The Students' World Of Laptop Radio
The Age
Tuesday July 21, 1998
WHEN the pupils of John Paul College, a Catholic regional co-educational school in Frankston, say they are "on the air", they really mean they're working with their computers.
The college has just done a deal, worth more than $200,000, to buy 50 Acer laptop computers and instal the largest wireless local area network (LAN) in Victoria. The network is one of only three in schools in Australia. The other two, both much smaller, are in Queensland.
The network allows remarkable freedom and flexibility in the use of the school's 50 laptop computers. College principal Liam Davison describes it as "very powerful, a thinking and learning tool that appeals to the student and the teacher of the future.
"We decided to bring in laptops but do it so they were available to all pupils, not just those whose families could afford them," Davison says. "We are a community-based school and we don't charge $12,000 in fees for a year. We have some pupils who cannot afford to pay; we carry them.
"So if we are charging $2000 a year for tuition, and a laptop costs $3000, it's a bit of an imbalance. Whatever we did with laptops had to be equitable."
The answer was for the school, not the parents, to buy 50 laptops and instal the wireless network to allow flexible access to the whole school population.
The school also runs three computer laboratories with desktop machines on a Novell network to teach IT subjects, but the laptops are used for much wider teaching purposes - in drama classes, English literature, language classes and more.
The heart of the system is a Digital wireless LAN installed by Histar Invotek, a Melbourne firm of computer consultants specialising in education. Even for them, installing the John Paul College network was a step into the dark.
"It's completely mobile," says Eddie Ragauskas, a former teacher who is now Histar's business development manager. "When I told our techs what we wanted to do, they thought it might be risky. It was unknown territory in the sense of how many laptops we wanted to connect. But, in the event, it was fantastic. I think radio links are the way to go in schools."
The system operates on 2.4GHz with an Ethernet loop connecting 19 wireless bridges to the school's central server. Transceiver boxes cemented to the lid of the 50 Acer laptops make a seamless connection to the network, which Ragauskas says, rivals direct Ethernet in speed and reliability.
Any laptop within about 400 metres, line of sight, of a bridge can connect to the network, though allowances need to be made for buildings and other obstructions.
Throughput is 2 Mbps, which is more than adequate for the school's purpose, but Histar is looking at the next generation of Digital's technology, which will move up to a steady 10Mbps.
Total mobility was one of the principal aims of the school in installing the system. "We had them build us two mobile computer 'labs' - trolleys that we could wheel about the school, plug into the network and work."
Going portable was a major step for the school, especially given its philosophical approach to community-based teaching.
"About 10 years ago we, like a lot of schools, recognised that we would have to bring computers in, both for vocational reasons and in terms of learning and a source of information," Davison says. "We now have a fairly computer-based library and resources such as CDs and we are now getting into the Internet.
"The big issue with the labs was that they had limited access to computers for non-IT classes and the hard-wired boxes and screens were inflexible . . ."
But notebooks were the buzz and a lot of parents, seeing them coming into schools such as MLC and Trinity, wondered what John Paul College was going to do.
"We adjusted our school fees to finance the purchase of the laptops and the LAN," Davison says. So then we got into asking what we wanted notebooks for. The trouble with notebooks without a network is that they are standing alone. It was the connecting that we saw as high value. That's when we came upon the wireless LAN.
What was a brave experiment has been highly successful. Students at John Paul College have what amounts to a cellular telephone system connecting its notebook computers and everyone has a chance to use the technology that is sweeping the world.
© 1998 The Age
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