Learning with mobile devices: a microportal design experience

1. Learning with mobile devices: a microportal design experience Dr James Kadirire

2. Overview • What is a microportal? • Why do we need a microportal? • Design criteria • Design considerations • Some current mobile devices • A microportal snapshot • Mobile devices used • Performance evaluation criteria • Discussion – lessons learned • Summary Dr James Kadirire

3. What is a microportal? • A microportal is a small version of a portal designed to run on mobile devices • A portal is a web site hosted with portal software that allows for: • Aggregation of different back end systems, processes or websites brought together via a single portal page. • It commonly provides personalisation of content • And hosts the presentation layer of information systems e.g. portlets. Dr James Kadirire

4. Why do we need a microportal? • Mobile devices have become truly ubiquitous with 1.52 billion users in September, 2004 • A microportal can take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to present learning material • Learning content can be aggregated from different websites, back-end syastems, personalised, and a single sign-on used Dr James Kadirire

5. The design criteria? • The software must be adaptable • The software must be extensible • The software must be ‘intelligent’ • Must render well on disparate devices Dr James Kadirire

6. What are the design considerations? • A resource allocation problem in which the utility value of the content must be maximised subject to some constraints • Considerations for calculating the utility value are: • Informational content • Cost • Design metrics • Relevance Dr James Kadirire

7. Some current mobile devices Dr James Kadirire

8. A microportal snapshot Dr James Kadirire

9. Mobile devices used • Nokia Communicator 9210running EPOC32 • Handspring TREO 270running Palm OS 3.x • SPV Orange Smart Phonerunning windows CE • O2 XDA PDA running Micrsoft Pocket PC 2002 • Palm Tungsten T, running Palm OS 5 Dr James Kadirire

10. Performance evaluation criteria • Image Rendering • The the speed of loading a web page • The ease of content navigation within the microportal • The overall (albeit subjective) quality of the page. Dr James Kadirire

11. Discussion - Lessons Learned • No empirical data was used to compare rendering times • In terms of overall performance: • Ericsson P800 • O2 XDA • Nokia Communicator • the Palm Tungsten T and the • SPV Orange Smartphone • Handspring Treo 270 • Phones with resolutions of 160x160 or less are no good for content adaptation and rendering Dr James Kadirire

12. Summary • The unprecedented growth in mobile device usage has created an opportunity to use mobile devices for learning. • Software adapted to different mobile devices needs to be developed, accessible via a microportal Dr James Kadirire

13. Dr James Kadirire Ultralab Anglia Polytechnic University james@ultralab.net Summary • Adaptable, extensible & intelligent sofware has been developed for a microportal • The design considerations and constrainsts have been discussed. • Mobile devices hold out a good prospect for learning via microportals. Dr James Kadirire