Jenny Waycott moves away from mobile phones and looks at the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) as general workplace tools. She reports what happened when staff from two very different organisations used PDAs for various purposes, including to support time management, to access and manage emails, and to record and store notes. She uses activity theory as a framework for understanding how new tools mediate activity. This provides a useful vocabulary for describing how mobile technologies can disrupt and change workplace activities, for example, by changing the relationship between elements of the activity, by modifying the processes by which the activity is carried out, and by introducing and resolving contradictions.

This paper describes a study that evaluated the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) as general workplace tools. Staff members from the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University took part in the study. They used PDAs for various purposes, including to support time management, to access and manage emails, and to record and store notes. The research is grounded in Activity Theory, which provides a framework for understanding how new tools mediate activity. The purpose of the research is to examine the two-way process by which new portable tools are integrated into existing activities; that is, to understand these tools change activity, and to illustrate how the existing activity system impacts upon the way the new tool is adopted and used. The study described in this paper is part of an ongoing project that has also examined the use of PDAs as tools for reading course materials by students on an Open University course (Waycott, 2002; Waycott & Kukulska-Hulme, 2001), and which will involve a further study of PDA use in a larger organisational context.