Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Oh to be with another company perhaps... 

My experiences with a different company were similar.

What I did discover is that the mobile phone company who provides the network is not in fact the company who supplies you with the mobile phone service, even if they have the same name.

Carphonewarehouse Vodafone for example is not the same as Vodafone.co.uk Vodafone.

I agree that the administration can be time-consuming and a problem.  We have 45 pdas and so 45 contracts and so every month I get 45 invoices, though I can pay them as one invoice.  We have a data only contract and now the trainees are using the PDA properly and not running upbills for voice calls.  We had a few 'rogues' at the start who were using the PDA as their own phone and we billed them and they soon got the message.  There is software available on the O2 site to help manage the accounts but I have not had the time to use it.  The worst offender for running up bills is a member of the staff who loans a PDA - we have only had to disconnect one student so far.  I have been promised admin support but am still waiting.

Hi

Wondering if supplied handsets are the way to go? I realise that cost is an issue but many students already have powerful mobile devices of their own. So perhaps we need to be looking at using these and supplying handsets to those who cannot afford it?

If we work with a particular handset and service provider then we end up with specific solutions, which will not be transferable to other devices. We've seen this before with the "desktop web" where developers assume everyone is using Windows and IE as their browser. Given the explosion of devices at the moment and the rapid rate of change don't we need to shift to a "device agnostic" approach and exploit what is already available?

I certainly think bringing in the service providers into the equation is very important and it would be good to see at least one or two sponsoring next years Handheld Learning. However, the pressure to change costs need to be brought across the mobile network providers.

In terms of connectivity things seems to be changing, there are better pricing models coming out, which allow higher data usage but they still have some way to go. Encouragingly though, we are seeing more devices with Wifi and bluetooth built in, these offer cheaper (sometimes negligible) costs to access data.

Stu