TeacherTabletPC

The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Tablet PC of the Year

Now’s your chance to cast your ballot for the 2006 Tablet PC of the Year! (For the purposes of this award, UMPCs will compete in Handhelds.) Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you’ve got until 11.59PM EST on Sunday, April 15th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best tech win! The nominees: Fujitsu P1610, Gateway CX210 / M285, Kohjisha SA1F00, Lenovo X60, and Toshiba Portege M400.

From my perspective, the Fujistu and Kohjisha are out because they don’t use active digitizers and because their screens are too small for my taste, the Gateway is in a big hole for using something other than Wacom Penabled technology, and we’re left with the X60 and M400 and I’ve compared those before.

Go cast your vote!

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is the project to bring very low cost laptops for children (likely elementary-age) in developing nations. According to Engadget (which has lots more info on the OLPC), this may eventually morph into low-cost laptops for children in developed nations.

Looking at the current hardware specs, this machine is a convertible tablet with touch screen (passive digitizer). The open-source Linux-based OS is apparently now available for download in live-CD form.

From the realm of I-was-too-sick-to-remember-to-post-this-morning…

Techdirt post on municipal WiFi:

Many cities’ municipal WiFi networks have been plagued with teething problems that vendors and local governments are trying to work out. While the public-private model most of these networks use means that these issues should get resolved, it’s been clear for a while that muni WiFi isn’t a magic bullet that suddenly makes a city “high-tech” or solves all sorts of problems.

This reminded me of the many conversations floating around unanswered at school about the impact on our students of the long-awaited free WiFi from the city. We currently impose a network blackout for several hours in the overnight to try to keep students from staying up all night every night online (whether or not this works is another issue), but it would be completely futile if all our students had WiFi-capable machines and free WiFi from the city.

It seems, however, that the city’s free WiFi may not be as close as hoped:

Ted Beck, Aurora’s chief technology officer, gets about 30 calls a day from residents wondering when free wireless Internet will be available in their neighborhood.
He wishes he could give them better news, but the estimate is usually in terms of months rather than days. A number of factors have slowed the deployment of the network, although it continues to grow.

Since I’ve had more than a few conversations lately about various accessory equipment and bags and cases and whatnot, I figured I’d do one of those “what I carry with my tablet” posts.  I’ll split this into two lists: what I take with me to school and what I take with me on a road trip.  Note that I don’t bring an AC adapter with me to school—having two extended batteries is enough to get me through the day, even if one of the two is only half-charged; I carry the standard battery as a backup and charge the two extended batteries at home at night.

Everyday, to school:

• Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad X41 tablet
• 2×8-cell extended batteries
• 1×4-cell standard battery
• Cross/Wacom Capless Penabled Executive Pen
• Timbuk2 Medium Laptop Messenger
• Timbuk2 Rectangular Clear Zip Pouch, Large, for spare batteries

Road trip!

• ThinkPad Multiple Battery Charger II
• ThinkPad 56W Ultraportible AC Adapter
  
• Kensington Universal Anywhere Notebook 70W AC/DC Adapter
• Microsoft/Pharos USB GPS Receiver
• Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000
• Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000
• Slim USB 8x DVD+/-RW Drive (Sony drive in an enclosure)

From TabletPCReview.com, Tablet PC Battery Life: How Wireless Affects Power Consumption

For those that saw a couple of formulas and graphs and skipped ahead to this part, I don’t blame you, here are the take aways based on the data:

• Simply turning on the wireless card doesn’t drain much power, it might shorten battery life by 2%, so if you want to remain connected to download email it’s no big deal.
• If you turn on wireless and are constantly trying to acquire a connection, such as if you’re constantly dropping a connection and then trying to reconnect, your battery life could be 6% – 7% shorter than usual due to the wireless card having to work extra hard.
• If you have wireless card on and are transferring lots of data, such as downloading large files or constantly browsing the web, battery life could be about 6% shorter than simply no wireless on. Consider downloading large files later when you’re plugged in.
• If you don’t need to use the web, turn wireless off, it’ll save you at least a few short (but maybe precious) minutes of battery life!

In my in-class use of my tablet I have generally just left the wireless on, in case I decided I wanted to hit the web or grab something from the server, unless I was having connection issues, in which case I’d turn it off mostly to avoid the annoying continual popups telling me about the connection issues while I’m busy trying to teach.

