Wireless Network Support for Pedagogic Interaction 

P. W. Garratt BSc, ARCS, DIC, PhD and C. Dawes BSc   

School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
United Kingdom
pwg@ecs.soton.ac.uk     

Abstract—Traditional face-to-face learning can benefit from a rich technological infrastructure functioning in real time. We have conceived, developed and used a software system, ANTS, Automated Notes Transfer System, which supports traditional pedagogic activities in an institution of higher education. ANTS resides as client and server on the personal computers of the teacher and learner, typically laptops brought temporarily into the lecture theatre. ANTS uses the wireless data communications network pervading the theatre and allows the teacher and learner to share educational material stored on the Internet. ANTS ensures the learner accesses the current version of the educational material. ANTS also allows the teacher and learner to collaborate in modifying the material as the learning activity progresses. Teacher and leaner can add, delete, and change text and graphics in response to discussion. Our use of ANTS confirms that it encourages learner-directed events during the activity. It also helps the learner in the cognitive domain of learning styles and facilitates group learning.

  
1 Introduction
Developments in information and communications technology (ICT) have generally led to different and more flexible approaches to lecturing [1]. While these technologies are complementing and supplanting traditional lectures and seminars the success of the changes depends on the degree to which teaching staff are familiar with the technology. Yet students generally welcome trends apparent in the increased flexible use of ICT [2]. In particular electronic technologies can facilitate the trend away from pedagogic teacher-dominated learning situation toward a learner-dominated situation.  This trend has been apparent for 20 years and modern software and data communications support it [3]. Especially influential are wireless data communications links such as that defined by IEEE 811.b [4] and commercial packages such as Blackboard [5]. Such facilities encourage the learner to be as active and participative as possible. 
We have conceived, developed and used a software system that functions within this framework of strategies. The Automated Notes Transfer System (ANTS) allows learners to interact in real time with the lecturer during a lecture or seminar. The vehicle of interaction is the wireless data network pervading the lecture theatre and connecting the personal computers of teacher and learners. The participants typically bring their laptop computers into the theatre or seminar room for the duration of the session. ANTS also encompasses a repository of course material, which is shared and navigable. Our system improves on similar existing systems in that the learner is certain of accessing the latest version and variant of the course material, the learner can navigate through the course material easily, and both teacher and learner can modify the course material in a collaborative way as the learning session progresses. We intended to experiment with ANTS in real learning situations to investigate its effect on learning styles and on the effectiveness of learning. We aimed to build a system that was general-purpose in a learning environment serving a wide variety of taught subjects. Also we intended to make our system portable and usable on a variety of platforms. 

2 Requirements and Specification
The perspective of the ANTS functionality is that of the learner.  The educational material of greatest interest during a pedagogic interaction is displayed in public, typically by an electronic projector under the control of the teacher while simultaneously being downloaded to the PC of the learners. The originator of the educational material, in the form of Portable Document Format slides (PDF) [10], is likely to be the teacher and colleagues who pre-prepare it for storage in the ANTS repository. The repository in principle can encompass material from any location linked into the wireless network. In the general this equates to the Internet. The learner facilities are paramount in relation to the teacher and in relation to the learner’s colleagues. The learner needs to select from the online material that which is most up-to-date and relevant to the current pedagogic interaction. Existing tools such as Blackboard [5] fail to make learner selection easy.  In common with existing tools ANTS allows the downloading of graphical and text material to the learner’s personal computer. The learner can subsequently share this up-to-date subset of the repository with colleagues. Also the teacher and learners can modify the material with graphical and text comments in the form of ‘overlays’. Where more than one teacher is contributing to a course and therefore to the set of educational material ANTS provides facilities for sharing among teachers. This helps co-ordinate the teachers’ partnership.  
We assume that material shared by learners and teachers is in the security domain of the ANTS user community and that questions of secrecy are of little concern during the learning activities. However malicious attacks from outside the community pose a threat. Consequently ANTS incorporates robust security features to detect and guard against outside interference. Computer-based tools to help authors collaborate are widespread. Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) is one example [6]. The functional repertoire of ANTS is generally similar to these with the extended capabilities of allowing the users to generate and store the overlays. The overlays comprise a few simple comments or diagrams added to each slide to reflect the answers to questions, the results of discussion, extra explanations and comments to aid comprehension.

Fig. 1. Example of a slide with overlay

Other objectives in the specification of ANTS were to encompass any taught subject, not only the Information Technology that was its primary focus. The software should operate in a Windows environment and a Linux environment [8] both of which are prevalent in educational establishments.

