Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities

Technology to the Rescue?

100 Iam sitting on an Amtrak train trying to finish reading a novel, but I cannot concentrate because I am surrounded by people speaking—no, yelling— into their cellphones. Right behind me is a young college student who has two papers due the next day, one in history and one in English. I know this because she has called at least five different people to talk about how much work she has to do and how she will never finish it in time. I want to turn around and suggest to her that if she just got off the phone, she could start her work, but I do not want to intrude in her personal space. The next day as I am walking out of class, I see hundreds of students leave a lecture class, and almost all of them immediately take out their cellphones or their iPods. They look like some alien army that needs to be hooked into a secret energy source. When I later ask my students why so many students get on their cellphones right after class, they tell me that they want to reconnect with friends or just “check in.” I then ask them what they think students did after class back in the old days—say ten years ago—when everyone did not have portable phones. Students look very confused when I pose this question, as if I was asking them how people would walk around without gravity. One student once sheepishly raised his hand and said that back in the day, everyone must have run to pay phones. This response made me laugh, and everyone else laughed nervously, until another student raised her hand and said, “People used to smoke after class, so at least now, we are, like, a lot healthier.” This response threw me off because I had never thought about this possibility, but still I was not 8 technology to the Rescue? tECHnology to tHE RESCUE? 101 satisfied. I asked them again, “What do you think people could do after a class instead of texting a friend or listening to music?” After a prolonged silence, a student replied, “You want us to say that the students talked about the class, don’t you?” I responded that I was hoping that someone might mention that possibility, but that there are other things people could do, like reflect on their own lives or just look at nature. This final comment prompted a series of confused looks; students just don’t seem to understand why someone would simply want to think or look. Some of my students tell me that they feel they are addicted to technologies , and many students admit that between each class, they check their Facebook pages to see if they have received any new postings. Students report how freaked out they were when they lost their cellphones, or explain that their essay is late because their printer would not work. It appears that we are really entering into a new digital age, and college students today do have a very different ways of working and communicating. The question, then, is how universities should adapt to these changes, and how new technologies can make education more effective. The “Smart” Classroom Many universities have responded to these technological innovations by wiring their campuses and making the Web free and accessible from all locations. In fact, the push for “smart” classrooms has cost schools a tremendous amount of money, and rarely do administrators or faculty ask if this money is well spent or what effects these technologies will have on student learning.1 In order to examine the question of whether new computer technologies actually promote or prevent education at research universities, I decided to teach all of my courses in networked classrooms. In fact, I helped to design a new high-tech classroom, and although it was never built, this experience taught me a lot about why universities often spend so much and get so little back for their money in this area. The first striking thing about teaching in a networked classroom, where each student is sitting behind a computer monitor, is that you never know what the students are actually doing. Not only do the computer screens often block their faces, but the Internet gives the students the opportunity to look like they are working while they are really playing games, checking 102 WHy PUBlIC HIgHER EDUCAtIon...