Summary of this semester

Oh dear, how do I sum up this semester? It has truly been awful. By far the most awful and tragic part is the death of Deborah Street, our co-investigator on the project. Deb died on the 28th March, suddenly and unexpectedly. This has been a terrible personal sadness for us on the project team, as Deb was a great colleague to all of us, and a good personal friend of mine. Her enthusiasm for teaching and supporting students will be sadly missed by everyone.

On a more mundane note, the tablets have had several problems this year (see below) and we have realised that they are sadly lacking in memory now, as we increase the activities we want to use them for. This makes then very slow. We have experimented with putting 4Gb of memory in them and this helps enormously, so the remaining project money will go on doing this for all 21 of them.

We spent a whole day last summer planning what we would do this semester, based on the findings of the previous year. We planned on around 20 - 25 students. 5 days before the module started in January another 25 students were added to the cohort! This threw our plans out completely, and we really flew the module by the seat of our pants, as far as the tablet project was concerned. We couldn't do what we wanted to do as we had such a big class to manage, and this is reflected in the responses to the questionnaires and focus groups - much more negative than last year.

All in all, a semester I would never wish to repeat :-(

A heads up on battery management

Just for information, we hit a problem in Dec/Jan with the tablet battery charging. For no apparent reason they stopped charging, even though they were all plugged into the charging trolley and everything seemed to be working normally. On checking each of the computers we realised that the problem was with battery management, and in many cases the computer had stopped seeing both the batteries. It turned out that this was the result of missing a BIOS update, together with missing a whole set of Vista updates as the computers hadn't been used for a couple of months over the summer. Quite why it should raise its head when it did, and why it should have the bizarre effect of making the batteries appear missing isn't clear, but at least we know that updating the BIOS and Vista solves the problem. Just a heads up for anyone out there experiencing the same problem.

Practising research interviews in Second Life

The picture here shows the interviewing stations in the Research Observatory in Second Life, where students can go in pairs and practice their research interviewing skills in formal, informal and relaxed environments. In each of the interview stations the avatars take on different animations (body language) and they are prompted to reflect on the pros and cons of the different environments with regard to how the interviewer and interviewee might feel in these settings. Also, how could you capture the data in these settings?

Second Life from the tablets

We've now pretty well completed loading the Second Life viewer onto all the tablets, and we're really pleased with how well they cope with it. The quality of the picture is generally good, although it doesn't have the richness of the picture on machines with more poweful graphics cards (e.g. no sparkly water!). But, we're still really impressed with how well they do handle it, and we'll be using them in class in semester 2 so that students can access a learning simulation area we're building on our SL island. For more info on this, go to our Research Observatory/SL blog at http://researchobs2.edublogs.org/ . The picture on the left shows the hub area of the island, with the offices on the right and the exhibition hall on the left.

New uses for the tablets

We're beginning to look at ways in which the tablet computers can be used to support other elements of the MScs in IT and Statistics, so that students can become more familiar with them when we begin the research methods curriculum work again in semester 2 (Feb 2009), and also to try them out for different aspects of the wider curriculum. For example, students can work together on creating work in the IT lessons, and then upload this to Sharepoint and continue collaboration both inside and outside the classroom. They will be using the tablets this semester for both IT and statistics curriculum work, so we'll keep this blog posted with comments, discussions and descriptions of the work.

Sharing practice and experiences

There was a meeting of e-learning teams from the SW of England at the University of Bath yesterday. The meeting focussed on the use of Tablet PCs for teaching and learning. It was an informal event to share experiences and good practice from across the region. Our project was very well recieved and there was a lot of interest in our approach and our plans for the future. More details about the event can be seen at http://weethe.wordpress.com/

Trying out new uses with the tablet computers

A few members of faculty have been trying out the tablet computers to experiment with their functionality and to produce ideas for supporting teaching and learning. The general feedback we are getting so far is that they are great to use, and particularly that the handwriting recognition is astounding! We'll keep this blog posted with feedback from these occasional uses, so we can build up an archive of ideas and reflections.