Is Wi-Fi Ruining College?

theodp writes "Over at Slate, Avi Zenilman has seen the real classroom of the future firsthand: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail, play Legend of Zelda, or update profiles on Facebook.com. But not to worry - replace laptops with crumpled notes, and the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past." From the article: "... when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students' browsing habits, they concluded, 'Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.' It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it's certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A's."

Limiting Internet Access

[unik]

Maybe it would be possible to allow access to a local intranet only through the wifi? It wouldnt eliminate any Legend of Zelda, but it might keep the surfing to minimum.

Run a chat room

[CrazyJim1]

If everyone has a computer(in some labs, and in the future), a monitored chat room can help learning a ton. For example: The teacher says something obscure, and the students want to know what it is, they can chat among their peers instead of disturbing the lecture. If no one knows in the class, they can interrupt the teacher. All talking would be logged so the teacher can see who's abusing the system after class.

How they handle it at Harvard (Business School)

[jwachter]

I'm a student at Harvard Business School, where they have a fairly interesting solution for handling this problem. While every campus building has wireless access, all the access points in the classroom buildings require a web based log-in that checks your student ID versus your class schedule. If you're scheduled to be in class at that moment, you are denied wireless access to the internet (in any classroom building).

Draconian, perhaps, but very effective at keeping us focused in class.

What's the fuss about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since there has been college, there has been a set of people that go and don't finish. There has been a set of people that cannot finish, no matter how hard they try. There has also been a set that seem to have enough together to take it seriously and do well too. There is also usually a set of people that can screw around as much as they want and still somehow succeed at it.

This just seems like another one of those IQ tests that college is all about. I watched people fail out because of games and such. When staying up all night playing Civ is a stronger motivation than studying then that's how it is. Same with the internet. If you're one of those people then maybe taking a couple years off to work might be what you need before you can take college seriously. You can save yourself a lot of money and heartache if you recognize that quickly.

Re:An "A" is an "A" Studen

[snilloc]

If there had been wifi at my college when I was there, I might have actually attended a few classes that I chose to put a lower priority on, knowing that I could get other things done while in class.

Effects on others

[rmcd]

I teach and find laptop abuse to be an issue. The Slate article misses the real problem, which is not that the student checks out (the article correctly notes there are lots of ways to do this), but that others can see the laptop screen. Suddenly there is a group of five students giggling about something. I've had students complain about the distracting laptop usage of others.

I don't know what the right solution is, since I think that in theory it's fantastic for students to have a laptop to take notes, perform calculations, and look up related issues during class. But it's a real problem when the abusers distract a group of students. I suspect that shutting off internet access during class is the best practical solution.

Killswitches.

[saintlupus]

Speaking as someone who works in college IT, I've heard from more than one colleague that the same faculty clamoring for wireless and technology in every classroom are the ones now clamoring for killswitches so that the students can't use it during their classes.

Awesome.

It's sort of like when we put projectors with laptop hookups in all of the classrooms in nice, integrated bunkers and then they decided that the laptops were too heavy to carry, and they wanted desktops permanently installed in there are well. Whee! I'll never understand why a professor can carry three different NPR tote bags chock full of paper, and the four pound iBook they've been issued is the breaking point.

--saint

Re:Browsing vs Looking up definitions

[triplepoint217]

A few years back my grandfather was teaching a class on at least several occasions a student with a laptop would look up information he was lecturing about and then add current examples, other information and the like. It took my grandfather by surprise a bit, but he said it was actually quite beneficial overall. Just like all technologies, it can be misused, but it can also be put to good use.

Latops have helped me

[vga_init]

I've been toting my laptop off and on since high school, and until a few years into college I was one of the only people in my class to be doing this.

In high school, I used it to take notes; I can type quite a bit faster than I can write, and they come out looking a bit more organized and legible than they otherwise would have. Also, having a computer for some reason would help me stay focused; I was practically raised on computers, and you might say it is sort of a comfort thing. Whatever it was, it helped me study.

In college, things became more interested. I started off taking primarily computer science courses. I taught myself to program when I was younger, and this process involves a great deal of fiddling around with new concepts in order to fully grasp them. I would sit in class during the lecture compiling away, doing examples that the instructor was giving me and seeing how I could push the envelope. On one occasion I was even able to correct my instructor on the usage of particular syntax.

Being the kind of person that learns scientifically (I like to observe the process and alter test conditions to evaluate the results), a computer is a very nifty tool for giving me the means to gasp the material during the lecture. While my original methods did not employ the use of wifi, having connectivity would be useful in case I needed to look up or download something on the fly; I would just have to be disciplined enough to turn off my instant messenger and mail client so that I don't get too distracted.

Usually I am opposed to computers in the classroom because of such things as funding and underemployment (of the machines themselves), but when the computers are owned by the students themselves, then I'm able to see more benefits (if you're going to pay a grand for a gadget, you're going to learn how to use it). Whether the computer ultimately helps or hinders your classroom experience depends on how good of a student you are, and typically good/bad students get the grades they deserve with or without wifi-enabled computers.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cornell Student Responds

[Alterscape]

I'm a Cornell University student, and I use my Powerbook during many of my long lecture classes to browse, as well as take notes. I'm in the film program, and most of my classes tend to be 2-3 hours long, and occasionally my brain needs something to think about besides the relatively dry theoretical content that's discussed.

I've noticed that when class discussions get interesting, heated, or something other than monotone, and I have an interest in actively participating, I close my laptop and listen more attentively. But in most cases, I can handle both the text and the lecture "data stream" concurrently. If anything, giving my mind something to do other than passively receive content. I also find myself looking up sites related to what we're discussing, if its actually interesting. Strange as it seems, sometimes dividing my attention actually lets me focus on stuff I'm less interested in.