3 Design and Development
ANTS is a software system residing as a set of clients on the personal computers of teachers and learners supported by a specialized server. In a proposed extended version of ANTS some of the teachers’ PCs can operate as servers.  It functions in the presence of a wireless data communications network linking the PCs to each other and to the Internet. The wireless network prevalent where ANTS was developed is the technology defined by the standard IEE 811.b [4] but ANTS could function equally well with a different wireless network.
The software incorporates standard routines for its communications functions and for its data base manipulation. The developers capitalized on their experience of Universal Modeling Language (UML) [7] in designing ANTS. The language generates some documentation automatically and can generate classes of object-oriented code to ease the next stage of development. The software development environment Rational Rose [11] was useful in this phase of the project. The major programming language is Java, which from version 1.4.1 onward allows secure sockets (SSL) simplifying the adoption of secure sockets for ANTS data transmission to enforce privacy. This feature is essential to safeguard the remote logins from unauthorized monitoring.
The developers compared several proprietary database systems and chose MySQL [9] since it provides ACID transactions, runs on both Windows and Linux [8], is stable and interfaces with many languages through widely available drivers. The format of the educational material supported by ANTS is PDF and it must be converted into a form that Java can process in ANTS. The conversion activity is time-consuming and slows down the response rate of the system but the conversion is unavoidable.

Fig.2. A possible client/server configuration for ANTS

          AP is a Wireless Network Access Point

 The software development environment employed, Rational Rose, enabled the developers to clearly layout the architecture, to discover initial problems with the system and to forward generate many of the classes with their methods.  The client side was developed after the server had been developed and tested using an automated test script. The client took about three times longer to develop than anticipated due to the complexity of rendering lecturers notes on the screen to enable the user feedback system to function. To implement the client the developers started with the classes provided from the UML and from this built up the system adding classes to provide growing functionality.
The security issues addressed by ANTS arise from two groups of unauthorized users: -
1.	Hackers trying for DOS (denial of service) entering the system.
2.	Users entering bad data into the system and attempting to get higher privileges.
To protect against the first group ANTS uses two strategies. After three invalid commands are detected connections are closed. Also connections can be timed out.  Security is closely monitored and there exists a separate log for attempts to hack into the system. This means persistent offenders of attack type 1 can be identified either from the type of command they send or from their I.P. address. These people can therefore be located and reported to the Internet police.
To stop the second set of users attempting to break into the system, after three bad commands have been sent by any one user in one session they automatically get locked out of the system by being placed in a blocked table. All bad commands are logged.
The ANTS software contains specially developed modules mostly in the Java language. Other languages used were Extended Markup language (XML) [7] for data description and HTML to produce web pages to navigate the slide images. Perl was used to produce the HTML providing links to the correct information.
Of several possible IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) the one chosen by the developers was Sun One [12] (formally Forte for Java) because of its: -
1.	Support for JNDI
2.	Graphical form editor
3.	Support for Java 1.4.1
4.	Capability for handling many large scripts and projects.
The drawback is that the Sun One IDE is very slow when the programs grow to be large since the IDE is itself built in Java.
ANTS recognizes three types of user. The Administrator who first specifies the course names and codes to the ANTS system. Lecturers are then able to upload, download and remove materials from these courses. Users are then able to view these materials either through the web Interface or directly through the ANTS Client system. The ANTS Client creates ‘scribbles’ under the control of the students. Scribbles are then uploaded back to the ANTS Server. These scribbles are then available as slide overlays on the web interface. Figure three shows the flow of information through the system and the roles of the three types of user.   The database supporting ANTS has been built in third normal form with all the tables being related through keys. It was initially designed in UML and underwent minor alterations to cope with the larger amount of information than was first anticipated.
The remaining major component of ANTS was the set of routines to manipulate the PDF documents. Comparing Multivalent [13] against Adobe Acrobat Bean [10] the developers chose the former for these features: -
1.	It is open source.
2.	It has a good implementation of PDF.
3.	Its execution is slow but adequate.
4.	Its documentation is sparse but adequate.
5.	Frequent updates arise.
6.	The developer was communicative.
This contrasted with Adobe Acrobat Bean which had these features: -
1.	It is closed source.
2.	There is no documentation.
3.	The release is stable.
4.	New releases are infrequent.
5.	There is limited communication possible with the proprietary company.
6.	It has a good implementation of PDF.

Fig. 3.  The flow of Information through the ANTS System

The development activity comprised an integration of specially written software mainly in Java with standard software from proprietary suppliers and from shareware developers present on the Internet. 
A planned extension of the current capability is to support educational material also in Powerpoint format since many teachers use this. ANTS can be tuned to speed up the system and reduce memory resources by using more advanced caching techniques and better integration with the external modules. These are further planned enhancements.

