[IP] The Wireless Future -- Professors Vie With Web for Class's Attention

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff@iconia.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 10:51:55 +0100
To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: The Wireless Future -- Professors Vie With Web for Class's
Attention

Professors Vie With Web for Class's Attention
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The New York Times

Universities are rushing toward a wireless future, installing networks that
let students and the faculty surf the Internet from laptop computers in the
classroom, in the library or by those ponds that always seem to show up on
the cover of the campus brochure.

But professors say the technology poses a growing challenge for them:
retaining their students' attention.

In a classroom at American University in Washington on a recent afternoon,
the benefits and drawbacks of the new wireless world were on display. From
the back row of an amphitheater classroom, more than a dozen laptop screens
were visible. As Prof. Jay Mallek lectured graduate students on the finer
points of creating and reading an office budget, many students went online
to Blackboard.com, a Web site that stores course materials, and grabbed the
day's handouts from the ether.

But just as many students were off surfing. A young man looked at sports
photos while a woman checked out baby photos that just arrived in her
e-mailbox.

--snip--

One professor at a law school in Texas became so upset by the level of
student distraction in 2001 that he took a ladder to school, climbed up to
reach the wireless transmitter in his classroom ? and disconnected it. The
students protested. The administration told him to plug it back in. But the
point was made, he said, and he regained the attention of the class.

In 2002, he told his students that they could not use laptops in his class
at all, even for taking notes.

"It has made an enormously positive difference to shut those computers off,"
he said.

--snip--

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/technology/02WIRE.html?pagewanted=all

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geoff.goodfellow@iconia.com * Prague - CZ * telephone +420 603 706 558
"success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html
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