Using PDAs for CAA: practicalities, disasters, apathy

For the last 3 years the Departments of Electronics & Electrical Engineering and the Robert Clark Centre for Technological Education at the University of Glasgow have been collaborating on projects to investigate the potential of PDAs in flexible learning and the use of highly portable mobile devices as CAA delivery platforms. During this time a number of challenges have been identified which will have implications for more widespread deployment of mobile devices. The project has now been extended and PDAs have been given to the students to use throughout their 4 years at university. This paper describes some of the technical, institutional and social factors that have been encountered during the project, various methods we have used to overcome these difficulties, and an assessment of the merit of each method, singly and in concert. Although our chosen platform has been a Palm OS based device the problems encountered are largely platform independent.