Legitimate educational uses of portable technology
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(c) 2000 Andrew Garrard
         http://www.fluppet.demon.co.uk/

Werner Habel recently posted some guidelines for people wishing to
use an onHand as a cheating aid in exams. This article caused
substantial dissent in the community which uses programmable
wrist-based computers, on the grounds that it was inappropriate for
such activities to be condoned in a manner which implied the assent of
the members of that community. In response, Werner proposed that
someone should write a complementary article to set the record
straight. It actually seemed to me to be appropriate to write two
articles, one to discuss the effects that technology such as the
onHand have on morally dubious activities, and one to discuss more
morally acceptable uses for the technology.

This if the second of those articles, and I should stress at the start
that all opinions contained herein are my own and should not be
considered to be those of other contributors to this forum. I should
also say I'm not a teacher of any sort, and that my perceptions may
come from my own little fantasy world.

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Werner's article concentrated on illicit uses of an onHand in exams.
Since this gives a bad impression of wrist-based computer wearers from
an exam viewpoint, in this article I'll try to suggest some legitimate
uses of wrist technology in an educational environment. By doing so, I
hope to redress the balance somewhat and show that these devices are
tools which can be used for honest or dishonest purposes, and that the
same can be said for a piece of note paper. My other article
concentrates on the specific ways in which technology can be used for
cheating and espionage, and mentions the consequences of these uses
from the point of view of early adopters of this technology.

I'll be concentrating on uses of technology in exams. The educational
uses of portable technology are reasonably well-known - some
establishments are providing students with PDAs to help with homework
and to give easy access to computing tools. In my time as a student
(ten years ago, for secondary school) programmable calculators were
made available to assist with advanced mathematics.

As technology advances it becomes more pervasive; I word-processed
(some) English essays, and as graphical capability improves it's
possible to make use of computer visualisation for most sciences. It's
not all helpful; the internet is a massive learning resource, but
there are stories of students feeding foreign language homework into
on-line translation services rather than learning the language
themselves. More portable technology gets used more, and as watches
become more capable (and less considered a geek item) they'll
encourage more educational use. Calculators increased the level of
mathematical understanding available to students, and a watch with a
calculator allowed me to play with calculations as a child. Of course,
I was never really a party animal...

But should students be allowed watch technology in exams? Obviously
there are constraints; the mathematics curriculum in the UK has
changed over the years to support the use of calculators (on the
grounds that it was better to teach technique than rote arithmetic),
and some English Literature courses allow the syllabus books to be
brought into the exam (so long as they don't contain notes). If the
course encourages mental agility rather than rote learning (as Werner
was arguing that his course did) and the exam reflects that then no
technology is going to help a student to cheat - although if the
internet becomes available as a resource then it may be possible for a
student to find the answer to the question they've just been asked.

On the other hand, many courses expect you to learn facts as well as
mental processes. There may be a good reason for this even if in
future life the student expects to have resources to hand of which
they are deprived during the exam. A chemist could reasonably expect
to be able to look up atomic numbers and valencies; a mathematician
could consult a book of formulae; someone learning French as a second
language could take a dictionary or phrase book with them to France.
Nonetheless, their future work will be much simplified if the
information is learnt; it will be to hand, quickly and instinctively
available, and natural enough that it can be used as the basis for
more advanced work. It slows you down if you need to look up each atom
while you try to write a chemical formula; a mathematician won't
recognise when to apply formulae if he doesn't know them; professional
translators can't stop to look up a word, and studying mediaeval
linguistics without knowing the modern equivalent makes dictionary use
hard. Nobody can reasonably argue that rote learning should be
entirely removed from exams.

So obviously, there are limits to what is considered acceptable. As
the capabilities of portable technology increases, the technology has
become capable of passing those limits (although a crib on a piece of
paper has always been able to hold information that the student
shouldn't have in an exam). But are there uses which are acceptable?
And how can the use of the technology be limited to within those
bounds?

I'll restrict myself to exam technique. No doubt many innovative
approaches exist that are subject specific, but I suspect if the
devices aren't considered acceptable for the majority of exams, the
minority won't be allowed exception. Traditional exam approaches that
I was taught include:

Determine which questions you need to do, and which you can.
       To be honest portable computing isn't going to help much more
       than scribbling on the exam paper would. It can help keep you
       from missing questions out by having the list centralised (and
       not lost on the back of a question sheet), though.

Keep track of time - pace yourself.
       Watches are, in general, good at this. It's a bit rude to have
       an alarm go off during an exam, but programmable devices could
       flash their backlights to give an active reminder. No doubt the
       vibrate alarms from mobile phones will make their way into
       watches soon (does such a thing exist?) which would allow for
       discrete timekeeping.

