Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I think having wireless on campus is great now, but damn, if I'd had Internet access in lectures, I never would have graduated.

Certainly typing is faster than writing. And it is far easier to exchange notes because there are no penmanship issues. But that doesn't explain how generations of students managed to get by before today.

The potential for abuse and distraction are too high; I see it now, being a middle-aged (shudder) grad student. If we need to coddle the kiddies to keep them interested in lecture, then something is seriously wrong and offering WiFi isn't going to fix the problem.

Calculators in math classes are one thing. Laptops are entirely different and so far off the ranch that you have to wonder what the UCB administration is thinking when this even comes up for consideration, IMHO.

D

Use it or lose us. Those computer projectors often don't project images at the same quality you get on the computer screen. We can linkto your lecture presentation and follow details of the pictures better on our own screens. IF you do this you can minimize the tapping.

Wireless-- screw that, we have wireless and each seat in EVERY room has a high speed data port. I wish I were mature enough to handle it. Thank god I record all of my classes and listen to them on the bike, in the car...

Is there demand from professors? As I can see it, there are a number of collaborative tools that could be creatively applied in instruction, although I'm not sure if they really apply particularly to large lecture halls over small, nor are they particularly useful unless everyone having a WiFi-enabled laptop with appropriate software is a requirement for the class (and I thought books/supplies were expensive when I was in school!).

Is this quote part of a larger piece? Can we get a link with more context for the recommendation?

And I thought you were a modern kind of guy. We had our own diversions and somehow still managed to learn. I took econometrics in graduate school in a classroom with a large fireplace that we used to keep stoked. The class was on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 4 to 6 p.m. and during the winter it was hard not to be mesmerized by the flames as the sun went down early rather than talk about the marginal anything.

Besides, doesn't a market analysis of this situation point to the need for the instructor to work harder to hold her or his students' interests rather than having regulations force the students to pay attention?

I'm currently a student at Columbia's School of Journalism, where our main lecture hall, like most of the building, is equipped with wireless, and I occaisionally take my laptop in there. I'm also an alumna of Berkeley, AB Phyiscs 2000, so I am quite familiar with the large lecture halls Professor DeLong works in.

Bakho makes extremely good points. Besides that, on several occasions I or classmates of mine have corrected a professor or answered a Professor's "oops, does anyone know when this happened?" type query with the aid of our wireless connection. Lectures and speeches can be blogged more efficiently. In the social sciences real-time news events that affect the subject matter of the class can be accessed, and in the sciences students can follow along while a Professor goes through a genomic or astronomical database, for example.

Finally, I'm convinced that a little bit of distraction can be better for a boring lecturer than no distraction. When I look back on my undergraduate career at the afternoon lectures with boring professors, I see that I stayed awake more in the classes where I had friends to pass notes to--and years later, I remember more of the class material. In the classes where nothing was distracting me, I usually just passed out. A person is unlikely to pass out from boredom with a wireless connection, and some absorbtion is better than none.

Finally, we already have plenty of distractions. Instant messaging pagers and cellphones, infrared-equipped calculators, gameboys, ipods with the headphones cleverly snaked through a hoody, etc. I think the potential benefits of this outweigh the additional threat of distraction.

I taught at UC Berkeley for 16 years, and was a student there, undergrad and grad, for 13 years. My last couple of years teaching at Cal were in Mass Comm, and I had several lecture classes in that period in rooms with wireless access. I was happy to have it. I know perfectly well from my days sitting in the back of those lecture halls as an undergrad that if a student is bored by a lecture, the Daily Cal is always within reach. The technology does not create boredom, the teacher creates boredom.

Steven Rubio usurped my comment.

Poor old Professor Swann sometimes had to shout to make himself heard over the rustling of a Wheeler-Auditorium-full of Daily Cals.

Swann was a Tenured Lecturer, or some such, in the '70s who taught Econ 1 off-sequence ("spring") for the flakey (ie PEIS) students like me who missed Richard Sutch's highly-regarded fall-quarter offering.

(Years later one of the TAs told me that they used to push Swann out onto the stage with the encouraging advice not to worry about what he said, they would patch things up in section. I don't recall newspaper-rustling in section. I do remember my TA writing down a sufficient set of equations to determine a general equilibrium; that was sufficiently (and necessarily?) cool to turn me into an Econ/PEIS double-major...)

