From: David Morgan [mailto:
d.morgan@unsw.edu.au]
Sunday, March 11, 2001
Laptops Give Business Schools a Lesson in How
a Learning Tool Becomes a Distraction
Education: Campuses are cracking down on students who day-trade, surf
the Internet and chat.
By SARA SILVER, Associated Press
NEW YORK--J.T. Law is paying $30,000 a
year to attend Columbia Business School, to sit in a global
economics class and learn how quickly rising
oil prices can bring on a recession.But
he wants more . . . excitement. So he
sets up his laptop in the back row and follows the market,
buying and selling stocks online while his professor
lectures on how economies expand and
contract. Nearby, other day-trading students keep at least
one eye on their computers and the
green-and-red displays that monitor the pulse of their
favorite stocks. "If I'm not learning, I
may as well be earning," said Law, a former investment
banker who was up $100,000 before losing half of
it in last year's market plunge.The
nation's elite business schools don't like it, and some are
struggling to stop it. But coast to coast, students are
using the Internet connections built into
their state-of-the-art classrooms for their own purposes,
and they are doing it during class.Day
traders, who ride rising stocks for just a few hours to
make quick profits, are perhaps the slickest users of
desktop hookups.
Many other students simply "multi-task"
their way to an MBA. Executives-in-training pass electronic
notes to classmates in "instant message" chat
rooms, e-mail friends and family, check interview
invitations, surf the Web in different languages--and find
time to take adequate notes. One student even planned her
wedding online during class.Overflowing
with donations from corporate sponsors and wealthy alumni,
business schools invested hundreds of millions of
dollars over the last five years to build cushy lecture
halls with each desk "wired" to the university network.
Now, however, the widespread misuse of
laptops is forcing those same schools to devise ways to get
students offline during class.
Professors Discourage Using Laptops in
ClassThe business-school experience
reinforces the growing concern that unchecked use of
computers--be it in elementary schools or
graduate schools--can detract from the learning environment
as much as enhance it.Scott Carr, a
professor at UCLA, discourages his students from using
their laptops in class. During a spring presentation, Carr
found himself behind one student trading stocks and another
reading NCAA basketball scores. To stop them without
interrupting the presentation, the operations
management teacher wadded up a piece of paper and threw it
at one of their screens. "So without
seeing it was me, he turned around" and flashed an obscene
gesture, said Carr, a member of the Technology
Steering Committee at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.
"When the student saw who had thrown the paper, he
blanched, put his laptop away and elbowed his
friend." Columbia professor Ira Weiss spruced up his
accounting lectures after growing tired of the look on his
students' faces when they'd made bad trades. "Every time I
walk into class, I have competition from the World Wide
Web," he said. Without question, computer networks are
useful tools in business education. Students prepare for
class by downloading problem sets from teachers' Web sites,
analyzing earnings reports from company financial
statements and making graphs of government
economic data. Once in class, students can use spreadsheets
to test how slight changes in sales projections affect the
price of a company's stock--and its value to
potential raiders. At the University of Virginia's Darden
School, Webcast technology lets students
interact with guest speakers who can't make it to the
Charlottesville, Va., campus.But the
hallmark "B-school" experience comes from in-class
discussion of case studies of companies at critical
junctures. Students debate whether Citicorp
should offer credit cards to Asia's expanding middle class
or enumerate reasons why Pepsi shouldn't
start a price war with Coca-Cola. Professors use the
Socratic method to challenge students who often
underestimate the difficulty of doing
business in Russia, raising millions in financing or simply
building a better bicycle.UCLA's Carr,
who has held office hours in Internet chat rooms and uses
PowerPoint presentations for his own classroom
wizardry, said that for students, "having a fully wired
classroom is an unfortunate temptation [that] somehow
disengages the student from what's going on
in front of the classroom."Open laptops
block eye contact with the teacher. Noisy tapping on
keyboards annoys neighbors. Note-takers on computers
struggle to capture information in charts or graphs.
