Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Nextel Awards Innovation Prize to MIT Doctoral Student

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 04:11:22 -0500

Nextel Awards Innovation Prize to MIT Doctoral Student
Nextel awarded its innovation prize to an MIT doctoral candidate who created a
way for students to use its i550 phones to silently signal professors that they
weren't following the lecture, or had questions - often tough things to admit in
classes filled with extremely bright people. The Nextel phones were used to
send messages to a professor's laptop computer.

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Wireless phones

Nextel announces innovation prize

By Peter J. Howe and Diane Lewis, Globe Staff, 3/3/2003

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student who developed a way to use Nextel

phones for students to pose their professors questions in class - or just confidentially
admit they
were confused - is being honored today with a first-place prize in a Nextel wireless
innovations
contest.

Eric Brittain of Cambridge, who is pursuing a doctorate in electrical engineering and
computer
science, is getting $1,000 in prizes and Nextel credits for the system, which was used as
an
experiment two years ago in an MIT aeronautical-

astronautical engineering class. A total of 80 Nextel i550 phones were distributed to
students in
professor Ian Waitz's ''unified engineering'' course and linked wirelessly to his laptop.

By pressing a key on the phone, students could send a wireless message registering that
they were
not following the lecture - which Brittain said is not always the easiest thing to admit
in a room full of
MIT geniuses. Phones could also be used by students to put themselves in line to ask a
question,
instead of having to hold their hand up for several minutes.

Although the Nextel phones were used as part of a one-time experiment, Brittain said they
showed
a number of possible opportunities for using wireless communications in class to
facilitate
communications for students ''who could be shy or who could be concerned that English
isn't their
first language, and so it is hard to ask a question in front of the whole class.''

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/062/business/Wireless_phonesP.shtml

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