Plan your essays, list the points you want to make.
       Electronics can't offer much over paper on this at the moment,
       but once input technology improves (don't get me started on my
       idea of range sensors under the watch to detect finger contact
       with a table for typing with a projected keyboard - anyone
       patented this yet?) the ability to shuffle notes around in
       electronic form to get the desired order can be useful, and
       easier to handle under exam conditions than a scrawled mass of
       lines on a piece of paper.

Check your answers.
       Assuming there are no restrictions on calculator use in an
       exam, something with a display the size of the onHand can be
       better than a plain calculator - and you're likely to be more
       familiar with it.

Check with geometry.
       A lot of mathematical answers have a geometrical equivalent.
       However, drawing a diagram to check that the numbers you have
       look at least vaguely right can be fiddly. I see no harm in a
       drawing package on, e.g., an onHand (which could do straight
       lines and circles - as a DataLink owner I only assume that such
       an application exists) which would make it easier to get
       accurate circles and angles. A bright student should be able to
       work out a suitable diagram to check, and interpret the result
       (although obviously not an alternative for algorithmic
       calculation in most cases). Such an approach is simply less
       fiddly than using compasses and set squares.

(There are no doubt numerous other examples; I haven't been a student
for a long time).

Nothing there relies on additional information being carried into the
exam, it's just making use of the tools that you have. There are more
borderline cases (watch as a spellchecker - probably not acceptable),
but generally the above is equivalent to bringing a nicer pen. We must
remember that these things cost money, so it's not going to be fair to
allow too large an advantage to be provided by these devices, and my
opinions aren't what counts when it comes to the bounds of
acceptability.

Obviously once we allow students to use watch computing in this way
it's important to stop less legal uses. If the technology was
standardised (as in the example I put in my other essay of insisting
that all students have the same programmable calculator) this it may
be possible to remove cribs beforehand; however for something as
personal as a wristwatch that's not really practical.

All the above suggestions require active use of the watch; it's not
sufficient merely to spot a student who is paying undue attention to a
wrist (which, at the moment, would be adequate). It's possible that
future watch technology will standardise on a platform (e.g. EPOC or,
so help us, a WinCE derivative) which might make it possible to limit
the facilities available - or at least the data held - but obviously
it's a bit rude to insist on hard resetting someone's PDA. This could
be the first call for a standardisation process for developers of this
technology, but we're on the early side for that at the moment.

At the moment it's going to be down to trust. A student known to the
examiner will probably be under closer observation when using the
device in an exam, but on the other hand if the uses are legitimate
there should be no reason for the student to be nervous (although a
wise student may explain the capabilities of the device to the
examiner beforehand). The difference, of course, is that someone using
a wrist computer to cheat is likely to look guilty, have a break of
workflow, and have to start from scratch in the answer to a question
using the watch (if a student has been playing with a watch for ten
minutes but only has a circle on the display when the invigilator
comes to look, it's fair to be suspicious).

Arguably it would take an invigilator who knew the subject being
examined to tell whether diagrams and notes on the watch are relevant,
but we're talking about ways in which the technology can help, not
ways in which it can be required, and if the invigilator bans the use
of the device then a student should be no more than inconvenienced. A
crib usually looks like a crib, anyway.

So we're down to very close scrutiny, which obviously isn't ideal. For
so long as there are only a small number of such devices this may not
be a disaster, and we can hope that standardisation will help out when
they become more common. It's the examiners' call, and if the above
advantages of wrist-based computing are to be made available and our
technology is to become more popular, we want them to consider this
kind of thing to be acceptable. Part of this is presenting a good and
respectable public face of the community. Each case of cheating of
course hurts that image. It's not practical to require every
invigilator to spend all their time peering over the shoulder of
students using their watches, so if invigilators aren't going to ban
these devices outright there needs to be a degree of trust.

I should say that trust between student and teacher isn't adequate -
it is the exam boards that decree what equipment is acceptable. If I'm
going to preach, I could say that cheating in this case harms not just
the individual but also the wrist computing community. But the purpose
of these essays is not to discuss the morality of cheating in the
first place.

So I'd conclude that there are quite reasonable uses for technology in
an exam, and that it would be unfortunate for students to be banned
from using these devices to make their lives easier; indeed it may
encourage good approaches to problems by making the actual
implementation of good technique quicker, simpler and less
error-prone. The problem of how to allow the advance of technology in
academia is very much present in this case, but the same issue is
all-pervading in modern schools and society. In my experience schools
have embraced technology with open arms where it has been of use to
the learning process, and I hope they will be able to do so here.

We need to make it easy for them, though. Standardisation by
manufacturers, cooperation by students, and a low profile by those who
do cheat will all help, and I hope let the advances in lifestyle
enabled by wrist computing be mirrored in improved learning techniques
for future students. Every new technology has a downside, and as the
wrist computing community it is our responsibility to insure that
these devices become accepted for their benefits, and life gets just a
little bit better for everyone.

Hmm. Anyone from a watch company want to pay me huge amounts of money
to be an evangelist for them? :-)