“…interesting after all these years that people still want to come together face to face to do workshops, seminars, participate in lectures and demonstrations, and generally network in a co-present manner. This despite all the issues of travel pollution, rising fuel prices, travel delays, terrorist threats, stress and anxiety, and so on.”

It happens that I have just been asked to attend and contribute to a conference in Spain. All expenses paid, which raises the additional issue of how money is spent and how it might (or might not) be better directed. It also happens that prior commitments prevent me from accepting … but, putting that aside, what would I feel about attending?

Truth to tell, despite my passionate belief in the importance of synthetic simulations as replacement for “co-present experience”, there are some things that can’t be done through them. Some things need physical, not virtual interaction. And which things those are is not a constant: they vary for each individual and, especially, for each learner.

The interaction around (rather than in) many conferences, workshops, whatever, can in the words of my invitation “create important and helpful synergies“. I value the (physical) research group meetings which I attend roughly every other month, and some professional development activities which involve actually being in the same room as other people; but there are those who do not, who regard them as a waste of time. I am generally less than fully energised by physical attendance at conferences, but I know colleagues whose professional passion depends upon it.

I do about ninety percent, perhaps a little more, of my educational work using electronic means of delivery, but there are subjects, groups and individuals for which this is not suitable. I have a very rewarding voluntary involvement with mathematics and science learning by groups of disaffected teenagers, for example, who need their courage validated and confidence boosted by every interpersonal cue available: they just wouldn’t get what they need from computer mediated communications. And seeing one of those groups wander in shared wonder around the Natural History Museum or across a wetland habitat I cannot imagine an adequate computer mediated substitute … supplement, yes, very certainly: but not substitute. On the other hand, there are a couple of similarly disaffected teenagers for whom social contact is difficult and painful, but for whom CMC provides a way forward.

Horses for courses; most (not all) of us need some sort of professional interaction in physical person, but there’s no “one size fits all” way to provide it for everyone.

The culture of conference as jolly junket, a sort of paid holiday perk of the job, certainly needs attention. So does knee jerk rejection of the new (still sadly all too common). But technology is a glorious enrichment of the available communication options, not a wholesale replacement of them.

For the past ten years or so, I have been running an introduction to ICT in Teaching and Learning for trainee teachers, lecturers and instructors. I have seen the attendees go on into practice. Those who make the richest contribution to their students’ learning are not those who embrace ICT as a new paradigm, nor those who view it as an interesting add on extra; they are the ones who eagerly seek to integrate its advantages into the broadest possible spectrum of educational experience.

[contributed by Felix Grant]

The other question was what exactly to do with these machines, to justify taking the risk. These two issues were linked; my clients had to feel that something worthwhile was going on, if they were to respect the tools involved.

One subject which interests all of them, regardless of gender, is cars. A month before the netbooks arrived, I started discussing with them the relationships between weight, power, speed and acceleration in a car. They have rather more practical understanding of these matters than can be easily explained by legal experience at their age so I concentrated on trying to relate this to theoretical engineering models, first visual and then symbolic.

With the netbooks on hand, I brought the talk around to how we might investigate the actual (rather than maximum or advertised) speed and acceleration values for real cars in daily use. They were very interested in this idea, and were keen to try their hand at using spreadsheets for the purpose. Then they realised that they would have to write down a lot of information and bring it back to the centre, then key it in, before they could do anything with it; at that point, disappointment and loss of interest threatened. Like a good conjuror, I then produced the netbooks.

Gathering data

The scheme they devised involved teams of six, each team stationed downstream from a Pedestrian Light Controlled crossing (this allowed two teams per crossing, getting double data for each red light, at three different crossings). The team leader (let’s call her or him “A”) would stand by the lights themselves, and would have the computer with an open spreadsheet. “B” through to “F” would be at measured distances downstream from the lights.

When the lights turned red (probably because “A” had pressed the button, but I didn’t enquire too closely), “A” would take up a position beside the frontmost car and enter details (make, model including engine size if possible, number of occupants) into the spreadsheet. When the lights went amber, “A” would raise his or her arm and the others would prepare to start stopwatches (mostly on mobile phones, though a few used the function on their wristwatches). When the lights turned green “A” would drop the raised arm and start walking up the line; the rest of the team would start the stopwatches running.

