A Revolution in Education Clicks  Into Place
 
Forum :Join a Discussion on Technology in the Classroom
 

        By JODI WILGOREN

              WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- During his economics
              seminar the other day, Sean Leary, a freshman at
        Wake Forest University, scanned stock prices, browsed
        basketball updates from ESPN, checked his e-mail, and
        perused pictures of "beautiful girls" on
        www.acewallpapers.com in search of a new backdrop
        for his laptop computer screen.

        It seems Mr. Leary, who
        had already taken one
        economics course in the
        fall, was bored by the
        discussion of marginal
        benefit and cost. But no
        matter. This is a laptop
        classroom, where each
        student sits behind an
        open machine, sometimes
        posting answers to the
        professor's queries on a
        virtual chalkboard,
        sometimes, well, doing
        something else.

        "I haven't skipped this
        class once," noted Mr. Leary, 18. "Even if there's
        something in class that's boring, there's other stuff you
        can do."

        Wake Forest is one of more than 100 colleges and
        universities across the country where a computer is
        now required to matriculate. (Some, like Wake Forest,
        have raised tuition and mail the laptops shortly after
        acceptance letters.) Not only has this created new
        forms of in-class distraction and revolutionized campus
        communication -- e-mail is used to plan Saturday night
        outings as well as to write responses to required
        readings -- but it has begun to transform teaching itself.

        For example, Gordon McCray, a Wake Forest business
        professor, turned all of his lectures into a streaming
        video CD-ROM, essentially doubling his class time by
        forcing students to watch the lectures (or read a
        transcript) on their own. He thereby freed class time for
        group exercises. Others have students do Web research
        in class to supplement discussion or use software for
        homework and quizzes that help tailor syllabuses to
        individuals. Professors say this way they are now
        serving a broader spectrum of learning styles.

        The very hours of learning have also been extended
        beyond the classroom through online discussion groups
        -- often including experts in the field or alumni. Where
        only a handful of students typically take advantage of
        once-a-week office hours, instructors are now in
        constant contact with their students by e-mail, even in
        the wee hours.

        "It's not just added on to the old curriculum -- it's a
        whole new curriculum," said Bill Moss, a professor of
        mathematics at Clemson University in South Carolina,
        where he started a laptop project for 250 engineering
        majors this year. "You've got old guys like me who've
        been teaching for 30 years who've got to throw out
        stacks of yellow notes and start a whole new
        pedagogy."

        Arguing that computer literacy is now an essential part
        of a liberal arts education, small colleges and
        professional schools now scratch for spots on Yahoo's
        annual ranking of America's "most wired" colleges.

        The first colleges to require computers were the
        military academies, which started putting a desktop in
        every cadet's room in 1983. But the current wave began
        a decade later at the University of
        Minnesota-Crookston, an outpost of 2,464 students on
        the western edge of the state, and has erupted over the
        last five years, from Seton Hall in New Jersey to
        Sonoma State in California, from the University of
        Virginia's business school to the tiny Shepard Broad
        Law Center at Nova Southeastern University in Fort
        Lauderdale, Fla.

        Now the trend is spreading to large public institutions:
        the University of Florida in Gainesville, the University
        of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michigan State
        University have all recently approved computer
        requirements.

                              Experts estimate that 80
                              percent of college students
                              now bring a computer with
                              them to campus. Making it a
                              requirement means the cost
                              can be factored in for
                              financial aid; it also allows
                              the university to impose
        uniformity, which makes technical support much
        simpler. In most cases, students pay about $3,000 for a
        laptop fully loaded with software specially designed
        for the institution, then trade it for a new model their
        junior or senior year.

        Universities are also spending millions of dollars to
        upgrade classrooms so there are plugs and Internet
        connections at every seat -- though some are
        experimenting with wireless technology -- as well as
        laser disc players and video screens up front. There are
        added costs for expanded computer help desks,
        work-study jobs for students who provide emergency
        technical assistance in dormitories, and training for
        reluctant, old-fashioned faculty.

