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• I hadn't visited Espresso Royale in six months. The old coffee shop across from the chapel and next to the CVS exuded the same pungent odors; behind the counter the same orange-haired clerks sported the same painful jewelry; and the same menu of coffees listed various Italian monikers. But something was different. Half the people at the tables were working on their laptop computers. Succumbing to the social pressure, I opened my PowerBook. Up came a message: Welcome to Espresso Royale. Today's specials include Lemon Chai and Latte Americano. Espresso Royale had gone online. It's wireless network was available to all sippers, at no cost. I checked my email and confirmed my flight reservations.
  
• Montparnasse Station hosts a sea of swarming commuters on their way in and out of Paris. At all hours of the day and night French men and women wend their way to the tracks and claim their chairs in the waiting rooms. With two hours to wait I found a seat, opened my computer, and saw the little AirPort icon flash on. I connected to the wireless network, and was asked to choose the form of payment for my access. The minimum charge was five Euros for 20 minutes. My two hours online would cost me $35. Though expensive, the network was fast and responsive, and enabled me to work with email, instant messenger, and the Internet, as if I was in my office.
  
• The speaker was boring. He was on slide number 23 of 56 of his presentation, which used PowerPoint-lessly to restate the obvious. But like many of the others in the room who had discovered it, I was using the wireless network to research and write Chapter 7 of my latest book, answering my mail, and carrying on instant message conversations with my daughter and one of my students. The conference center charged $9.95 extra per day for unlimited use of the network from your room or anywhere in the center. Despite the deadly presenter, my morning turned out to be quite productive.

These are all true events of the past month that could not have occurred a year ago. A new set of technologies are fast finding their way into our coffee shops, public places, and hotels, that allow us to connect to the Internet no matter where we are. And these wireless networks are appearing in our schools and colleges as well. My daughter tells me that she can connect from anywhere in the entire library complex at her university, and my friends in Maine tell me that more than half the K-12 schools offer the service. This week's article explains how wireless networks work, and how they can be useful in teaching and learning.

Wireless what?

It's not like cell phones, it's not like walkie-talkies. The new technologies that enable the kind of access described above is not a form of telephony or two-way radio. It's simply a way to replace the familiar Ethernet cable with a radio connection to your local area network. The cable is replaced by a radio transmitter in the building and a radio receiver in your computer. (Actually, both radios can transmit as well as receive.) Instead of traveling down the copper conductors in the cable, the signals travel over the radio waves from your computer to the local network.

So if you move too far away, and the radio signal gets too weak, you can no longer browse the Web or get your email. Depending on the power of the transmitter and the quality of your receiver and the number of obstacles between them, you will start to lose your connection when you are perhaps 150 feet apart -- the length of my back yard. And what you are connected to is the same local area network you'd have connected to with the cable. So the wireless networks that we found at the coffee shop and the conference center are a local affairs, short extensions of Espresso Royale's and the hotel's wired networks. This is the fastest-growing of the many wireless technologies proliferating around us today, and is designed especially for connecting computers.

(Other wireless networks include the familiar cell-phone networks, the portable phone in your home, and the newer Blue Tooth system. Blue Tooth uses a different kind of radio wave, and is designed for very short distances, such as between your cell phone and your earphone, for instance.)

The networks in the examples above all use the same radio frequency and the same method of encoding the data that travels along it. No matter what brand of computer, or operating system, or wireless transmitter is used, they all talk the same language, one that was designed and agreed upon by a committee of engineers from a wide variety of organizations and companies. This international standard is called 802.11b, so named by the engineers who agreed on it. (Apparently they agreed previously on 801 other things before getting to this one.) So I can use my Apple laptop in my brother-in-law's home network (based on Cisco transmitters) while he uses his Dell computer running Windows.

Mostly Laptops

Seldom do we see desktop computers using a wireless network. Most of them were installed when wired networks were the only possibility, and most never move. So wireless offers little advantage. But the phenomenal growth of laptop computers (see the previous articles in this series on Laptop or Desktop and 1 to 1 Computing) has promoted portability and created a consistent demand for connectivity. Many laptops arrive from the factory with the wireless transmitter and receiver and software built-in; for others it can be added with an accessory card that costs less than $100.

The wireless laptop provides the worker or the student with the freedom to research, communicate, create, or learn no matter where: in the library, the conference room, the classroom, the office, the cafeteria or the sports field. It takes computing out of the lab and off the desk, and allows online work to be done wherever it's needed. It's no wonder that this sector of the computing industry is enjoying steady growth, and that more and more people and organizations are taking advantage of it.

Setting Up

For the simplest wireless network, all you need is a wireless laptop and a base station. The base station is a small transmitter-receiver, about the size of a ham sandwich, that you connect to your existing Ethernet network (or, in some cases, to your telephone line.) Then fire up your laptop, connect to the base station, and you're on. You may need to do some configuring of network settings, but not much more. The least-expensive base stations cost about $200., can handle up to 20 users up to 150 feet away. You'd need a more powerful base station, or a number of small ones, to equip an entire school.

Security

From my living room, my laptop picks up my neighbor's wireless network across the street. I can see his network in the list (it's called Casa Faccenda), but I am unable to connect, because Ron has protected it with a password. Most wireless networks are secured in this way from unwanted visitors piggybacking on your infrastructure. And some folks go even further, encrypting the data that's sent over the radio waves from the laptop to the LAN. On an encrypted network, my name would go over the wire as *hu (%rb@w or some other combination of symbols that would thwart anyone tuning in to the transmissions between my laptop and the base station.

Wireless Schools

Teachers and students in schools that have installed wireless networks tell me that it causes a change in the overall teaching and learning environment. People carry their laptops about with them all day, connecting when and from where they need to. The computer, its learning tools, its working tools, and the resources it can connect to, are available all day in all the places people might be. Students find this to be a natural extension of the communication technologies they have grown up with since birth, and quickly adapt the form of their learning to take full advantage of the constant connection. Teachers find they can rely on a library in every lap as they are teaching, and thus create more challenging assignments and class discussions that incorporate more sophisticated research and use of data. Schools leaders find that the learning environment seems different and more serious since the advent of the laptops with wireless access.

Wireless Warnings

But not everyone likes this new environments. Some teachers do not like to be challenged by a student who browses on the Web to a different interpretation of the topic, and poses a question in the middle of her lecture. Some administrators don't trust that all the power of the computer and the network, when freed through wireless, will be put to good use by students. Some policymakers fear that students already spend too much time in front of the boob-tube anyway, and this all-day, all-places access simply exacerbates a negative trend. Some students may be distracted by the breadth and depth of the information and communication capabilities offered by the wireless network, and may not pay full attention to the topic at hand.

But as I watched the students in the coffee shop, and wandered about to see what they were up to, none were playing online games, none were looking at naughty pictures, and none were disturbing the peace. One was reading a site on Chinese economic statistics. Another was writing a paper for English class. In the back corner the young lady was answering her email. As I post this week's article to the Web, I'll do it from my laptop through a wireless network at the conference center where I am working. The wireless way is winning.