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."

Comments

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.

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

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 :-)