The recent survey by the Princeton Review that ranks RPI as the nation’s “most connected campus” is getting the Institute a lot of positive press, and no doubt has great marketing appeal with prospective students and parents.
It is also, however, an attractive entree into an intensified dialogue on the actual impact of “connectivity” on education and the college experience as a whole. While schools such as Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Boston Univeristy, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill were among those ranked 25 or higher, it is just as significant that many schools that RPI would do well to remain competitive with did not make the top 25 list, including MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Cal Tech, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn State. If we can consider these rankings alone as indicative, it would seem just as likely that connectivity (as defined by Princeton Review) has little—maybe even an inverse—correlation with the overall quality of an institution. What gives?
The October 22 announcement in Forbes enumerates the criteria used to rank connectivity, including computer-to-student ratio, the existence of a campus-wide network and wireless access, online class-registration capability, and the availability of credit-bearing online courses (among many others). The article goes on to state that “[t]his year’s winner [RPI] brings a bit of technological nirvana to the sleepy town of Troy, N.Y. Every student is required to own a laptop, and the school offers students discounted notebooks, preloaded with appropriate software. Once equipped with the right hardware, students can get online just about everywhere, with ethernet jacks and wireless networks in classrooms, lounges and labs.” Notably, however, the availability of network or Internet connectivity specifically in classrooms was not actually among the criteria used in the survey.
Over the course of three terms as a TA at RPI (for classes on the social history and politics of IT, coincidentally), not only the advantages but also the difficulties of connectivity were demonstrated to me time and again, and while the former find their way into the headlines, the very real headaches of this “technological nirvana” are rarely discussed.
Clear-thinking specialists in instructional technology understand that it’s crucial to recognize the significant differences in communicative modality between different types of classes. In the context of RPI these very different types of classes are taught in the very same classrooms, yet my experience was that those rooms with connections (whether wired or wireless) were “uninterruptibly connected,” i.e. the spigot could not easily be shut off. Simply forbidding laptops might be an acceptable alternative, but some point out this can involve undesirable policing, and at any rate means students can’t use them for note-taking.
To assess the effects of “classroom connectivity,” three questions immediately come to mind: 1) what is the connection to be used for ideally, 2) how does it get used in fact, and 3) what are the negative effects, if any, of “uninterruptible connectivity,” particularly on classes in which it has little utility? I have heard many responses to the first question: viewing class slides or other supplements, online dictionary access, fact-checking during discussion, access to class notes on a remote server, in-class printing, and so on.
My experience is that discussion-based classes see only minor benefits from having these in-class capabilities, and while I am ignorant of sound empirical studies providing answers to question two, readers of this editorial will be all too aware that Internet-messaging, ESPN.com, and online gaming occupy a non-trivial portion of the classroom connectivity pie.
In my view, the next real innovation in classroom connectivity is the one that will help tune the technology to the specific pedagogical needs of a variety of class types, allowing it to be applied when useful without corroding classes where it is not.
That innovation might be as simple as a switch (to accompany all the other controls proliferating in classrooms) that would toggle classroom connectivity on or off. Or it could take the form of a “wireless jammer,” a portable device instructors could carry with them that would inhibit both connection to a wireless drop and inter-laptop wireless connection within 50 feet (maybe even cell phones, while we’re at it). In whatever form, “interruptibility” might be just the move needed to make connectivity a more appropriate technology.
Comments on an expanded online version of this editorial are actively solicited at http://www.rpi.edu/~denicl.
Lane DiNicola
STS GRAD