Some Classrooms Have 'Kill Switches'
In 1996, UCLA's Anderson School became
the first to fully wire its classrooms and require students
to own laptops. But last year, to restrict
class-time surfing, the school banned connecting cords in
required, core classes. It now lets each professor decide
whether and when students can plug in. The University of
North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School said giving
teachers latitude has diminished the problem,
but next year it will still install a "kill switch" so
professors can simply turn off the network.
At the behest of the student government, the University of
Virginia spent $40,000 to install little green kill buttons
at lecterns. The reason: Students were
sending computer messages to classmates, making snide
comments about class discussions.But
"students were turning the network back on and teachers
weren't noticing the little green light was on, or faculty
would forget to turn it off, so we eventually
programmed the network to leave it off" until break, said
Jeanne Liedtka, associate dean of the Darden
School. "It's made the students more comfortable speaking
in class, but it doesn't mean that some students still
aren't playing solitaire."
Last year, Columbia expanded its
integrity code to include a student promise to "use
technology in the classroom only as it is
directly relevant to the material being discussed."
Administrators say this has curbed most problems with
classroom disruption. "Having a culture that
dictates respect is much more important than having kill
switches," Associate Dean Safwan Masri said.
Indeed, classroom kill switches won't affect the latest
wireless technology, which uses radio waves or infrared
signals to link electronic devices to the
network.MIT undergraduate Jonathan
Goler goes in and out of hot stocks during management
classes at the Sloan School using a Lucent
Wavelan wireless card that links his Sony Vaio laptop to
the university network. He dreams of programming his
computer to trade while he does laps in the
pool. "I swim two hours a day, but unfortunately I can't do
anything about the market then."About
90% of the top business schools will have wireless
capability in classrooms within the next three years,
barring significant changes in technology,
said Barbara Maaskant, chief technical officer at Emory's
Goizueta Business School in Atlanta.The
University of Chicago got its first taste of misuse of
wireless connections during a fall collaborative class that
linked students via computer with professors
at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. When the presenter wasn't local,
students spent class checking their
portfolios since "they were in effect watching TV," said
Steve Stern, director of computer services.
With plans to have wireless capability by summer, Chicago
expects professors to control what's going on in the
classroom by grading on participation,
calling on students randomly, and "making their course more
compelling than whatever's on the Net," Stern
said.The swoon of dot-com stocks has
sharply diminished day-trading mania, in and out of class.
Multi-tasking, however, is still part of the
MTV Generation's culture.
Students Defend Use of Laptops
"We've grown up in the age of
information overload--it's an environment where people are
always competing for our attention, the TV,
the ads, the Internet, the games," said Spencer Lee, a
second-year student who covered the issue for Columbia
Business School's newspaper, The Bottom Line.
"We use our time the way it's best to use it, and some feel
it's a better use of their time to read the
Wall Street Journal online."B-schoolers
normally pay attention to riveting presentations--high tech
or no tech. During lulls, the laptops pop right open.
"Multi-taskers might be able to follow discussions, but
they are unlikely to be able to contribute to them," said
Joel Brockner, an organizational psychologist
in Columbia's management department.And
the brightest, bored by professors who teach to the average
learner, are the most likely to find other things to occupy
their time.
Papa Thiam, who traded alongside J.T.
Law during their first year at Columbia, was finally forced
to pay attention in Brockner's course this
fall. The class, Managerial Decisionmaking, "was exactly
the kind of class I'd normally trade through," said Thiam,
who competes in motorcycle road races during
school breaks.But Brockner's classroom
wasn't wired and besides, Thiam had lost all his play money
on plummeting tech stocks.Unlike most
required courses, Thiam found Brockner's class to be very
good, and thanks to his contributions in class, earned an
honors grade.He now thinks it's
counterproductive to give students desktop access to the
Internet."Having the gadgets took me
back to being a distracted kid," said Thiam, a native of
the Ivory Coast. "If business students don't
have the discipline not to use it, I don't expect to see
that discipline in college students and much less in high
school students."
Apologies to those who have seen this on another list
Dave
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David E. Morgan, PhD Email:
d.morgan@unsw.edu.au
School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour,
University of New South Wales,
UNSW, Sydney, 2052,
Australia.
Ph: +61 2 9385 7146 (w) +61 2 9489 1448 (h) Fax: +61 2 9662 8531
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