The course, an introduction to archaeology, was redesigned to take advantage of the communication possibilities that the web and wireless technology afford. Instead of lecturing, Tringham provided the students with information guides and library sources on the web in advance of class and used the lecture periods to hold "forums" in which students assembled into research teams and discussed specific archaeological topics. The students used wireless-enabled laptop computers to take part in chat rooms, the text of which was projected on a big screen for all to read. Discussion leaders - Tringham, her teaching assistants, and designated undergraduates from the course - served as moderators, responding to selected topics appearing on the screen while the online chat continued.

"The use of wireless and a public chat discussion was enormously helpful for - in fact essential to the success of - the forum discussions in the large classroom," says Tringham. "If we had just the chat and not the spoken word reacting to it, students would have become so involved in their own computer world that it would detract from engagement in the classroom activity. But the combination really enhanced the learning process and made for varied discussions. It allowed for a larger group of students to be engaged at one time, with the extra benefit of providing a written record of what we were discussing."

Tringham's course was one of three at UC Berkeley - Statistics 21 and Chemistry 1A being the others - to experiment with wireless solutions in the classroom through a grant from Hewlett Packard that expanded AirBears, a system that enables students to connect with the campus network from designated access points using a laptop computer equipped with a wireless Ethernet card. The HP-funded project, which was awarded to statistics professor Philip Stark, aims to use the technology to promote new and engaging modes of interaction among students and between students and faculty, and to leverage existing resources to make them more widely available inside and outside the classroom. Campus eateries, libraries, large classrooms, student common areas, and teaching labs are among the sites where access points were installed. Stark is currently heading a study of how the technology has contributed to student learning.

While it's too early in most cases to make definitive conclusions on where wireless will prove most valuable in bolstering education, it is being implemented in many different ways on UC campuses, and embraced for the possibilities it raises both in classroom and out-of-classroom campus settings.

Among the most obvious advantages of the technology is the convenience factor: Students and faculty can use their laptop computers to go online any time, anywhere, within the coverage areas. "It allows you to take advantage of serendipity," says Stark. "I can be sitting in a café, meeting with graduate students or colleagues, and when a question comes up, we can find out the answer immediately. It eliminates information bottlenecks."

At UCLA's Anderson School of Management, a wireless infrastructure that was installed earlier this year enables students to work and be connected anywhere inside or outside the seven-building complex via a single access point. "Cell phone users know about going into dead spots and getting disconnected during travel," says Jason Frand, assistant dean and director of Computing and Information Services for the school. "Those same problems exist in the wireless local area network arena. With this technology, we hope to leapfrog the current 'hot-spot' issues to provide ubiquitous coverage in a single, continuous area."

The student-driven initiative, supported by a grant from 5G Wireless Communications Inc., was designed to meet the needs of students at a technology-intensive school that emphasizes group study. "Students are required to participate in teams throughout the program, in almost every course and as part of a six-month consulting project," says Frand. "If you go out onto the quad, you'll find that all of the tables are taken up with students interacting in groups. But until now there has been no way for students to access the network or the Internet during these interactions. On a typical day, there's such a shortage of quality group-study areas; wireless enables us to stretch out to the lawn area, taking advantage of the beautiful Southern California weather."

Creating Computer Labs on the Fly

At UC Riverside's Graduate School of Education, wireless technology has been used to address problems of limited space and resources. "Because there's no place to build any more traditional computer labs, we have been able to exploit the campus's investment in wireless to create labs almost any place where we can fit a handful of students with laptop computers, such as in the graduate student lounge," explains Kathleen Schwarz, programmer analyst for the school. "It's changing the way students do business."

The shift to laptop computing also means that students - many of whom shuttle back and forth between work, campus, and home - can conveniently access all campus services on the same computer where they write papers, surf the Internet, and send and receive email, regardless of where they are.

Wireless technology has also facilitated a reinvention of the physical space of the traditional computer lab, says Schwarz, whose department has developed a hybrid computer lab that includes fixed desktops but also incorporates accommodation for laptops. She notes that conventional computer labs, with desktop workstations lined up in rows across the room, restrict the movement and sight lines of instructors and students, hindering communication and collaboration. "We have students who need to work together on electronic portfolios and other projects, and it's difficult to do that when you're all faced in one direction in rows," Schwarz says. "With wireless technology, we don't have to have locked-down tables and wiring that limits our flexibility in configuring the space to meet various needs."

Other applications are being explored through the Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC), a multidisciplinary university-industry partnership to advance the technology in research and education. Through a grant from Hewlett Packard, WINMEC is conducting experiments in enhancing classroom education with mobile networked devices. Among the concepts being explored is giving students in large lecture settings the opportunity to provide anonymous real-time feedback on whether they understand a particular concept being explained by the instructor. "If the majority of the students need me to clarify what I'm saying, that instant feedback would be extremely valuable to me, so that I could fix it," says Rajit Gadh, professor in UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director of WINMEC.

