Mobile technology cuts loose at Alberta: Edmonton's NAIT forestry students use HP's mobile technology for field work and real-time mapping.

As one of Canada's largest technical institutes, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, is all about using the latest technology to support the education of a highly mobile student body and the administrative tasks of a large, growing institute.

"The typical approach in education is to go to the marketplace with a tender and look for the lowest price you can find," says Sandi Barber, Mobile Learning Project Manager within NAIT's Technology and Curriculum Innovation area. "The problem is that you end up with a fractured approach to your IT [system] and the purchase price is small compared to what it costs to maintain your system."

Costs aside, the commitment to increased mobility is providing access to the information and applications students need and save physical space for more value-added activities such as seminars and interactive labs.

An early example of that mobility is NAIT's two-year forest technology program with wireless-enabled notebook PCs. "We went wireless because our students do a lot of fieldwork," says NAIT's Sherril Cossey. "We thought the wireless and peer-to-peer network would be terrific for us."

She's right. Students use iPAQ Pocket PC notebooks to download data from their instructor, record data in the field, produce maps and find their way in the forest using global positioning system and geographic information system software and for real-time mapping.

That benefit is a result of the solution to one of the key challenges NAIT administrators faced: A cohesive IT plan and a partner like HP that could provide all of NAIT'S IT needs. They also wanted a technology partner that could match NAIT'S vision for mobile computing. "We have a plan and vision for all of our students to be connected [to NAIT] by 2005 with their own computing device. We need them to be able to access their grades, their digital curriculum and a whole range of services," she says.