OUseful Info

Portable OU

Are these the first signs of a changing attitude towards protable media, I wonder? At least two courses I know of now provide students with portable devices as part of the supplied course materials: TU120 Beyond Google sends out a 256Mb MP3 player to students at the start of the course, and the T885 Team Engineering students leave the weekend residential school at the start of their course with a 256Mb USB memory stick (and a webcam, too...).

The devices are OU branded, as these photos of the USB memory stick and the MP3 player show (I'll add a pic of the T885 memory stick to this post as soon as I get one):

The T885 memory stick is not preloaded with anything, although I believe students do load photos onto it during the residential school, that they must take away and then share somehow. T885 is exploring all sorts of social software tools - blogs, wikis, maybe even flickr?, and I hope to post more about it in the coming weeks...

The TU120 MP3 player does comes preloaded with some audio files recorded by the course team and used within the course. As such, the player is used to deliver content to students, as well as providing them with a portable - and standalone - means of consuming it.

However, the TU120 MP3 player is not preloaded with any software (though it could be...) although the mailing the player is sent out with does contain the OU Online Applications CD (which I've mentioned several times previously).

As I have the current CD handy, here are a few screenshot from the installer to show what's on it:

As far as I know, the Firefox installation is a vanilla one - i.e. I don't think there are any OU customisations applied to it.

I've been thinking for some time about what Firefox customisations we might usefully provide, either as extensions, or preloaded into an OU distributed Firefox installation package and I hope to post some demos relating to that topic in the next 2 to 3 weeks...

Posted by ajh59 at October 18, 2006 12:53 AM