As the lead car passed each team member, the stopwatch at that position would be stopped. As “A” reached each, the time on their stop watch would be entered into the spreadsheet. In this way, a database of timings at fixed distances for different vehicles was built up. The results were also visible in a predefined scatter plot at the right of the same screen, with an interpolated trend line, so the model could be seen developing as they worked. When complete, the sets of data were merged into a single sheet on the desk top and then filtered to compare different data for similar subsets.

As for the risk, I handed over the complete trial set to the two alpha primes in the group (one male, one female) and left them to arrange distribution; and all came back.

Taking it further

This probably seems an underutilisation of the equipment. The same data collection could, after all, have been done with a pocket PC or similar (in fact, the idea was partly suggested by Chandra’s Big Freeze which used Psion clamshells. But the experience of taking “proper computers” out, and being trusted to do so, was worth its weight in gold and stimulated desire to learn. There were, in any case, two follow ups which would not have been possible with handhelds.

First, there was use of a pure mathematics package to compare the experimental data with a theoretical model. Chandra and AbsentCat had described their use of SysQuake LE for projectile modelling. SysQuake is available for both Windows (in the cybercafé) and Linux (on the netbooks) so I installed both. Having set up a basic acceleration equation (d=½at²) on the PC, we set the value of a by trial and error to give a line which matched the spreadsheet data. The young people found this very empowering, and probably learnt more algebraic confidence in half an hour of SysQuake than in all of their time with me to date. They also learned, to their surprise, that most acceleration is over within a very short time (with speed surprisingly low and surprisingly constant) on urban roads.

Second, AbsentCat scrounged us the loan of a set of plug in USB interfaces allowing various types of switch to start or stop timers on the netbooks. The students had a lot of fun with trying out various switching devices. We were loaned some pressure mats which could be placed on the road, though too often the passing vehicles avoided them. We experimented with home made trembler switches, but they were too sensitive, and hard to position usefully. Lengths of rubber tube, filled with water, were laid across the road with light pressure sensitive microswitches plugged into the ends – these were the most successful, and supplied 95% of our usable data.

Broader benefits

The tremblers were a complete failure in data collection terms but worth their weight in gold for the interest which they provoked. A drop of mercury is placed in the bottom of a glass tube; one electrode is immersed in it, and another arranged as a circular collar around the inside of the tube, fractionally above the meniscus; any motion which shakes the tube causes the mercury to make contact between the two electrodes, completing a circuit. Most of my clients have, at some time, been involved in vehicle theft, and immediately realised the relevance of tremblers to car alarms. We got a lot of chemistry, physics and engineering time out of the resulting investigations – even starting a new set of data collection exercises to investigate the link between tube size, collar spacing, and the trade off between sensitivity and discrimination.

This second (more accurate) phase gave us enough data to further investigate the mathematical model, and to extend it into areas such as mechanical work or power/weight ratios. It also allowed us to compare vehicles by type (small car, four wheel drive, bus, lorry, motorcycle, etc). Most valuably, in some ways, it led on naturally to discussing the range of road behaviours exhibited by different users of the same vehicle.

[Contributed by BobTheBumbler]

Real science.

The advantage of portable computing devices is that they encourage “real science” activities out in the world – look at Sayid’s “Pushing up daisies” quadrat activity, for example. To have a spreadsheet available at the same time as fishing around in a ditch for tadpoles, or recording estimated speeds and accelerations of aircraft lifting from a runway, or exploring a lemonade bottling plant, brings the analysis of data vividly to life as part and parcel of the phenomena being observed. When it comes to sharing the excitement with others, though, these devices have their shortcomings.

Generally speaking, a pupil with hand held computer has to store field data in a spreadsheet or database, write notes in a word processor; return to school or home; upload both to a PC or Mac; and only then start to merge them or share them with peers.

With the trial set of Asus netbooks, I was able to take groups of students out and make the computing a seamless part of the fieldwork. There are several levels to this.

Most basic level: sneakernet.

This applies in most field contexts. Here, the pupil enters his or her own data and makes his or her own notes, as in the usual handheld setup. However, a single USB flash drive is circulated continually around the group, each pupil backing up their work to it as it reaches them and then copying a complete set of files back to their own machine. It’s necessary to name the files logically (Jesh_Kaur.doc, Jesh_Kaur.xls; John_Smith.doc, John_Smith.xls; and so on) and to avoid overwriting and keep individual work distinct, but once that habit is established it means that every member of the group has both multiple recent backups her or his own work (on both the USB drive and the computers of other members of the group) and also reference access to near current copies of everyone else’s.

The next level: WAN to go.