I realize that to a certain extent, I'm probably hurting myself by tuning out "less interesting" material. But, at the same time, before I had my laptop, I took notes in spiral notebooks and they'd often be punctuated by long stretches of doodles where the lecture became to dry to hold my attention by itself. I was a 3.5-ish student before I got my laptop, and I'm still a 3.5-ish student today.

Why?

[elucido]

It's not the teachers job to force students to learn, or limit the ability of students who use the technology to learn faster. When you get rid of the internet, students who use the internet to actually research what you are talking about suffer, you end up hurting the students who are bright enough to use the technology properly. You also hurt the technology industry, as sales of laptops and wifi equipment will go down if you attack the main users and buyers of it. It is always wrong to punish the minority due to the stupidity of the majority. This means if the majority is ruining your class by not studying, give them F's, but don't hold others back with your solutions.

I think access to information and communications should be increased on campus as much as possible so students who actually know how to use the technology can use it. If a student wants to play games and goof off in class, theres a grading system to handle those students.

Re:Should not require notes

[don.g]

I certainly found I had that problem -- I'd concentrate so much on writing illegible notes that I wouldn't take any of the content in. In classes where we were given printouts of the slides, and I could annotate them where needed, I found I retained much more information from the lectures. Unfortunately, I can't claim that the correlation is significant, as lecturers for each subject all seemed to use the same technique.

Part of the problem, I think, is that lecturers like to see students doing something, and having to write out copious notes helps with that. I had a lecturer who, in previous years, had given out a coursebook with material from the course. But for some reason he decided this was a bad idea, so stopped giving them out and just wrote up all the notes on the board verbatim and expected everyone to copy them down. This made it very difficult to learn things in his lectures, even when you did have the previous years' coursebook :-)

Re:Limiting Internet Access

[insomniac8400]

You can't just block the internet all the time. The only way to fix it, is to automatically restrict wifi access to the local intranet during the times you are scheduled for class. Although it would also mean no wifi if you skipped class. Honestly I think no tech solutions are best. In one of my classes anyone with a laptop had to sit in the 2nd to back row so their screens wouldn't annoy anyone else, and a TA would sit in the back row watching them to make sure they were taking notes and not surfing the web. It worked flawlessly.

Re:Limiting Internet Access

[bcrowell]

Why should you want to limit it? This is college we're talking about. These students are paying for the priviledge of wasting thier class time. Thier tuition bought the wireless they can play Zelda during Phys 121 if they want. So long as they keep the volume down so that the student who want to pay attention (and who will end up being thier bosses later on) don't get distracted.
One strange thing about your logic is that it's all based on the supposition that the student is the one paying. At an expensive private school, it's probably Mommy and Daddy who are paying. I teach at a community college, so in my case, it's the taxpayers who are paying essentially all the cost. Why should the taxpayers subsidize people to play a MMORG?

Another problem with your logic is that you assume bandwidth is as free as the air we breathe. It's not. AFAIK, every college and university in the U.S. these days has an acceptable use policy for their network. I've had a student pornsurf while his female lab partner (a Muslim woman who wears a head scarf) sat there uncomfortably. I made the student meet with me and the dean, and it was quite interesting. My attitude had been that it was pure and simple sexual harassment, but the dean simply treated it as a violation of the AUP. (The guy had also cheated off of her exam paper.)

Finally, my feeling as a teacher is that I do have a right to ask students who are losers not to distract from the educational experience of the people who are really there to learn. It really is distracting to have this sort of thing going on. However, I structure the rules of the course so that nobody has to stay for the full 1.5-hour period if they feel they aren't learning anything. I give quizzes and collect homework during the first 5-10 minutes of class, and after that, they're free to leave without any penalty to their grade if they feel there's a more productive way to use their time.

Maybe one reason this kind of thing becomes an issue is that the standard chalk-and-talk lecture is simply a bad way to teach, but a lot of professors don't want to admit it. The solution is to use better teaching techniques --- techniques that get the students actively involved. The idea of lecturing came from centuries ago, when books were so expensive that students couldn't afford to buy them. (I mean really, really, really couldn't -- the disproportion between incomes and the cost of books was an order of magnitude worse than it is today.) So the teacher would read the book out loud, and the students would take dictation, writing down their own individual copies.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

We (yes, I'm an university professor) can't just give the majority of students F's. The students
evaluate us at the end of each course. While this is a good thing, it does
constrain the grading policy that the parent article suggests, even
though it might otherwise be reasonable and fair.

Consider that your promotion and tenure -- your entire future in the field --
is going to depend, to some small-to-moderate extent, on the evaluations
given to you by those 18-year-olds who tuned out your lecture in favor of playing Zelda.

Problem isn't always the students

[RyoShin]

I'm one of those people who always brings their laptop to class. The only classes that I don't take it to are math classes, or classes where it's not allowed (which is almost unheard of.) I even bring it to classes like Physics.

The main purpose is notes, but as the term goes on, it takes on a whole other secondary purpose: Giving me a reason to be there. Frankly, 75% of the professors I've had so far in college (I'm in my second half the junior year) are dull, read off slides, don't know what the hell they're talking about, or are incomprehensible. However, most don't tell me when tests/quizes/homework will be ahead of time, so I go to class to make sure I know. While in class, I either work ahead in the book, do homework, or browse the internet. I once played Half-Life during Chemistry.

There's no reason for me to do otherwise. Either the professors have such high curves that I don't actually need to learn the material to pass, the book gives me all the info I need so the professor is useless, or the professor is actually good and I am actually taking notes. The presence of my laptop generally has little to do with my overall grade, regardless if I use it to take notes or not, but the level of the professor has a profound effect.