Collaborative learning system based on wireless mobile equipments

With the popularization of wireless mobile equipment, long distance education based on such equipment, e.g., PDAs, attracts increasing attention. However, two problems are: how to transform current Web pages to display correctly on PDA; how to deal with long distance discussions between PDA users and PC users. We have developed a mobile learning system, composed of a collaborative learning model and a network agent service model. The system can be deployed over a heterogeneous network of mobile wireless devices and wired devices, ranging from PDAs to desktop PCs. The collaborative learning system, based on traditional C/S (client-server) architecture, includes some basic discussion tools. The client side is implemented in the form of an applet, which can communicate with the server side located on the Web server. Teachers and students can communicate through the Web page browsers of PDAs or PCs. The network agent service model, which acts as an HTTP agency, can transform the text and images in HTML pages into an appropriate size and format that can be displayed by the PDA browser, according to the size of its screen. The architecture and framework of the mobile learning system, which includes some key technologies, such as the realization of image conversion, is introduced. We demonstrate the use and effect of the system in the context of long distance education.