Central Institute for Distance Education Research - FernUniversität in Hagen
Aug.16th 2001
Here you will find only ZIFF material attached to the project, notes, extra tables or a questionnaire etc.From e-Learning to m-learning
Notes
m-learning on the campsite
In summer 2001, Nokia advertised the new communicator 9210 to come to the stores. As a student interested in such new communication devices H. went to several stores in his German university city with a standard inquiry question: "I shall leave next week for vacation to a camping site in southern France but I want to check my normal e-mail and want to connect to the internet" and found out that- 1. several department stores had announced the communicator but none could present one,
- 2. that people in the department stores, even the specialized ones, could not elaborate on specific details of the device and that they only could rely on material meant for advertising.
- 3. Alternatives like the ipaq by compaq had a similar fate - these devices were at hand but could not be presented in function.
- 4. Even older devices like Ericssons R 380 were on stock but could not be presented in complete function.
- 5. In one store ( SATURN, Hagen) at least three members of the team tried to sell the R 380. Two of them were members of the store, one of them a member of one of the telecommunications - provider company. His Ericssons R 380 at least functioned as a normal mobile phone, with sms possibilities attached, as the list in the display showed. But none of the more elaborated functions like e-mail, wap, outlook, synchronized calendars and mailboxes were in function.
- 6. H. tried to connect to his mail server, only to find out, that installation procedures are very complex and that it takes at least one hour to get acquainted with this device.
The situation seeemed to be typical- sales personell is not really acquainted with the products.
H. went to several stores only to find out that there might be a chance to find a suitable device for his intentions, then he found a small sales agent for mobile technology who normally instals the devices for taxis, busses or the fire department who sold a data modem (Ericsson GC 25) for his laptop. It has been installed, it functions, and everybody seems to be happy.
Two technicians had no problems with installing the device: the one of the small shop prepared the laptop functions with the CDROM and the other one, from the computer department helped to connect to the university computing center, to which the "provider" line will lead. The only remaining problem will be the low battery quality of the laptop.
Ericsson GC 25
Since batteries of laptop-devices would not provide enough time to work, the decision was to hook into the electricity net wherever possible and start connecting then. For the retrieval of e-mail directly from the provider 1000km away it only took a couple of minutes. Although the standard linking-in procedures had been prepared by the menu of the e-mail program, building up the configuration and starting ther system took too much time to be called "convenient".The evaluation of the list of connections proves that
1) the shortest connection possible took 52 seconds and costed DM 1.30 ( Euro 0.70)
2) the longest connection, less than half an hour being "online" already costed DM 56,- (Euro 28,-)
One of the problems arriving was the breakdown of the server to hook in into the university towards the end of the period in France: the only possibility was to have the mail routed to a net-provider (gmx), this prolonged the procedure of retrieving the mail becuase there are two aspects in this procedure which cost time: the additional routine to start the laptop with the www program ( in this case Netscape proved to be faster than Explorer), which means to start the program and load all the plugins etc., and then to do several transactions of logging in and having the password checked and looking at all the advertisements to be built up.
Technically the problems encountered were only of financial aspects- to find an invoice of more than DM 500,-- on returning home would be the most severe reason to turn down this possibility as feasible for students.
The other technical problem of a much too short-time battery can be solved in two ways. During the experiment in France there was the possibility to connect to electricity on the site where clients needed electricity for hair-drying, shaving or loading their cellphone-battery. This situation was kind of awkward because someone working with a laptop computer next to someone drying his hair feels like "out of place". In future there will be a battery-transformer inside the car in order to use the car-battery.
The next experience was with Futuroscope. On the site of Futuroscope you can find an Intenet-café where it is easy to connect with very fast lines to the internet at no additional cost. So in this case the use of net-mail seemed to be the good alternative. Only one smaller problem arose there, too: the keyboard is different from the one you find in Germany, so many typing errors came up and made it difficult to be satisfied; In one case the technical setup of the computer proved to be (out of security reasons) rather complicated, but service staff was at hand and could fix the problem. The other aspect of such internet-cafés is that in most cases it will be impossible to load up files and send these via e-mail attachment because these systems only seldom have floppy disk drives.
In October 2001 the decision was taken to buy only one device R 380s. Purchase was no problem, prices had fallen down to less than a third of the sum of summer 2001. When you buy such a system there are two ranges of problems: 1) there has to be a "provider" different from the normal university provider since the provider is the one which bills you. Billing normally functions via bank automatically: in the case of such a project, unless everything can be refunded by the project later, the provider wants to bill the private account. So the first step was to give a private account only to change it afterwards into a bill sent by mail. Configuring the R380s for telephone use turned out to be a matter of minutes. This is what service people do several times a day. But to instal e-mail function with connection to an existing different provider, so that office e-mail can be viewed via the handheld system, and answered, this seems to be the more unusual problem. Not to speak of wap functions. There are wap possibilities you only have to activate the wap browser and dial into the preferred pages. It seems that providers are the ones who offer these services directly since it is their policy to make the money by the minute. To instal this service you have to key in up to a dozen different account numbers,IDs, server names and addresses: this is not very convenient. University of Bochum - I learned - uses wap service already for e.g. prolongation of books boorowed from the central library; University of Vienna: Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien offers Wap services for the students at least in one of the facuties (Wirtschaftsinformatik), they installed a new channel (pocket-WI) under the provider Avant-Go and claim to be the first channel with university-content. The good thing about Avant-Go seems to be that the use of the content and the access to these pages is free - you to pay for the tlephone-connection as usual. In December we are going to evaluate this offer in detail. Another service provider in Germany is Jamba. The special offer is that customers may publish via WAP their busines card, like a homepage free of charge. In December we will try out this offer.