If you’re a student using a Tablet PC on a regular basis, you might consider writing for The Student Tablet PC—they’re looking for a new author.

If you’re a teacher using a Tablet PC and interested in writing about it, you should get in touch with me.

Hawk Tour is a system to give tours at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From the Hawk Tour web site:

HawkTour is a proof-of-concept application designed to exhibit pervasive computing in a real-world application. HawkTour is context aware which allows it to give tours of the campus center without having a live guide. More than just an application, the real value is in the underlying architecture upon which HawkTour is built as it is extensible to any environment.

HawkTour demonstrates pervasive computing, a technology that radically changes the way we think and deal with computers. Pervasive computing makes computers invisible as it seamlessly integrates computing and networking power into our environment. Using context aware applications, our environment becomes intelligent enough to interact with us in a natural way. Eventually, mundane chores can be done by smart devices letting us be far more productive.

The pervasive computing page on IIT’s Computer Science Department web site talks more about Hawk Tour in the context of pervasive computing in general:

Hawk Tour is a context aware Campus Tour application, a project conducted at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) via an Inter-professional (Ipro) team. It provides Campus information on demand. It runs on PDAs, Tablet PCs, and other mobile devices, and the content can be shown on the digital devices or on a display interface near by. IITour is supported, wirelessly, by a campus wide context-aware middleware. Once it is initiated it will be completely driven by user location and intent. Based on the current location and his/her orientation (or the PDA’s orientation) of a user, it dynamically retrieves necessary campus information and presents it to user through the user-friendly interface. It shows map of the current location and it’s associated campus information, like near room, nearby restroom, Coffee shop, a historic wall, some historic information about the building etc. The key point is, the information are presented to user based on his current location and action are taken based on it’s intent.

Having a location- and/or orientation-aware Tablet PC opens up a wealth of possible applications.

Teaching and Learning Economics with Technology: 1:1 Computing and Econometrics — day three

Three classes using Tablet PCs in a 1:1 computing environment with DyKnow Vision and there is some transformation in and active engagement with the curriculum.

On Monday in class I used a mostly blank DyKnow notebook and an open Adobe pdf file of my lecture notes. Using the screen grab of Adobe Professional 8 I copied as image page after page of equations as I displayed them in DyKnow Vision to all the students. I then talked about them and expanded on the notes with the pen. Students seemed to follow the presentation and for the first day I think the technology was pressed a bit into the background. Still one student kept losing connection (a wireless issue?) and I did not notice many students taking many digital notes on the screen. I will have to follow up and make sure that they are not only taking notes, but saving the notebooks and going back and referring to them as needed.

I was able to use the minute paper (inside DyKnow) at the end to check whether they felt like they were on track and after reading and commenting I returned all the student submitted panels. I think they truly followed the presentation based on their comments. What was remarkable is all 8 students wrote about only the econometrics and not a word about the technology. Have they assimilated DyKnow this fast? Or at least until the next issue. They seemed to remain engaged, following the presentation on the screen and asking plenty of questions about the econometrics.

Since I’m on spring break and have time to think about and do such things (read that as “have a stronger-than-usual desire to procrastinate”), I’ve done a little tweaking with the site. I’ve added a contact form, added the ability to subscribe via email, and added a page on subscribing (see the links across the top of the page). I’ve also disabled the forums for the moment, since the only use they seemed to be getting was collecting registrations with (mostly fake) Russian email addresses. If there’s sufficient interest in forums in general, I may bring them back or rebuild them using bbPress instead of pubBB. Also, those of you reading this via a feed (i.e. subscription, RSS, Google Reader, etc.) have probably noticed the addition of ads by Pheedo—at the moment, this is the only option available to me for placing ads in the feeds, which I feel is appropriate given that I have Google ads on the web site (if it were possible to put more minimal ads, preferably Google text ads, into the feeds, I would do that instead).

Let me preface this with the standard warning that I am not a lawyer. Any commentary I add herein is based on my working knowledge of copyright in the context of being an educator and an occasional producer of content. Furthermore, I will argue largely on the side of TurnItIn.com mostly because I believe that they have not made the strongest possible arguments so far and because I think that the students’ use of copyright law to challenging the system is ridiculous, not because I necessarily believe that TurnItIn.com is morally or ethically sound.

