Test Bot

A bit of a technical update

We have had problems with Vista on the tablets since we got them, so we have now given up and gone back to XP. We couldn't do this at first as there was no XP build available for our model of tablet computer, but now that there is and we have uploaded it onto all of them, the difference in speed of operation and reliability is amazing. No more battery charging problems either, which was one of the more bizarre effects of the Vista build.

New uses for the tablet computers

The HP TFT project officially came to an end in June 2009, but we still have all the kit - so what next?! Well, the tablets were used in Artificial Intelligence classes by one of our colleagues in the Bristol Institue of Technology in semester 1 (Sep 09 - Jan 10) and we'll be pestering him and his students for some evaluations of their use. The results of those evaluations will appear on the research website.

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.