When I was arranging for my Social Web 2.0 class at the UW I asked for a computer lab. I was met with surprise and was advised against letting students go online during my class. I have been attending conferences with laptop enabled sessions for a couple of years now so I was a little surprised myself. My goal, since it was a social technology class, was to ensure my students used them all.
It’s been going very well, so far. I told my students to bring their laptops to class. and I had them create a chat room for inclass backchanneling discussion. I created a class mailing list, and I reguraly email them updates to assignments. They post their reading commentaries as blogs in Vox. They send me presentations to review in email. Just yesterday, we were sending files back and forth in class via email that were then integretated into the class discussion using the projector.
I had “Brady Forrest”http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/ of O’Reilly come to give a guest presentation to the class. I sat behind one of the students to surreptitiously observe her behavior during the discussion. She wasn’t surfing around aimlessly. Rather, each web site Brady mentioned she immediately looked up. Her surfing behavior was a continuous supplement to what she was hearing during the conversation.
Yesterday, I asked the class what did they think. On the whole, they found the experience positive, indicating that the chat room enabled them to ask each other for explication of terms I was using during lectures, and to look up web sites as I mentioned them. They did report however that they did feel that their attention was split: transferring back and forth between the topic of the lecture and their laptop screen. This split attention reduced their inclination towards jumping into discussions.
My expectation is that we all need to learn both the etiquette and the self-regulation required to handle the multiple channels of a wi-fi enabled class room. However, my observation is that overall it increases student engagement in the topic. Although I am receiving less direct attention during lectures, on average more of the students’ brain cells are firing over the course of the class.
