REFERENCE
Stead G (2003) Meeting the challenge: producing m-learning materials for young adults with numeracy and literacy needs.
http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/mlearn/papers/CTAD%20paper.pdf
CHAPTER 6 DEVELOPMENT OF COURSEWARE FOR MOBILE LEARNING
This chapter gives the specifications of typical Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), smartphones and mobile phones of today and discusses the development of mobile learning courseware for them.
PDAs
The Compaq Ipaq 5000 series may be taken as the state of the art for Personal digital Asistants (PDAs) or palmtops or handhelds at the time of writing. Typical of the series is the 5555 which is illustrated below:
HP Compaq iPAQ 5555
An update to the iPAQ 5455, the iPAQ 5555 features the new 400MHz PXA255 XScale processor with a 200MHz system bus. This doubles the rate of data flow between the processor and the system memory and increases performance considerably over past XScale units.
Other updates include the new Pocket PC 2003 OS - Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC - and 128 MB of RAM. It is claimed that the iPAQ 5555's myriad features make it the most advanced Pocket PC available today.
The HP iPaq 5555 Pocket PC sports a broad range of applications, integrated wireless capabilities, enhanced security and expandability. Continuing to deliver expansion capabilities, the powerful and flexible HP iPAQ Pocket PC 5555 is designed to meet your handheld computing needs with enhanced fingerprint security and wireless connectivity both in and out of the office. One can gain competitive advantage through increased mobile productivity that allows you to communicate, access, and manage information when one wants.
Components
With broad choice of wireless capabilities such as integrated Bluetooth and WLAN 802.11b, one can access the Internet, email, and corporate data at home, at work or on the go.
Versatile expansion capabilities and accessories allow one to extend the HP iPAQ Pocket PC's capabilities or convert it into a unique handheld device. Easily print documents, email attachments and pictures directly from the HP iPAQ Pocket PC to an HP printer. A removable battery, transflective display, integrated Secure Digital slot, increased memory, and Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 Premium Edition give greater productivity with optimal performance.
The HP 5555 allows one to gain competitive advantage through increased mobile productivity that allows one to communicate, access, and manage information when you want.
Mobile learning courseware
A mobile device with these specifications is an excellent device for mobile learning. In the From e-learning to m-learning project in Norway courseware was developed using Microsoft Reader Works software to produce a comfortable didactic environment for mobile learning students. All students were provided with a PDA with Microsoft Reader software and studied a course for which the content and background readings measured 1000 A4 pages.
In questionnaires filled in by the students who studied this mobile learning course, satisfaction was expressed with the didactic environment created, the students expressed themselves comfortable with the size of the screen and satisfied with reading course text from the display developed with Microsoft Reader. This is of great importance as one of the criticisms frequently levelled at mobile learning is the problem of screen size and forecasts that students would have difficulty studying from the screen of a mobile device. These problems have been shown to be resolvable by the developers of the From e-learning to m-learning project courseware in Norway.
These Norwegian developers state ‘we chose a course previously developed for Internet/web based learning, ‘The Tutor in Distance Education’ as courseware for this project. This course is one of our many ongoing Internet courses and therefore already available in a HTML version. Thus it was relatively easy to adapt the existing version of the course to the iPAQ since MS Internet Explorer is the browsing tool used. The main part of the adaptation was to create directories and file structures that insured that all content was present and worked as intended. Some modifications had to be done, e.g. the table of contents had to be changed, so that all links to introductions, study units, articles etc. could be placed on one page.
The Contents page also contains links to examples of course pages such as class list, forum page, the student’s personal college page and others. Students can also link to the presentation of their tutor with contact information. The course includes reference links to many external resources, which also are available on the Pocket PC, but accessible only when online through the mobile phone. The course also includes a number of articles available at the Internet College pages. We chose to include the whole library of distance education research reports, articles, conference papers etc. available on the pages. This was done mainly because the course content concerns distance education pedagogy and didactics, thus as the storing capabilities of the iPAQ was sufficient, we considered this as an extra academic service’.
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The HTML version applies Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer that is a web browser withfar less functionality than the full scale PC version.The other version developed for the project uses Microsoft Reader on the Pocket PC as ‘browsing’ tool.
Microsoft Reader with ClearType is one of the programmes available to read e-books or content in the *.lit file format (MS Reader file format). Microsoft has developed Microsoft Reader with ClearType that enhances display resolution by as much as 300 percent by improving letter shapes and character spacing, making them appear more detailed, more finely crafted, and more like printed fonts.
This gives powerful digital advantages like integrated dictionary support and electronic annotations, while honouring the best traditions of typography to ensure proper kerning and leading, correct margins, and line justification, to name a few. The software also gives the opportunity to read e-books, Pocket Dictionaries etc. to downloaded from the Internet and synchronized to the PocketPC via the PC.
There are several methods to produce materials in the Microsoft Reader format. One may create on-the-fly Reader files via publishing websites like eBookExpress:
The eBook Express Home Page
It is possible to outsource the entire or parts of the converting process. Several e-book consulting and content conversion services are available and offering services ranging from document conversion to complete e-commerce solutions. Overdrive is one example of a firm that offer ePublishing solutions, http://www.overdrive.com/ .The software builds the e-book, page-by-page, according to individual preferences to suit the device one is using.
One may also download software that converts publications into Reader files/e-books according to individual preferences. One of these is ReaderWorks. This is a third-party software recommended by Microsoft developed by OverDrive Inc. ReaderWorks is available in three versions, Standard, Publisher and Professional. The Standard version is freeware with less functionality than the Publisher and Professional versions. OverDrive and Microsoft also provides a software development kit (SDK) that software developers can use to build tools that generate Micorosoft Readerfiles. Microsoft also offers an add-in functionality for Microsoft Word that makes it possible to convert a Word document to Reader format.
We have in the project produced a version of the learning materials for Microsoft Reader using the Standard version of ReaderWorks from OverDrive Inc. This version is a freeware application with some limitations regarding commercial sale and distribution. It also lacks the opportunity to provide cover pages and marketing information.
ReaderWorks Standard includes tools to convert html, text and image files to Reader format. It also allow for making a table of content based on heading formatting of HTML documents. Our experience so far is that this is a very well functional tool that also is quite easy to use. It has an intuitive user interface with many different options and functions. We had some problems with empty meta-tags that made the conversion fail. The software also showed some problems with documents containing internal style-sheets and script language. These errors caused the conversion to fail. The HTML code causing these errors had to be manually corrected. The software supplied good reports on what kind of errors arising and where they occurred.
Screen shot from ReaderWorks software
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