4 Conclusions
A version of ANTS of adequate functionality has been developed, tested and used in real pedagogic interactions i.e. lectures in a University Department teaching Information Technology. The major difficulties in implementing the software concerned the handling of educational material in PDF format using the Java language. The resulting execution speeds and therefore response times are slower than we hoped but still fast enough to satisfy the users of ANTS.  Overlays of text material were relatively straightforward to implement but overlays of graphical material were more difficult. Further development is necessary to provide a wider ranging graphical capability to the users of ANTS. However users found the functionality of the current version of ANTS sufficient to allow them to form an opinion of the system. Our experience of its use and the feedback from users confirms that the tool is generally successful in achieving the objectives we set. 
Our tests confirmed that the implementation of ANTS is portable from a Windows platform to a Linux platform. The focus of the present project was education in Information Technology. There is no reason to believe that the educational material handled by ANTS could not relate to, say, history or a modern language but the generality of ANTS across a range of taught subjects remains to be demonstrated in practice. It could be argued that the facility provided by ANTS to modify the educational material during the pedagogic interaction lends itself to improving learning in the cognitive domain as identified by Bloom [17]. This may be considered more relevant in subjects such as Information Technology, mathematics and the sciences that demand understanding on the part of the learner.
Users find the setup and initiation of ANTS easy but some report that the tools within ANTS that allow users to navigate through the educational material and select sections relevant to the immediate lecture content would benefit from improvement. Continuing user feedback is providing ideas for enhancements to the functionality of ANTS in this domain. 
In general the learners in a lecture welcome tools such as ANTS to improve their learning experience. Lecturers in the institution vary in their style and in their use of educational material handed out as hard copy. It cannot be taken for granted that learners are skilled at taking notes especially in an audience of diverse linguistic background [14]. The dictation of lecture notes is generally a misuse of lecture time so ANTS provides a valuable compromise solution allowing learners to combine dictated material with pre-prepared material. A support tool of this kind allows the lecture to exploit its inherent advantages as a learning method:
1.	Students who have an auditory learning style learn more readily when they listen than when they read.
2.	The lecture is of particular value in introducing a subject.
3.	The lecture is valuable where knowledge is advancing rapidly and up-to-date textbooks are not available.
4.	The lecture can awaken critical skills in a student.
5.	The lecture can provide aesthetic pleasure.
6.	The lecture is economic of staff time [15].

Lectures remain a teacher-dominated activity and ANTS improves on this by allowing learner participation. Increased autonomy for learners is achievable with the real time support of information and communications technology in the way achieved by ANTS. The collaboration and interaction that ANTS fosters can benefit the learners enormously. The immediacy of the educational material that is available on-line and the facilities for the group of learners to assimilate, comprehend and modify it during the lecture contribute to the shift in perspective from teacher to learner. ANTS also shifts the perspective of learning as a single learner to learning as a group activity. Both these trends are viewed by educationalists as highly desirable [16].
 The exploitation by ANTS of a Wireless Data Communications Network is of particular benefit in this aspect of learning. The participant group can continue to use the ANTS repository and functionality anywhere in range of a Network Access point. In many Institutions these access points give a pervasive and ubiquitous coverage on the premises, in the student accommodation and where they congregate socially. ANTS can therefore support group learning before, during and after the pedagogic interaction in diverse locations at the convenience of the learner group.
 Lecturers and students given the opportunity to experiment with them certainly warmly embrace tools such as ANTS.

References

1.	B. Collis & J. Moonen, Flexible Learning in a Digital World: Experiences and Expectations (Open and Distance Learning Series). London:  Kogan Page, 2001.
2.	G. Saunders & F. Klemming, “Integrating Technology into a traditional learning environment,” Active learning in higher education, vol. 4, no. 1 pp74-86, March 2003. 
3.		B. Joyce & M. Weil, Models of Teaching, Prentice Hall, 1990.
4.	http://standards.ieee.org/ accessed 9 July 2004.
5.	http://www.blackboard.com/ accessed 9 July 2004
6.	http://www.cebm.net/cat_about.asp accessed 30 June 2004.
7.	http://www.w3.org/XML/ accessed 30 June 2004.
8.	http://www.linux.org/ accessed 30 June 2004.
9.	http://www.mysql.com accessed 30 June 2004.
10.	http://www.adobe.com/products/acobat/adobepdf.html accessed 30 June 2004.
11.	http://www.rational.com/uml accessed 30 June 2004.
12.	http://wwws.sun.com/softwarew/sunone/ accessed 30 June 2004.
13.	http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/multivalent accessed 30 June 2004.
14.	L.B.Curzon, Teaching in Further Education, London, Cassell, 1997.
15.	 P.Saunders, “Lectures as an Instructional Method,” in The Principles of
         Economics Course, P.Saunders, Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.
16.    D.Boud, “Moving towards autonomy,” in Developing 
         Students’ Autonomy in Learning, 2nd ed. D. Boud Ed. London, Kogan-  
          Page, 1988, pp. 17-39.