This was amazingly easy to set up and use, though not suitable for all settings. All that is required is a wireless router, a power supply, and a relatively small study area. When in a museum, that lemonade bottling plant, or many other visit sites, a temporary wifi zone can (with site permission) be set up in an area such as the café or visitor centre. No internet access is available, but work sharing becomes immediate. If a wifi hard disk is attached to the router, so much the better – all shared work is then available to anyone within the coverage area, regardless of whether its author is within reach. If an adaptor is carried for running the router and disk from a vehicle’s cigarette lighter, good use can also be made of time on the minibus home afterwards.

Continuity at school and at home.

If each pupil is made an author on a shared blog, with restricted readership (to avoid predation risks, but also to provide the group with privacy from nonparticipant peers) and the teacher as administrator, subsequent write ups and analysis can be pooled. By copying and pasting material from the word processor or spreadsheet such blog entries are quickly and easily generated, then can be edited and developed in place. The blog takes care of permissions – each member of a group can red everyone’s material but only change his/her own. A small portable computer continually in the same pupil’s hands, allowing work to be done when that pupil feels like it (at home or at school), able to access the blog whenever and wherever wifi access is accessible, a great incentive to participate.

Team science

All in all, my trial period with these “netbooks” has been the best opportunity yet to develop in pupils a genuine constructivist experience of working in a real community of team science. The pupils working on this pilot responded magnificently, simultaneously nourishing and feeding from each other, exchanging ideas and critiques, competing to be the best contributors to shared success.

All I have to do now is get funding to buy a full class set for long term use!

[contributed by KateQ]

Portability is a relative term. Many of the boys to whom I loan a palmtop machine simply put it in their trouser pocket. Girls, on the other hand, usually put it in a school bag along with their books and so on. These Asus machines are about twice the size of a Psion, four times that of a Palm device. That makes them unpocketable, but doesn’t much affect a school bag. For boys, then, a change in behaviour is often necessary for these machines to be considered “portable”, but not for most girls.

For that reason, I loaned all five machines out to boys on 24 hour tickets in the first week just to see what would happen. In most cases, they went into sports bags (and came back muddy) or satchels (and came back covered in grey fluff). In a significant minority (15%) of cases they were carried around continually in the hand, which places them at considerably greater risk (but see below on survivability).

After the first week they were loaned as required, regardless of gender or time span; as expected, the girls treated them exactly as if they were palmtops.

Survivability was more worrying, and I asked how much risk was acceptable in field trialling. The answer back from the sponsor was that deliberate attempts to test a machine to destruction would be unacceptable, but that we shouldn’t let potential hazard stop us from doing things we would do with a palmtop. It happened that a joint maths/sport project was under way, so the trial subnotebooks were added to the stock of Psions and Palms and allowed to go out onto football and netball pitches.

A football pitch provided the severest test of survivability. A pupil took one of the netbooks down to a practice game to try out both real time analysis of game descriptors entered into a spreadsheet (OpenOffice Calc, saving in Excel file format) and video capture to disk using the built in camera. The computer’s novelty attracted a lot of attention and it wasn’t long before attempts were made to take it away from its guardian, who resisted. In the resulting mêlée the computer was dropped, trampled on by several sets of studded boots and rolled over by half a dozen tussling nine year old boys. When order had been restored, the referee had to dig it out of the mud. Cleaning the mud out of USB ports, Ethernet socket, VGA output connector, sound jacks and, worst of all, the keyboard, took a lot of time, patience and cocktail sticks but, miraculously, everything was still in perfect working order. After that, we sealed all orifices with electrical insulating tape unless they were needed for use; proper sealing plugs would be better still, but would probably get lost fairly quickly.

Fast forward: despite horror stories like this, and my gut feeling that these machines are not ultimately as robust as handhelds, none came to grief in the time we had them.

My summary judgement: these are a valuable addition to the portable computing options available for primary science. Since Psion type machines are no longer made, and can only be replaced second hand, their gradual replacement on failure by these small subnotebooks seems a good strategy. At the same time, it would be a mistake to withdraw a working handheld (especially of the palm type). For as long as possible, keep existing palmtop hardware in use but expand enthusiastically with subnotebooks.

[Contributed by Chandra]

Over the past few months we have been sharing a set of these machines, moving them around different groups for a week or two at time and comparing notes on the results.

