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Getting Started Guide to Wireless Networks
By Professor Mike Sharples, University of Nottingham (formerly at Educational Technology Research Group, University of Birmingham) |
Students are starting to carry around a miscellany of mobile technologies, including phones, games machines, music players, hand-held and laptop computers. Some 30% of university students now own a laptop computer; 95% of students and 25% of children aged 7-10 have a mobile phone.
Now a new generation of laptops and phones is coming on sale, with built-in wireless chips that give students and staff high speed access to a local network or the internet from anywhere within a building or campus. Schools, colleges and universities are responding to the availability of relatively cheap wireless access points and wireless cards for laptops by setting up wireless Local Area Networks (LANs). Some have provided students with wireless laptop machines for use within the classroom or building, or on loan to take home. Others have allowed students to connect from their own devices.
This mobile access is already starting to alter the dynamics of education. Students can own the kinds of tool that an academic or researcher takes for granted. They can browse the internet, share files and learning resources, and keep in permanent contact with friends and colleagues. Being able to communicate online at the same time as talk face-to-face can enhance learning, allowing students to mail queries to a teaching assistant during a lecture, to carry out small group research in the classroom, or to swap and critique each other's work. Research at Pontificia Universidad Católica, in Santiago, Chile has shown that children can learn maths topics more effectively in small groups using wireless hand-held computers compared to paper-based activities.
To set up a basic wireless network is fairly straightforward. In general, plugging a wireless access point into the cabled network will automatically establish a connection to wireless computers. But the very ease of setting up a simple wireless network can lead to immediate problems. By default wireless access points are not secure, so that anyone with a wireless computer can tap into the local network. Installing and configuring a secure wireless network is more complex, as is deciding where to place the access points to provide the best coverage, and managing the authentication and registration of new devices on the network.
There are good general surveys of the benefits and problems of wireless LAN and overviews of the technical standards, but a lack of practical 'how to' guides. To fill the gap, the University of Birmingham has produced a Getting Started Guide to Wireless Networks. It is aimed at IT managers in universities, colleges and schools, as well as small businesses, to give practical advice on setting up and configuring wireless LANs. It has been written with the assistance of Microsoft, but is vendor-neutral and so is equally applicable to Windows, Linux or Macintosh installations. You are welcome to copy or circulate the Guide, providing that the University of Birmingham is acknowledged as copyright holder.
References
University of Leeds (2003). Student Computer Ownership Survey
www.leeds.ac.uk/iss/surveys/PC_hefce_report.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2004
Dundee University (2003). Mobile Communications Survey
www.dundee.ac.uk/elecengphysics/mobilesurvey_results.php. Accessed 23 April 2004
Guardian Online (2004). Rapid rise in children's mobile phone use
www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1205205,00.html. Accessed 1 May 2004
Zurita, G, Nussbaum, M and Sharples, M (2003). Encouraging face-to-face collaborative learning through the use of handheld computers in the classroom, in L Chittaro (Ed) Proceedings of Mobile HCI 200, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp193-208
Becta (2004). Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). Becta Technical Paper
www.becta.org.uk/subsections/foi/documents/technology_and_education_research/w_lans.pdf
Ting, J, Sharples, M and Williams, B (2003). Getting Started Guide to Wireless Networks. University of Birmingham and Microsoft download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/education/solutions/wireless/downloads/wireless-lan-guide.pdf
May 2004
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