In The Mark, a Canadian online forum, yet another professor — this one at the University of Ottawa — states the obvious.
After almost 10 years of teaching undergraduates, I’m through with the internet, at least in my classrooms. No more will I allow students to use laptops or other electronic devices in my classes. In the new attention economy of an always-on, everywhere-available wireless internet, I admit defeat. I cannot compete against the seductive spectacles offered by 1.7 billion internet users. I’m pulling the plug on the wireless classroom.
… [Students are] utterly addicted to the net, largely incapable of exercising discipline over their media use, and extremely uncomfortable at the thought of being offline for a 90-minute lecture.
A simple thought experiment should have made it clear to university IT departments that installing wireless internet in all classrooms without so much as an off switch was inviting trouble. Imagine giving all students a portable television to bring with them to class. Now connect a telephone and a typewriter to the TV. Throw in every available cable channel in the known universe. Add a database of most modern music and movies. Include direct lines to all of their friends, all of their classmates, and 1.7 billion strangers.
… Professors cannot police the laptop use of 60, 80, 200 students or more (nor should they be expected to). Education is not a problem to which technology is the solution…
April 17th, 2010 at 8:46AM
There is a solution to this problem. At a certain French university, any person affiliated with the university (staff or student) can access WiFi, but, for fear that strangers might walk on campus to get free access and, I don’t know, engage in illegal p2p trafficking, they require authentication – and the method for authenticating is complex to set up and tends not to work for most users. I for instance know of a place where you can set up WiFi on certain versions of Windows, and on Linux if you are resourceful enough, but not on MacOS.
The consequence is that hardly anybody, including professors, can connect. And the professors who know how to connect do not spill the beans.
April 17th, 2010 at 8:56AM
Interesting, DM!
April 17th, 2010 at 2:26PM
Except, DM, the students will just use their own WiFi.
If there’s a tower nearby (and there usually is), more of them will just start using their personal accounts.
April 17th, 2010 at 9:30PM
For three years I had a classroom with an exposed router, *outside* a wiring closet in a drop ceiling. I ran a long extension cord from the router to the electric outlet next to my desk. Anytime I wanted, I could cut electric power to the router, eliminating access to the intertubes. It was heaven. And the students never caught on: they groused to me about the frequent outages of “our internet”.
April 17th, 2010 at 9:55PM
Townsend: Funny!
April 19th, 2010 at 12:34AM
How will the students who are, as Professor Strangelove puts it, “largely incapable of exercising discipline over their media use” ever keep a white-collar job? Almost all such jobs will require access to a computer and to the Internet.
Do these students also need to wear muzzles lest they suddenly shout inappropriate comments during lectures? Are they leashed to their seats to keep them from running up and down the auditorium stairs chasing a laser-pointer dot? Do they begin to whine if left unfed for half an hour? Do they intermittently wet themselves?
If students don’t learn to pay attention and do work even in the presence of an Internet connection and access to University Diaries or whatever it is they’re reading during class, they will surely be fired soon from any college-graduate–level job.
April 19th, 2010 at 7:23AM
@Cassandra: The lecture rooms are far away enough from the dorms that they cannot set up WiFi from there, and French universities don’t have towers.
WiFi access in the classroom has some uses. For some classes, it’s nice to be able to access applications that do not reside on the professor’s laptop. It’s also nice when you get a question and you wish to provide a reference, but you don’t know the exact reference off the top of your head, to be able to do a 5-second Google to get the precise title and publication date.
April 19th, 2010 at 7:30AM
The best use of networked classrooms is for lab classes. In programming classes, you typically need to access documentation. Knowing how to navigate documentation quickly is actually a skill needed for programming. Nowadays, much documentation is online.
I’d even go as far as to say that knowing how to Google if somebody has already had your exact technical problem is an important skill. (Face it, a lot of problems in practical computing are problems with buggy software and unclear documentation, so it’s important to check whether people have stumbled on the same issue beforehands.)
We no longer hand out programming assignments on sheets of paper.
Instead, the students view a Web page, and they can hand the assignment through the page itself. This allows professors to receive the work they have to review or grade offline – which is important especially for part-time staff whose lab is off-campus.
In my experience, during lab classes, off-topic usage of the Internet is limited. Maybe this is because the prof and assistants navigate through the classroom. Maybe it is also because there is limited time to do the work, so any time used for off-topic stuff is time not spent on actual work.
Now, this is about programming classes. For theory classes… not so much usage. The Internet is very useful though off-class for finding documentation on specific topics, like “what is the complexity of the decision problem for quantifier-free linear integer arithmetic?”.
April 19th, 2010 at 10:10AM
@Dom:
I think that’s why a lot of businesses use “net nanny” software, which sounds an alarm when “non business reason” use of the Internet is going on. And also why such a big deal is made of things like Cyber Monday and how productivity ‘slows down’ during March Madness and such.
I like Townsend’s idea though; it amuses me that the students never twigged to the fact that he was the one cutting the access.