To me, the primary gain would be the ability of students to download and run models during the class, and to make use of symbolic algebra applications like Mathematica in real time. OK, so they are going to be surfing the net for dates and blogs, but so what and I can still chalk up a metaphorical eraser and toss it at them

Its an interesting issue, at Northwestern a number of the professors have started prohibiting the surfing of the web or checking email during class, but still allow computers for notes or working with the same spreadsheets as the professor. It might be best to provide the professor a way to turn off the wireless access if it's not needed during a class. That would keep it from being abused, but it might be hard to keep some of the wireless access from other rooms from bleeding into the others. I like having access but, it can be very attractive to check your email if the class gets dull...

Give the prof three settings: Off, Internal only, and Wide open.

Off turns off the whole network.

Internal only lets the students connect to the prof's computer, and each other, but not to the campus at large or the internet.

Wide open - well, the sky's the limit.

Lets the professor tune for the expectations they have of their class. Choice is good.

Hi, Brad.

As you may know, many of our evening and weekend classes are videotaped and then streamed so that students missing the class can see them. The camera is set in the back of the classroom and set to a wide angle, in order to capture as much of the class as possible. As a side effect, the camera shows what is on the computer screens of the students' laptops. As part of the teaching improvement plan, these tapes are made available to the faculty for their perusal.

So, after having seen many of these tapes, I can divide the students' use of the computer in the classroom into a few classes (with proportion of use in parenthesis):

Writing class notes, using Excel to make calculations when the class is at the point where some are needed, checking the web when I make a reference to a specific page. (5%)

Working on PPT slides for other classes or their jobs, using Excel to make computations when none are required (that is for other classes or for their jobs), write long Word documents that look suspiciously like final papers or reports for other classes. (10%)

Browsing the web while I talk about statistics or game theory or class is otherwise proceeding in a direction that does not require the web (50%)

Email, chat room activities, and IM (35%)

I once sat in another instructor's class to observe, and I sat next to a student that spent all class time in a four way IM with other students in the same class. The topic was the class, though: they exchanged comments on the instructor choice of clothes, their opinions of their classmates' answers, the layout of the room. Everything but the actual material being covered.

At least they are more discreet than the students who used to read the newspaper cafe-style when I was a student (in the XVIII century, it seems like).

Jose

Admit it! You're just worried about getting Googled real time by your students.

Your econ students are rational utility maximizers and so giving them more choices can only increase their utility. Of course this is a good idea.

(It had to be said. Everyone knows it had to be said. The only mystery is why nobody else said it first.)

Okay, let me get this off my chest: when I was an undergraduate lo so many years ago I never was aware if the lecture was "boring" or not. In fact, I don't even remember thinking about the entertainment quality of the lecture.

You see, I figured it was my job to learn the material and I was concerned about what content I was getting. This idea seemed to have been common in "those olden days." Of course, maybe I was just out of it.

In fact, the very best learning time I had in class was with someone I know--in retrospect--must have been very boring: he came in, sat down, and then proceeded to read from 1,000-year-old lecture note in a monotone. But the material he provided was so good I just lapped it up. And took another class from him.

I feel better now...Back to my rocking chair on the porch at the retirement home. You young wippersnappers don't know what learning is...

I'm a law student at the University of Michigan and we have wireless in most classrooms and laptop use in class is pretty widespread. I find that in classes that are well taught I do not use it or use it sparingly, in classes that are poorly taught I use it when bored pretty extensively. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so because were it not for internet access I'd probably go to class with less frequency and just rely on commercial outlines and other supplements to get me through. This allows me to get other things done such as search for a summer sublet, register for classes, etc. while still being around to pick up on any worthwhile points. Luckily, most of my professors are pretty good so it's usually not an issue.

This thread is an example of why I read this blog. My mind has been changed, esp. by Thane Walkup's argument.

D

In a related conversation on my blog ( http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/archives/000144.html ), someone suggested reading

http://www.hci.cornell.edu/LabArticles/Multitasking_Hembrooke.pdf

which actually (gosh!) put this to the test.

Students surfing the net do worse then students paying attention. Students surfing the net for relateed work do only slightly worse that students with their laptops closed. (In other words: the damage can be contained, but is still substantial.)

Brad,
Here is one practical use for the wireless connection: I am told that in some classes at Harvard Law School, students can indicate anonymously in real-time whether they are comprehending the class material. The lecturer gets an instantaneous measure of average student comprehension and can adjust the delivery or explicitly seek out the nature of the confusion.

There is one potential problem in that students surfing, or playing movies on their screens, can distract others seated behind them.

