Strategizing Mobility

After pilot projects in mobile computing from 1995 to 1997, Seton Hall University rolled out a full-scale laptop program in 1998. The effort, known formally as the Mobile Computing Program, was a standard- fare laptop initiative: Starting that year, all freshmen were required to have a portable PC. The school purchased IBM (www.ibm.com) ThinkPad laptops and leased them to students at a discount. To counterbalance the expense for students at need, Seton Hall officials increased the pool of financial aid and gave priority to those who qualified. By 2001, every student on campus went through the program and bought a new laptop. Coupled with the school’s growing wireless network, the laptops facilitated computing from just about anywhere on the school’s South Orange campus. On the surface, everything was great.

Behind the scenes, however, CIO Stephen Landry says that technology officials knew they had to take additional steps to ensure that students used the laptops as part of their everyday experiences. The first approach to this strategic enforcement of mobile computing was what Landry calls “curricular integration,” an effort to support and encourage faculty to integrate the use of laptops in the curriculum. At the center of this endeavor is the Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Center, a multi-disciplinary facility that financially motivates educators to build entire lessons around laptops: The center doles out a total of $250,000 in multi-year grants to academic departments willing to redesign core courses around mobile technology. Paul Fisher, the center’s director, says the grants are some of the most sought-after dollars on campus today.

“The whole idea was to inspire our faculty and department heads to use mobile technology to improve student learning,” says Fisher, who notes that the center also rewards Faculty Innovation Grants of up to $5,000, for individual educators who embrace mobility. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t just handing out an expensive word processor.”

Faculty-centered incentives weren’t Seton Hall’s only approach to solidifying mobile computing on campus: Landry and his colleagues launched an internal marketing effort aimed at students, too. For starters, through a special laptop group within the IT department, the university set up a number of support services such as maintenance and repair. Next, the school mandated that all freshmen take a skills class called “University Life” in their first semester on campus. While this class g'es over basics such as studying effectively and saying no to drugs, it also includes several hours of tutorials on how to use the ThinkPads, how to connect to the wireless network, and how to keep anti-virus software up-to-date. Though most students term the class “cheesy,” Landry says it works wonders, nearly eliminating help desk requests from first-time users.

The final leg of the strategy to ensure the success of Seton Hall’s mobile computing effort is a system of checks and balances dubbed the Mobile Computing Assessment Program. The program, designed in 1998 to provide prompt feedback to the planning team, consists of an annual survey administered to a random sample of undergrads at the school. Survey items and their analysis are managed by a team of faculty members, administrators, and technologists. After every survey, the team shares results with the campus community and the larger educational community, via conferences and publications. Clearly, something’s working: by the 2003 survey, 89 percent of 275 responding students reported that they were “satisfied or very satisfied” with the use of mobile IT in their courses.

Smarter Smartphones

Technologists have seen the future of mobile computing at Carnegie Mellon University, and that future revolves around smartphones that actually are smart. You know the smartphone: any handheld device that integrates personal information management and mobile phone capabilities. At CMU, however, researchers under the leadership of Professor Asim Smailagic have developed a mobile, wearable system that is one part PDA, one part cell phone, and one part virtual secretary—it can screen calls and send them to voicemail if the user is in the middle of a class or important meeting. The system, dubbed SenSay (for “sen”sing and “say”ing), is currently in pilot phase at the university’s Pittsburgh campus, and could be implemented on a broader basis as soon as next year.

Smailagic bills the portable system as a “context-aware” mobile phone. It consists of an ordinary mobile phone, a sensor box mounted on a user’s hip, and voice and ambient microphones mounted somewhere near the user’s neck. The microphones record sounds in the user’s environment (including the user’s own voice), and software in the sensor box analyzes the data to determine what kind of situation the user is in. After comparing this data with a certain set of rules, the software decides what to do with the call. If, for instance, the program determines that the user is in a lecture or meeting, all incoming calls are sent immediately to voicemail. If, on the other hand, the program determines that a user is in the middle of a conversation, calls ring through in silent mode, vibrating to notify the user that someone’s on the line.

AT CARNEGIE MELLION, smart phones are
smarter than elsewhere: the 'SenSay devices
screen calls and even clam up during classes.

“The way we see it, this research takes mobile computing to the next level,” says Smailagic, who predicts the system will retail for $200 when it hits the general market. “Instead of having to worry about interrupting students in a particular environment, the phone d'es all of the thinking for them.”

Down the road, Smailagic hopes to network SenSay systems into the school’s wireless network, and create a plug-in application that expands the context for these context-aware tools. Specifically, researchers are working on ways to enable SenSay units to interface with user course schedules and Global Positioning System (GPS) maps of campus. Under this expanded approach, the system will rely even less on its microphone inputs; if a student is sitting in a lecture hall, or his course schedule indicates that he is in a lecture, the phone system will assume the student is busy and send calls to voicemail. While SenSay d'esn’t account for a user’s free will, it certainly would enable responsible students who don’t skip class to focus on learning. In the end, at least in higher education, that’s what mobile computing is all about.