phone and iPod with him wherever he goes, regularly synchronizing his laptop’s calendar to the other two devices to help him stay on top of academic assignments and social plans. He says that, if properly implemented, a UMD could potentially meet all of his communication and computing needs in a single device.
“If I could have one device that fulfills all my needs and more, then I would only have to carry one thing around and only pay for on piece of technology,” McGrory says.
Universities might sometimes help advance technology adoption, but for K-12 schools the issue is how to keep up. Many K-12 teachers are too busy dealing with a broad cross section of students and navigating new federal and state standardized tests to explore the bleeding edge of computing. However, it’s a mistake to tag K-12 educators as hopeless tech laggards.
“Education is today where busin ess was 20 years ago – on the cusp of radically transforming the learning environment,” according to the Teachers Talk Tech 2006* survey published annually by technology reseller CDW-G.
Among the changing opinions reflected in the survey of 1,000 public school teachers:
- 71% say technology is effective in teaching writing skills, up from 64% in 2005
- 79% say technology in the classroom is an important teaching tool for students, up from 77% in 2005
- 65% say students’ academic performance improves with use of classroom computers, up from 61% in 2005
“The general trend is more mobile PCs in the classroom,” says Bob Kirby, director of K-12 education for CDW-G . “We’ve seen a huge amount of growth.”
Some K-12 educators introduce mobile technology by way of carts*, which offer a means to share laptops and then securely store and charge the devices when they’re not in use. Other school officials are following Maine’s model and distributing one laptop per child. Texas, Michigan and Virginia also are home to one-to-one programs.
Mobile computers especially are relevant to non-traditional students, such as those who are home-schooled or attend charter schools. As an example, Kirby points* to CDW-G’s partnership with the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, which will provide 3,000 students in grades six through twelve with laptops, printers and software.
Many UMDs come loaded with USB ports which easily interface with various scientific peripherals. Which is why Kirby guesses that UMDs might find uses in environments where students are expected to go out in the world and gather and input data – a scenario that excites those in higher education, as well.
“One of the reasons we’re interested in mobility is that it provides great support for active learning, which tends to be the most effective approach to mastering subjects,” says Diana Oblinger, an Educause vice president in Boulder, Colo. “With mobile devices you can enable many elements of active learning such as an ability to capture data on location.”
The combination of mobility and connectivity embeds learning into everyday life and gives students greater choice and control over the learning process, Oblinger says.
For all the promise associated with UMDs, questions remain about the devices. And it’s not at all difficult to find curmudgeons* griping about durability, battery life, input options and price.
But Steve Paine, who publishes the popular Carrypad* site, has an easy retort to such concerns.
“The combined ad vancement of power efficiency and power storage is growing faster than any software house (apart from gaming vendors) can put demands on PC architecture,” says Paine, who operates the site from Bonn, Germany. “Therefore, at some point in the future, you will be able to buy a UMD that fulfills all your home computing needs.”
Paine says today’s relatively high prices are a consequence of UMDs only being stamped out in very low numbers. He believes that falling prices on laptops can be explained in part by the fact that hundreds of millions of notebooks are made annually. The One Laptop Per Child project* – which, despite design restrictions similar to many UMDs, appears well on its way to producing $100 laptop – shows what happens at big scales, he says.
Intel is addressing common critiques of UMDs, as well.
“We will be putting more and more attention on the ergonomic challenges, the software challenges, the packaging challenges, and the heating challenges, to squeeze these things into smaller and smaller spaces,” Maloney said in his Intel Developer Forum speech. “At Intel we have a goal of reducing power consumption by an order of magnitude so that we can meet the demands of this kind of market.”
While the engineers toil, pundits such as Paine continue to be optimistic about the place of UMDs, particularly in education. Expanding input possibilities to include touch and voice creates new possibilities for conducting handwriting exercises to practicing music notation, he says.
“There is a huge opportunity now for software houses to start introducing touch into all types of software,” says Paine. “From preschool, gesture-based, action-reaction learning applications to serious high-end business software, touch is intuitive and efficient. And together with mobility, it’s a wining combination.”
Geoff Koch, a former Intel writer and editor, is a freelance writer, editor and Big 10 sports buff in Lansing, Mich. He recently co-authored "Open Source Development: A Platform Perspective" for the Intel® Software Network. He also wrote the "Software Developer FAQ: Intel® Virtualization Technology," which describes a few of Intel’s own virtualization efforts, and "Computer Security: The Hardware/Software Solution," based on an interview with Intel security researcher Victoria Stavridou-Coleman. Write to him at koch.geoff@gmail.com.