        "The students believe we've given them an edge as they
        go out into the marketplace," said Joseph D. Harbaugh,
        dean of the Nova law school, where students use legal
        case-management software to file their assignments and
        mock-bill their time. "This has set us apart as we go out
        into the market for students and for faculty."

        At Clemson, English classes keep their compositions in
        electronic portfolios posted on the Web. At Western
        Carolina University in the foothills of the Smoky
        Mountains, literature professors are able to use primary
        source documents in their lectures, displaying Web
        images of the handwritten notes of a minor British poet
        from an archive hundreds of miles away at Princeton
        University. In Jonathan Zittrain's class on Internet and
        Society at Harvard Law School, students respond each
        week to a question posted on the Web, and the answers
        are automatically routed to another student -- or,
        perhaps, the author of the pertinent article -- for
        comments.

        At Oberlin College in Ohio, a class on the industrial
        revolution is using university-owned laptops kept
        locked in a newly wired classroom. One day they
        browse an online archive of correspondence between
        spouses in 19th-century Pennsylvania, another they
        analyze data from the 1870 census in Cleveland.

        "We're experiencing something of the same sense of
        upheaval," said Gary Kornblith, the professor, aware of
        the irony of his technique and his topic. "I see a lot of
        parallels, and I hope my students will see parallels."

        Here at Wake Forest, where the class of 2000 was the
        first to receive laptops, only a handful of professors
        regularly use computers in the classroom, but nearly all
        of them incorporate technology into their teaching.

        Students in Patricia Dixon's Musical
        Protest in the Americas class
        consulted Pete Seeger himself in an
        online chat (and later corrected the
        professor by supplying Mr. Seeger's
        eyewitness view of events).

        Rick Matthews, chairman of the
        physics department, said a
        circuit-maker program has elevated
        his electronics class. Before, students would draw a
        circuit, he would find a couple of mistakes -- probably
        miss one or two -- and give the paper, say, an 82. Now,
        students can test the circuit to see whether current
        would actually flow; everyone gets a zero or 100,
        because no one turns the assignment in until it works.

        "The homework before wasn't teaching them anything --
        it was merely documenting what they knew and didn't
        know," he said. "Now, they're putting four times as
        much time in as they did before, they're enjoying the
        homework more, learning 50 percent more electronics."

        David G. Brown spearheaded Wake Forest's computer
        initiative while he was provost, and now is dean of the
        university's International Center for Computer
        Enhanced Learning. Dr. Brown, an economist, is a
        surprising spokesman for e-education: his computer
        experience five years ago was limited to typing on a
        word processor. Now, his syllabus is an interactive
        document featuring color photographs of his students,
        his "textbook" is electronic, and he grades essays
        online.

        "The computer is like the library," said Dr. Brown,
        who uses laptops every day in class, having students
        type answers into a chat room rather than raise hands,
        or prepare an instant presentation doing Web research.
        "It's an intellectual resource. If you don't have it, you've
        got to dumb down your course, you've got to dumb
        down your research."

        There are, of course, potential pitfalls.

        There is the astronomy professor at Wake Forest who
        posted his lectures on the Web -- so most people
        stopped showing up for class. And there are the
        students at Columbia University School of Business
        who spend their time in class trading stocks --
        occasionally interrupting the lecture with whoops of
        joy or sighs of pain over their trades. And there is the
        incessant clicking on campuses everywhere as students
        take notes on their machines or use them to write
        exams.

        "It can't make up for a good teacher," said Heath
        Baumgarten, 20, a Wake Forest junior from Freeport,
        Me. "It has changed the social body. It's harder to meet
        people. A lot of people are inside a lot now."

        As the first laptop class graduates from Wake Forest
        this spring, Mr. Baumgarten said he, for one, plans to
        leave his computer behind.