At the Open University in the UK (which teaches via distance learning), the vast majority of our courses now use asynchronous conferencing. We have something like 120,000 students using this technology. Many courses find it enormously effective. The actual conferencing technology (FirstClass) is not especially sophisticated, but works really well for our needs.
To me the asynchronous aspect (i.e. people not on the conferences at the same time) adds quite a bit for distance learning students. It fits nicely with the variable study patterns and time availability that people studying part time have, and makes quite a difference over classroom discussions or IRC. And maybe we just have nice students, but I don't often see many flame wars.:-)
On the course I teach, we've also had a lot of success with embedding interactive elements into the course website. Our metaphor for this is that they're all reading from the same textbook and can scribble things in the margin for others to read. Except that 500 of them can all have the same book out of the library at once...
Actually I'm afraid this isn't correct. The SPV runs on Micro$oft's Smartphone OS, a variant of Windows CE 3.0 (the same OS that runs PocketPC on the iPAQ etc); the P800 runs on Symbian OS 7.0 (essentially the same as the OS that runs the Nokia 9210 and 7650).
One can argue about whether the M$ or the Symbian solution is better, and certainly their feature sets are not dissimilar, but they're very clearly different platforms. They can't run the same software, and have important technical differences.
For my taste, the basic design strategy makes Symbian's platform superior. It was designed from the start (as Psion's EPOC) to run on handheld devices, taking into account their strengths and weaknesses. Windows CE has been designed from the start to be as close as possible to Windows in its appearance and functions. I gather Windows CE has got a lot better in recent releases but that still seems to me a flawed strategy.
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To me the asynchronous aspect (i.e. people not on the conferences at the same time) adds quite a bit for distance learning students. It fits nicely with the variable study patterns and time availability that people studying part time have, and makes quite a difference over classroom discussions or IRC. And maybe we just have nice students, but I don't often see many flame wars. :-)
On the course I teach, we've also had a lot of success with embedding interactive elements into the course website. Our metaphor for this is that they're all reading from the same textbook and can scribble things in the margin for others to read. Except that 500 of them can all have the same book out of the library at once...
One can argue about whether the M$ or the Symbian solution is better, and certainly their feature sets are not dissimilar, but they're very clearly different platforms. They can't run the same software, and have important technical differences.
For my taste, the basic design strategy makes Symbian's platform superior. It was designed from the start (as Psion's EPOC) to run on handheld devices, taking into account their strengths and weaknesses. Windows CE has been designed from the start to be as close as possible to Windows in its appearance and functions. I gather Windows CE has got a lot better in recent releases but that still seems to me a flawed strategy.
Hint: Soviet Russia ceased to exist in 1991.