Richard’s Educational Technology Blog

This week I had a great opportunity to listen to Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist for Intel (thanks to an invite from my friend Curt Allen of Agilix Labs). He gave a very interesting top 10 list of reasons to mobilize.

Before jumping into his list, I want to summarize (to the best of my ability) what he meant by mobilizing. His solution is that we look for ways to get the content directly to the users. For example, instead of having to go to a portal. like Blackboard, students could get the documents directly on their mobile devices. One way to think of it would be like e-mailing the documents to the students. The difference though, is that it would keep track of updates and changes to documents and automatically update your local files as needed. There are products that make this type of system work today. Bloglines and other blog aggregators work in this way, they give you a list of all of the changes and additions to the blogs that you are subscribed to. Agilix’s goBinder software provides this same type of functionality for Balckboard. Content from a student’s course is automatically downloaded to their computer and synchronized every time a student gets online.

Chris Thomas gave a “Top 10” list for why we should move to this moble, portal-less paragidm of learning systems. Keeping my previous examples in mind, take a look at what he had to say.

Top 10 reasons to mobilize

1. Turning out technology disadvantaged alumni
By using older technologies (like portal-based systems) students are being taught with archaic technologies. Yet they are using cutting-edge technology for all other parts of their lives (instant messagning, sharing music, online gaming, etc).
This is my experience in using Blackboard discussion boards after having classes that use blogs.

2. The network ate my homework
When depending on server portal solutions, like logging into Route Y (BYU’s education portal) there are always network problems (network went down half way through my quiz, etc). By sending information directly to a student’s mobile device (or a teacher’s), there is no system to crash or keep the information from being transfered.

3. Services not available
This is also known as server overlaod, and we see it at the beginning of every semester or late at night before a large assignment is due. The only solution to this problem in the oly system is to add more and more servers to the data center. However, when you add more servers, more people will use them and the problem will never be solved. By transferring information directly from mobile device to mobile device there is no system to crash, even during peak times. All you have to have is someone making sure the network is working (and that can be a professional service provider like Comcast)

4. Cost to re-purpose content for online use
When materials are stored on web portals, all of the content must be converted into webpage files (HTML). Based on a project done for the US government, there is a 60% addition to cost by having to convert everything to HTML (this data comes from a study done by Thomas did while looking at an online grant application process for the US government. Typically when the grants were due the servers would max out, see problem #3, but there was also a ton of labor in maintaining thousands of usernames and passwords and creating all of the HTML pages for each form (average of 20 html pages for each form, such as help, contact info, etc.), there were also a bunch of databases trying to interface with the grants database. With the new system of sending content directly, there is no need to worry about user accounts, no need to create HTML pages to support all of the forms, and no reason to interface with a bunch of databases (any other group that needs access to the data can just take the XML from the new system and do whatever they want with it). The good of a “gateway” like blackboard is that it a common place to get stuff. The bad is that it is converting the original format of the conent to the gateway’s format (ie. a word document, a video, ect) This requires a TON of conversion, time and effort. The better way is to get the files “downstream”. Stop uploading and downloading from the “gateway” bottleneck.

5. Poorly informed campus community
A major problem with 33using traditional websites or portal environments is that it requires students to check in to see if something has been updated. This can take a lot of time and it is very easy to miss something. This should not be the responsiblitiy of the user. Instead, by using a mobile paradigm a notification would be sent directly to the user (like an agrigator for a blog)

6. Speed Learning Impossible Network Latency guarantees 50% reduction in students consumption rate (example of teacher who had been given broadband and still had to download everything on the computer for speed. We need to find a newer opportunity)

7. Learning System Enduced Labor
Systems that fouce students and teachers to upload and re-enter content into the learning systems are a great waste of student and instructor time. A prefect example of this is the time it takes to enter dates into the blackboard course calendar.

8. Partial brain learning – when teachers and students must comply to leraning system methodology (ie. being forced to use LiveText or BlackBoard)

9. Disadvantaging the Disadvantaged
The portal solution, and the forced repeated downloading makes it very difficult for students with slower connections to receive the information. “The people who need education the most are those who are least capiable of having a broadband link.”

10. Cost and impact of wasting bandwidth
Bandwidth is wasted when the same information is downloaded more than once by the same user. An example of this would be a student checking the course syllabus every couple of days. The document hasn’t changed, yet the student must download it to view it because it is stored on Blackboard and not sent to the student’s local machine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Educational Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.