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TTU's Technology Institute's Newsletter April 2007

PSP

The PSP initiative.

The PSP initiative is a project with the purpose of determining how effective the Sony PSP is for the deployment of educational material to students.

The planned use of the PSP is as a mobile web platform allowing access to online content modules from a small, compact, and affordable device.

The PSP features a web browser which enables it to view web sites and run flash based applications.

The institute will provide pages formated specifically for the PSP in size and resolution, with interface designed to be easy to use with the PSP controls.

Limitations:

1 Memory, the PSP features only 32 mb of internal storage but has an expansion slot allowing it to use removeable media in the form of Sony MemoryStick flash cards. These cards allow the PSP to have storage capacities limited only to the size of the cards available (4g). 1 gig cards are affordable and provide a very large amount of data storage.

2 Browser Cache, the PSP web browser is only able to read pages of a size smaller than 2mb, capable of displaying up to three sites at one time, these sites would have to be no larger than approximately 682.5kb. 675Kb will be the target page size. These smaller pages would mean a very small load on campus servers and take up a very minimal amount of server space.

3 User interface, the PSP UI is very intuitive and easy to navigate however typing is very difficult due to the lack of a keyboard entry system. This problem is remedied through the use of pre-loading the machines with bookmarks for all necessary pages, pages designed to be easy to navigate, and the PSP's built in “simple type” interface which allows common phrases and URL data to be entered quickly. These are not intended to be a personal computer allowing for the taking of notes, or writing papers.

Campus wide wi-fi would enable the PSPs to access content and data from any point on campus wirelessly through the built in 802.11g card.

Ultimate goal:

The ulimate goal of this project is eventually to have full campus wide deployment to all students, backing from Sony in the form of funding, discounted pricing for the units, and development tools allowing us to produce full featured stand alone applications, and possibly even packaging course content on the PSP's native media form of UMD disc.

–Brandon Denton