Project Observations

These blogs were very elementary, with little use made of comments, though students did read other blogs. There is certainly potential for much richer use of the facilities, especially where the work is more oriented towards making use of online resources. Yet, this was already a fairly complex operation involving several kinds of PDAs, desktop PCs, and servers, though the complexity was hidden as much as possible from the user, so that the moblogging itself became a fairly simple process.

At the end of the exercises students were asked to fill in a survey to report back on the exercise. The initial technical barriers seemed to be overcome as can be seen in the feedback obtained, but not everyone takes to blogging, so alternatives may have to be provided. It is difficult to say to what extent mobility aids the reflection process with a relatively small sample and no control experiment (blogging without PDAs). However, when asked 'Where there any advantages to using the PDA to write your blogs?' all but one responded positively, several citing the convenience of writing without constraints on place and time - 'even in lectures' and 'easier than sitting at a desk.' One comment was particularly interesting for its suggestion about note taking - 'I could do small pieces at a time and build up a piece.'

Whereas the blog hosting solution proved very satisfactory, the general immaturity of moblogging tools was disappointing. Few clients were available and most of these were limited to particular platforms, contained bugs, or lacked important functionality; few were released with open source licences. Setting up the devices and tools can be very fiddly, which raises the question of support from IT staff, who may not have any resources allocated for training in this area. Current products are generally marketed at mobile phones, reflecting the growth in that market. However, the phone clients are typically designed for instant capture of events, rather than sustained reflection, with small screens that cannot hold much text and able to store very few entries in the cache. Altogether, this environment may offer convenience but also may be encouraging short attention spans (as well as large phone bills).

Even so, moblogging did work quite well, despite the scarcity of dependable software.