But students have been zoning out since the beginning of time, and I have to admit that one of the reasons I bring a pad to meetings (let's hope none of my colleagues sees this) is so I can draft a letter or plan a class if I get bored. So it's hard to object to my students having access to new technologies of distraction, and it's up to them to decide if they want to follow or not. The question I'd ask about the Cornell study (which I haven't read) is what causes what -- would the surfing students simply be daydreaming if you took their computers away.

More broadly though we may want to reassess the value of "seat time" in planning classes. If the class is pure lecture, must we compel students to assemble at the same time and same place to hear it? On the other hand, as several folks note, if *everyone* has a networked computer there are all kinds of cool interactive things you can do, but that may mean radically rethinking your pedagogy and devoting a lot of time to setting that kind of class up.

WiFi is a tool that offers opportunity for better or worse. Since compelling arguments for how achievement can be improved by this tool have been presented here the question becomes should the tool be denied those who will put it to good use because others will misuse it?

Here in Japan, students already use cell phones to message each other, thus skipping the step of 'gee this will help students study' and going right to the 'misuse' phase. Many teachers are much happier that their lectures are quieter...

You don't have to give them the capability. Laptops with Wi-Fi cards can already create "ad hoc" or "computer to computer" networks over which they can IM or (if they all use a Mac) take real-time collaborative notes in the same document using SubEthaEdit. This stuff is very easy on a Mac but Windows isn't far behind.

I am a law student where wi-fi is present. I notice mainly email and card games. I had to move once because Tetris in front of me was too tempting for my eyes. I just bring my pad of papper to class.

I think a lot of students are only looking for the "black letter law"; just what they need for the test. Whenever the professor says anything that actually needs to be known latter, people switch over to their word programs and the clatter of typing is heard.

Many people in comments have spoken about how freedom should be given to students, sometimes less freedom is what is in the students best interests.

Like putting the bag of potato chips away so you don't eat any more.

"The project was designed to incorporate wireless technology into large classrooms to address the 'chronic problems' of large lecture classes--impersonality, isolation, and difficulties in engaging students intellectually."

Er, how is a method of communication that discourages face-to-face conversations and restricts one to sending text messages (and maybe the occasional picture or two) going to combat "impersonality" and "isolation"?

As for wireless communication's fostering intellectual growth, let me give a summary of the most common cellular phone call (overheard on buses everywhere) in Bob Newhart style:

"Hi. Where are you?"

"I'm on a bus downtown. Whatcha doing?"

"Nothing much. You busy tonight?"

"Oh, OK. See you later."

(Repeat as necessary using different phone numbers.)

Of course this is a parody but not far off the mark. I've also watched the kids of one of my best friends engage their pals in instant-messenging conversations: the average sentence length is perhaps three words.

Of course any medium of communication can be used for good or ill, but what that's got to do with _teaching_? What is a lecturer going to do with this wonderful technology, conference-call his students? send wake-up messages through AIM ("Mr. Tomlinson, sit up straight and take notes!")? If it's a question of _physical_ distance between the lecturer and a seat in the nosebleed section of a vast lecture hall, why not just install a P. A. system? Or (gasp) make classes smaller?

I don't think anyone anywhere actually needs wireless access. Millions of people learn, work, and function perfectly happily without it. But if you've got ADD, perhaps ten videos and IM channels are what you need to keep from flipping out in a lecture.

What the schools should really do is to have webcams in every room and provide the students with an in room DVR that can record all the student's class lectures. This would benefit everyone by keeping tuned out students away from class, providing back up for review of material and also as a QC check on the professor's lectures.

Also bar cellphones and laptops from class. Honestly all the students speaking here aren't getting that much from their lectures anyway if they need all these gadgets to be "better" students.

Most of you will have to show up for work based on someone's schedule and not what you would like, so get used to it now.

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Nil homini certum est - Nothing is certain for man. (Ovid)

Parva leves capiunt animas - Small things occupy light minds (small things amuse small minds)

Ultima ratio regum - The final argument of kings. (Inscription on French canons in the times of Louis XIV.)

Pars maior lacrimas ridet et intus habet - You smile at your tears but have them in your heart. (Martialis)

Poor old Professor Swann sometimes had to shout to make himself heard over the rustling of a Wheeler-Auditorium-full of Daily Cals.

Swann was a Tenured Lecturer, or some such, in the '70s who taught Econ 1 off-sequence ("spring") for the flakey (ie PEIS) students like me who missed Richard Sutch's highly-regarded fall-quarter offering.

Intelligenti pauca - Few words suffice for he who understands

Res firma mitescere nescit - A firm resolve does not know how to weaken