Laptops Give Business Schools a Lesson in How a Learning Tool Becomes a Distraction
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 Class
The 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.”