The machine is small enough to just about go into a handbag, as some of our young female teenage students demonstrated, is big enough for adapted touch typing after some practice, has on board wireless or wired network connectivity, is provided with three USB ports plus microphone/headphone jacks and is remarkable resilient.

Prices start at £167 (about $300 or €230 at time of writing), although the the ones we used were those with two or four gigabytes of storage at £220 or £250 respectively ($400/€300 or $450/€340). Each machine in our set was also provided with a one gigabyte SD/MMC card, on which the default documents folder was configured to reside.

Despite some remarkably rough treatment, the complete set survived and were returned to the supplier in full working order.

That’s it for now. We will follow up with individual posts on our separate experiences over the trial period.

[Contributed by Chandra on behalf of the whole trial group]

We were looking for a program which would “listen” to a note and report its frequency, and at the time didn’t find one - though we have, with many thanks to Steven Pon who wrote in response to the original post, since discovered WavePort, from PASCO Scientific.

We ran a pilot with individuals, audibly matching frequency generated from a PC to plucked strings and pressed electronic organ keys, and got surprisingly good results with very close approximations to the theoretical curves. Unfortunately, when we extended this to a class it was much less successful.

We split the class into two groups, one with a guitar and one with an electronic organ, and set them to matching frequency to note in the same way, discussing amongst themselves the best match and coming to a consensus on the value to be entered into a spreadsheet log. For some reason, the results did not even remotely resemble the pilot with individuals. Some results followed the theoretical curve; some were completely out (including, interestingly, some which were almost exactly one octave adrift) and others which perversely followed a sequence in the wrong direction!

We’ve dropped the idea for the time being, pending more thought and trialling. On the positive side, however, we learnt  a lot - and the students were very coöperative in trying to make the experiment work. We’ll be back to it in due course.

[contributed by Ivor McGillivray and Felix Grant]

Things are coming together again, however, and I hope that things will be busier  from April 21st (when most Spring breaks end) onward.

Taking all of that together, the results broadly corresponded with Lakshmi’s perception.

Students whose favourite subjects include the visual and dramatic arts, and whose best marks are in those subjects, tended to handle Equations! with more confidence than MathType, and to produce better designed physics assignment pages when working on the machine on which it was installed. Interestingly, this was also true of those whose focus is physical activity (games, sports, physical education).

Students with a preference and bias towards English Language, literature, history, geography, and sociology showed the reverse inclination: they performed best, and felt greatest confidence, when using MathType.

Surprisingly, the split was also visible within the subgroup of students who prefer and perform best in the sciences. Students whose chemistry is stronger than their biology had a MathType leaning, while their peers who lean towards biology but have a weakness in chemistry preferred Equations!. Those whose strength is in physics and/or maths, however, were indifferent to which package they used, were equally competent and confident in either, but showed irritation at having to switch from one to another, in either direction, when resuming an assignment on a different machine.

One final split emerged. Formulator Express is freely available to all students on all other school computers apart from the two laptops which they were required to use for this assignment. In roughly equal numbers, some students preferred either of the trial packages to that established option while others reacted against the need to shift away from it. None of them placed preference for their usual tool above one of the trial packages but below the other - either they preferred it to both, or they didn’t.

[contributed by Ross]

The first problem we have encountered is an apparent dearth of devices or software which will listen to a note and read out its frequency. There are plenty of them (aimed at instrument tuning) which will do it the other way round, reading out a note name (C, F#, G, etc), but not a frequency. And although we did work out an alternative approach based on these guitar tuners, the interference from a building full of computing equipment, hearing aid loop generators, WiFi networks, several hundred cellphones etc, swamped them and made them useless.

A microphone attached to an oscilloscope is too unwieldy for our purpose: first introduce the oscilloscope, then explain the setting of time bases, learn to disregard noise … a one hour session would be over before anything useful had even stared. It will be useful and interesting further in, but not at the beginning.

Plan C involves auditory comparison of a tone generator signal to played keyboard and guitar string notes, by tweaking the frequency specified in the generator and deciding by consensus when a played note has been matched. This looks initially promising. We have started with NCH’s tone generator, which works well; the synthesiser at National Taiwan Normal University’s physics department also looks promising:

An alternative, offering sequential playing of different frequencies will be needed for subsequent work; a purpose made interface for preference, though it could be done using a mathematics package or even BASIC at a pinch. Ivor has written one as a Java Applet, but security measures in the browser environment where it will be used are raising barriers which have still to be resolved.

More as the idea progresses…

[contributed by Ivor McGillivray and Felix Grant]