There's article in the daily Chronicle of Higher Education Online at:
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i02/02a04301.htm
that will be in the September 7th paper form of the periodical.
CUTTING THE POWER
Business Schools, Fed Up With Internet Use During Classes, Force Students to
Log Off
By KATHERINE S. MANGAN
Excerpts include:
For years, business schools have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars
into wiring their classrooms, handing out laptops, and making it easy for
students to log on to the Internet. Now many schools are spending thousands
more to make students log off.
The Internet has become a nuisance in many classrooms, where students are
tuning out their professors while they send e-mail messages, check company
Web sites, trade stocks, and otherwise multitask their way through their
M.B.A.'s.
Schools are fighting back with electronic "kill switches" that allow a
professor to shut down students' Internet access while class is in session.
And kill switches aren't the only weapon in professors' arsenals. In some
classrooms, a student who is sending a snide e-mail message to a classmate
might find, to his horror, that the professor has captured the contents of
the message and projected it on a screen for the entire class to read.
Critics, including many students, say they don't need their professors
acting as Big Brother.
....
Others counter that the entire class suffers when distracted students don't
participate in discussions. That's particularly true at a place like Darden,
where much of the class time is devoted to student discussions of case
studies.
.....
Elliott N. Weiss, Darden's associate dean for M.B.A. education, initially
resisted the idea of kill switches, which were installed in classrooms three
years ago. "But I came to realize that having Internet access was like
placing a big bowl of candy in front of students," he says. "They'd eat,
whether they were hungry or not."
The problem isn't confined to M.B.A. programs. A Cornell University study of
80 undergraduate students published earlier this year found that
unrestricted access to the Internet was a mixed blessing. Although it
enhanced learning for some students, it distracted others, and may have hurt
their grades (The Chronicle, April 20). Other colleges and universities that
have installed kill switches in their business schools include Bentley
College, Babson College, and the University of Michigan.
.....
Keeping students off the Internet was the last thing Darden officials had in
mind when, in the mid-'90s, they wired all of the school's M.B.A. classrooms
and required students to own laptop computers.
Most had underestimated the Internet's addictive powers. Many professors
initially asked offending students to log off at the beginning of class.
When that didn't work, Darden installed kill switches in each of the M.B.A.
classrooms. The switches, which were mounted on the classroom wall, in full
view of the students, allowed the professor to shut down Internet access. A
green light meant the network was on.
"At first, the teacher would turn the system off, and when he wasn't
looking, students would turn it back on," says Mr. Giaramita. The switches
were moved to hidden locations inside classroom closets.
"If students wanted it on badly enough, they'd pull the old 'I have to hang
up my coat' routine" and duck into the closet, says James M. Fink, who
received his M.B.A. in May. "That would be their cover for flipping the
switch back on."
While it might seem like a cat-and-mouse game, Mr. Fink insists students
have some valid educational reasons for logging on to the Internet during
class. "When we had guest speakers, I would have liked to log on to Yahoo
Finance and get some background on the stocks they were talking about so
that I could challenge them intelligently," he says. "I'd have all the data
in front of me."
....
Meanwhile, on other campuses, officials have been debating the pros and cons
of policing Internet use during class.
Officials at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill found that it could be expensive and difficult.
"We've had requests from faculty who want to turn off networking in
classrooms because students are sending e-mail, chatting online, and not
paying attention," says Richard Larsen, associate director of information
technology. "But because of the way our system is set up, we'd have to go in
manually and turn off each port, which would be extremely time-consuming.
Then, someone would have to remember to go through and turn them all back
on."
One Kenan-Flagler faculty member who begins her classes by telling students
to disconnect from the outside world says a kill switch would make her life
easier. "I'd propose calling it an 'enabling switch' and having its default
be off," says Mabel Miguel, an adjunct associate professor of management.
Although most students cooperate when she asks them to stay off the
Internet, a few ignore her, she says. "Some students say it's distracting to
see a colleague in front cruising or answering e-mail, but I refuse to
police the matter further," she adds.
Bentley College, which has required all undergraduates to own laptops since
1985, is pulling out all the stops to keep all its students --
undergraduates as well as graduate business students -- from zoning out in
cyberspace. The college has spent about $60,000 developing software and
hardware to limit Internet access. That's still just a fraction of the
approximately $1-million annual budget for academic technology, says Phillip
G. Knutel, Bentley's director of academic technology.
In some classrooms, a professor who suspects that the student in seat A21 is
sending an e-mail message about the lecture to his friend in C24 can capture
the message on his own computer, then display it on a large screen for the
class to see.
The system is controlled by a PC at the instructor's podium, but it only
works with computers permanently installed in the classrooms, not with
students' laptops. Intercepting messages isn't the system's only purpose --
although for frustrated professors, it's probably the most fun. Professors
can also use the system to help a student who is having trouble with an
assignment by projecting the screen image from the student's computer for
the whole class to see.
The school has a separate network-based system that can reach both installed
PCs and students' laptops. That system allows a professor to control all of
the ports in the classroom with the click of a mouse. Rather than a single
kill switch that shuts off Internet access entirely, Bentley professors see
a menu of four choices on the computer at the front of the classroom when
they boot it up.
They can allow students access to the Internet, but not to their college
e-mail accounts, shut off access to both, or throw the switch on all
electronic distractions, including Bentley's intranet. The system sends a
command to a central server to reset all of the ports in the classroom. It
also has built-in safeguards to ensure that students can't override the
commands.
"So far, we're a step ahead of them," says Mr. Knutel.
Kill switches aren't necessary at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton
School, because classrooms aren't wired for laptop use. School officials
took some flak for not jumping on the technology bandwagon in the early
1990s. Now that wired schools are struggling to keep students offline, some
Wharton officials are feeling vindicated.
"We never wanted technology to get in the way of the relationship between
the student and the faculty member," says Gerry McCartney, associate dean
for computing and information technology.
Wharton officials decided to take the lower-tech route after visiting some
highly wired business schools where laptops seemed to provide more
distraction than instruction. At one prominent business school, which Mr.
McCartney declined to identify, "the entire back row was playing solitaire.
It didn't seem to faze the dean at all," he says.
Nevertheless, he scoffs at the idea that students need to be kept in line by
professors with their fingers poised over a kill switch. "I have no sympathy
for that," Mr. McCartney says. "These are adults. What is this? 'I'm taking
your ball away from you and I'll give it back to you when school's over'?
Wasn't that third grade?"
.....
Edward Adams, director of computing services for the University of Michigan
Business School, says trying to keep students off the Internet is pointless
when more and more students are going wireless. Hand-held devices like Palm
VII have built-in, wireless Internet connections.
His assessment? "It's a dead end. There's nothing you can do to prevent a
student from getting on the Internet."