One of the main aims of a newly started and ongoing m-learning development project at Dewsbury College is to explore the potential for PDAs to act as laptop replacements in Community Outreach Centres. The growing use of laptops was first highlighted as a health and safety issue due to the weight of the equipment and the nature of the Outreach Centres. If laptops were needed for a particular lesson, they had to be taken in by the tutor - along with any other projection and teaching paraphernalia required. Further debate had taken part regarding the suitability of PDAs to take the place of laptops as extra machines began to be taken in for group use, as they were so much lighter to carry. Aside from this pragmatic consideration, there seemed to be exciting possibilities to extend engaging e-learning to groups who would be traditionally more likely to be excluded from formal education.
We are using 10 HP iPaq 2210s for the project. These use the Pocket PC 2003 operating system. The iPaq has both Compact Flash and SD card memory. The CF slot can therefore be used with Margi Presenter to display a lesson (if required) though an LCD projector.
One feature of our project, which is supported entirely by the college at this point, is to explore the use of home made web pages on the PDA and some bespoke 'flash' objects. The tutor responsible uses home made web pages as part of her class delivery. One benefit of web page use is that students can access them at anytime from the college Intranet. The web pages link to a variety of other information sources, quizzes and web sites whilst at the same time allowing an organised route through the subject. Because of this the pages allow for a variety of differing learning styles and offer more accessible experiences to a wider range of learners.
These webs are currently being converted and repurposed for the PDA. Once again, it is not the purpose of this case study to describe the techniques (or tribulations!) which this conversion has caused.
As many readers will know, Hot Potatoes tm is the trade name given to a variety of quiz templates produced by Half-Baked Software inc . Hot Potatoes are widely used in the UK F.E. community.
Hot Potatoes' current incarnation is version six; each previous version building on the other, with its developers keeping up with major improvements in various browser technologies. Version six is designed to work well with version six of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and with the advanced features that system offers.
The tutor's webs had been made using MS FrontPage 2000 and linked to Word Files, PDF files, Internet web pages, PowerPoint files, videos and Hot Potato quizzes (mainly version five but some version six). It followed therefore, that as the tutor's web pages were being converted for use on the PDA, some things had to overcome conversion problems or be ditched! One of these decisions involved Hot Potatoes.
Hot Potatoes are saved for use in html format, the native file being kept for editing purposes and backup only. So using the hotpot.htm file didn't seem like it would be a problem, after all we were converting html pages anyway; but it was a problem.
The PDA's we are using feature the Pocket PC version 4.20.0 OS with an Intel (r) PXA255 processor. The Internet Explorer version used on Pocket PC 2003 is nothing like as sophisticated as version 6 featured in Windows XP and above so some of the java enabled features of the Hot Potato quizzes were lost - in fact many saved in the latest version (6) could not be read at all.
I therefore wrote to Half-Baked Software in September 2004, to seek their advice and asked if they had any plans to feature PDAs as a platform for Hot Potato use. Martin is one of the company's shareholders and quite rightly he suggested that I should be "hassling" the "PDA Browser coders" because "by the time we could create such a thing, PDAs would have browsers compatible with the standards we use" . However, we didn't have the time or the technical know-how to do this sort of hassling as the PDAs were ordered and the students were being briefed. Like the Hot Pot team, our need was for "just getting things to work".
By this stage I had already tried saving the existing native format Hot Pot files in earlier browser formats but to no avail. The Pocket PC version of Internet Explorer just was just not up to it. I knew that previous versions of the product would save in browser version 3 or 4 but Martin's e-mail showed that this older version was no longer available or supported by them. Luckily I had found a Greek web site where the older version could be downloaded (although it has since disappeared). There are also old copies of Hot Potatoes on some college machines which have not been upgraded. My first attempts were encouraging but there was another small problem.
Until the new PDAs arrived we were using an older iPaq 3970 as a development machine. This supports Pocket PC 2002. The hotpot.htm files were at least showing now, they just weren't showing the formative feedback, which is the great feature of JBC. This was a disappointment but we waited eagerly to see if our new PDAs, with Pocket PC 2003 installed would overcome the problem. Sure enough, when we transferred our work to the new PDAs the JBC files worked fully, showing feedback as intended.
Version 3 saves the quiz in a linear fashion; instead of moving on laterally page by page as they do now. The questions are all on the same page, one underneath the other. This suits the PDA user because they just have to move the scroll bar downwards instead of looking for a 'next' button. The feedback is given in a frame which takes up the top 20% of a normal PC window. It was this feedback frame which Pocket PC 2002 hadn't been able to accommodate. So now we were happy, we had the best feature of Hot Potatoes working on our PDAs. We set out to see if other Hot Pot quizzes would work just as well.
So far, we have tried JBC (and therefore JQuiz should work equally as well), JCloze and JMix and have been happy with the results. JCross and JMatch are much less satisfactory - although workable if you can be bothered. JCross spreads too far over the confines of the page to be effective and JMatch was never satisfactory in this version as the drag and drop feature had not yet been integrated. As a matter of interest, I saved a JMatch drag and drop in version 4 - but the PDA refused to see it!
JBC, JCloze and JMix, use the top frame mentioned above, to give feedback and although the frame can take up to almost half of the screen it can be moved with the tap-stick used to operate features of the PDA. Just gently tap on the line and drag it up a little, to suit the size of feedback given. Beware that three html files are created by version 3 and that each of these must be loaded onto the PDA and a link created to the title file.
Perhaps something which will be reported on more critically at a later date is the miniature screen size of our PDAs. The way Hot Pots is represented on them is difficult to work - however, the JBC, JCloze and JMix quizzes work at least as well as any of the other web pages being converted.
In fairness, many readers may regard our quest to see if Hot Potatoes would work on a PDA to be a fruitless waste of time and in many ways I can agree with that point of view.
But to students in the Outreach Centres who generally do not have access to such technology, our tenacity may well be a tremendous addition to their learning experience. Much of the clientele have needs other than their 'taught' subject and it is our sincere hope that the PDAs will help us to bring some of the more technological techniques for learning into their world. They will certainly make it much easier for the tutors to carry with them and if that alone brings the desired improvements to the learning experience, then our efforts will not have been wasted.
As discussed above, it may be that the future will bring far more powerful machines of this nature that make our efforts seem miniscule in retrospect, but already having overcome the use of PowerPoint, Video clips and home made web pages, developing a way of using Hot Potatoes on the same platform has been a real boost to us. After all, we are seeking to replicate the same experience for Outreach students as those in mainstream classes. To have lost Hot Potatoes would have been a shame.
David Sugden
October 10th 2004.
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This screenshot shows the JBC multiple choice quiz. Clearly a lot of scrolling is required, but the learner benefits from interactivity and feedback.  |
This screenshot shows Jcloze quiz. Again scrolling is required, but the learner is involved in an active learning experience.  |
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