Location-based capabilities open up other opportunities for campuses to explore, Gadh notes. With a wireless network, a central server can provide users with such information as where other users are in proximity to a given access point. "If students are working together in peer groups, they can go on their PDAs, cell phones, or laptops and know where their partners are at any given time," Gadh says. "If a professor is trying to locate a student or teaching assistant, he or she can do so." Location-based services could also help students or visitors find a classroom or other campus facility, he adds.

"Wireless is enabling us to be connected all the time, wherever we go, and it's allowing us to know where we and others are located," Gadh says. "This introduces enormous possibilities for what is basically a mobile Internet."

Ubiquitous Computing at UCSD

At UC San Diego, the ActiveCampus project is a research effort designed to investigate ubiquitous computing infrastructure - deployment of wireless technology for public spaces - as well as potential applications for educational networks. "We have this opportunity arising from the miniaturization of computers, their rapidly dropping costs, and wireless connectivity to a networking backbone," says William Griswold, professor of computer science and engineering and director of ActiveCampus.

Through the infrastructure created by ActiveCampus, Griswold's group has implemented and studied an in-class application called ActiveClass, which serves as a visual moderator for classroom interaction between students and professors. "A lot of us at UCSD felt that we were facing a growing problem of large classes with an increasingly quiet student body - many students were unwilling to raise their hands in front of 150 of their peers," says Griswold.

ActiveClass aims to encourage participation by having students, professors, and TAs connect with the system through their PDAs or laptops, then allowing students to submit anonymous questions during the class period that can be viewed by all users. Other students can vote on the urgency of the question, offer their own answers or enter a follow-up or entirely new inquiry. Meanwhile, the instructor and TAs can view the display at any time, see which questions are ranked highest and thereby prioritize them; either the professor can answer them verbally or the TA can provide a written response.

"The key aspects are that it's anonymous, it's silent communication that doesn't interrupt the professor, and the communications are aggregated," says Griswold. Among other things, he explains, ActiveClass empowers students to ask everything from administrative types of questions that would be difficult to raise during the lecture, to advanced inquiries that they might fear would be unpopular, given that these questions are unlikely to appear on an exam - but about which they are simply curious. The program also gives instructors the flexibility to answer questions during natural breaks in a lecture, or to hold off until the next class period if time is short.

Elsewhere at UC San Diego, experts at the Jacobs School of Engineering have brought broadband wireless network access to riders of a commuter bus that shuttles students, faculty, and visitors around UCSD and from the La Jolla campus to the Sorrento Valley train station and UC San Diego Medical Center. The bus, dubbed the CyberShuttle, enables passengers to check email, surf the Web, watch streaming video, or listen to high-fidelity music even while the bus is moving at freeway speed, thanks to an Internet connection via a dedicated 1.25 MHz channel at speeds up to 2.4 megabits per second - many times faster than conventional "wired" access using 56K modems.

Wireless Introduces New Concerns

For all of its advantages, wireless computing introduces new concerns, both technological and social, when brought into the educational setting. On the technological side are the twin issues of cost and access. UC Berkeley's Stark points out that there is a learning curve associated with implementing wireless technology in the classroom, and infrastructure issues that require funding. In Tringham's anthropology course, which pilot-tested the use of wireless technology through Stark's grant, one of the problems from the start was that the majority of the students did not have wireless-enabled computers. "There's a social inequality, a feeling of being left out, that will be a concern until all of the students have access to the technology," she says. Other issues include privacy and security. Location-based services will need to include features that allow users to "opt out" if they don't want others to be able to track where they are, Gadh notes. And most wireless solutions are still perceived as not being sufficiently secure to protect against hackers.

Gadh believes these and other technological challenges will be quickly overcome. More difficult to eradicate will be concerns about potential distractions in the classroom - students browsing the Internet or sending each other instant messages during lectures, or passing files or other information to each other during exams. Solutions include blocking network access during exams. At UC Berkeley, Stark was worried about classroom distractions, but such complaints did not materialize.

"Right now, every institution is doing different things with wireless technology and having different experiences with it - some things work, some don't, and you adjust," says Gadh. "It's a social learning process right now as we all fine-tune and figure out where this technology is going to fit."

Given the immaturity of the technology, the biggest educational benefits at this point are likely to occur in highly structured settings, UC San Diego's Griswold suggests, offering the ActiveClass experience as an illustration. "You have a captive audience with students coming in twice a week in a mature setting - the classroom - with a specific problem you're addressing with the technology: lack of participation," he says. "It's much easier to instigate change in a controlled, mature setting like that than in less structured situations." [Read related article on audience response systems ]

Most everyone agrees that wireless will change university education, in ways that are hard to predict. "We don't know where it's going to end up," says Griswold. "And the good news is that we don't need to know. We learn something valuable, we publish it, someone else re-performs our experiments and learns, and through that discovery process it gets taken to the next level."