While I think I had been vaguely aware of these lawsuits, the first I really read about them was on Techdirt — “Plagiarism Checker Sued For Copyright Infringement”

Back in 2002 there was some discussion over whether or not, Turnitin, a popular plagiarism checker that many schools and universities use, was violating students’ copyrights. The program worked by comparing any uploaded works to a large database of previous works. However, it would then add those new works to the larger database. Many students began to question not just why they were being treated as criminals first, but also why Turnitin was allowed to use their content in its database without first licensing the works from the students. While there had been occasional stories wondering something similar over the past few years, now it appears that two high school students have decided to step up and sue the company for copyright infringement. This could get interesting for a variety of reasons. The students clearly thought this out ahead of time — registering the copyright on the papers, which gives them the ability to sue for statutory damages, rather than just be made whole. At least one also had explicit instructions in the paper that it not be included in the Turnitin database — and those instructions were ignored.

While I’d love to argue the point about being treated like criminals and being guilty until proven innocent (mostly on the grounds that TurnItIn.com is more a protection of an honest student’s work against unauthorized copying, blah blah blah…), I think that’s a debate that isn’t going to move anywhere, so I’ll try to stick to the copyright arguments.

A pdf datasheet titled “Copyright and Privacy” on TurnItIn.com says, in part:

The archiving of digital fingerprints of papers is permitted under the current laws of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, among others.

I think the first key is in the use of “digital fingerprints.” I’m not at all sure how the service could work as specified if they only keep some sort of digital fingerprint (perhaps a hash?) of each submitted paper, so right away I’m none too thrilled with this file. The full text of the file doesn’t really go much further than that in terms of actual reasons why their use of students’ work would fall under fair use.

A legal opinion document presumably written by Foley & Lardner, posted on TurnItIn.com (though rather than finding an obvious link to it on TurnItIn.com, I found it through an Ars Technica article on the lawsuits) is a bit more informative:

Hence, by itself, teacher submission of a student work to Turnitin is within the scope of the evaluation license provided by the student to the teacher on submission of the work for grading. The implied license may not extend to other aspects of the TURNITIN system, such as archiving, however, such aspects are allowable as “fair uses” of the copyrighted material.

Now, here’s where I start to get really edgy about the whole thing. My suspicion is further heightened by a Washington Post article titled “McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service”:

“All of these kids are essentially straight-A students, and they have no interest in plagiarizing,” said Robert A. Vanderhye, a McLean attorney representing the students pro bono. “The problem with [Turnitin] is the archiving of the documents. They are violating a right these students have to be in control of their own property.”

…

Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, co-director of the intellectual property law program at Suffolk University Law School, said that although the law regarding fair use is subject to interpretation, he thinks the students have a good case.

“Typically, if you quote something for education purposes, scholarship or news reports, that’s considered fair use,” Beckerman-Rodau said. “But it seems like Turnitin is a commercial use. They turn around and sell this service, and it’s expensive. And the service only works because they get these papers.”

So, looking at all this, I see two big issues here. First, what rights, if any, do the students have to control papers they submit as a requirement of a class? Second, is the archival comparison use actually fair use?

What rights, if any, do the students have to control papers they submit as a requirement of a class?

I would claim that students have little or no rights to control this work. I think the general idea set forth in the legal opinion commissioned by TurnItIn.com is largely correct, though perhaps too narrow in saying that the student implicitly licenses their work to be graded and evaluated by the teacher. I would make the case that in the context of the class, it is entirely up to the teacher to decide on reasonable conditions under which the work is submitted—this already includes the requirement to submit the paper through a service such as TurnItIn.com and I see no reason why this wouldn’t naturally extend to saying that it is a requirement to allow TurnItIn.com to archive the paper for ongoing use. Moreover, it is not uncommon for teachers to keep archives of work submitted by previous students to compare to newly turned-in work to check for plagiarism.

Is the archival comparison use actually fair use?

I would claim that, especially due to the commercial nature of TurnItIn.com, that the archival comparison is not fair use. I think the argument against it being fair use is particularly strong if the full text of the paper is used, whereas using some sort of hash of the paper might be arguable.

In both questions, I believe that a disclosure about the use and a requirement that students agree to the use in order to submit the paper ought to be sufficient to preclude any of this copyright litigation.