Classrooms with Wi-Fi: A Challenge for Teacher Control and a Revolution in Learning

Abstract

WI-FI TECHNOLOGIES WILL soon permeate classrooms in schools and colleges just as they have started to enter business conference rooms. When they do, they will raise issues of stewardship and control for teachers. How can a teacher assert the necessary and traditional control over classroom proceedings to remain effective? How can a teacher retain focus and discipline in the classroom when students multitask with ease? Can the technologies be used for educational benefits, e.g., through augmenting subject matter with instant research or through greater participation? This article will try to address some of the behavioral issues that emerge when Wi-Fi access becomes commonplace in the classroom. Graduate seminar rooms and lecture halls are equipped, or can be readily furnished, with projectors, screens and whiteboards, while phone lines typically link these rooms to the outside world, both for voice and dial-up data services. However, Wi-Fi in such settings is new and growing, and the behaviors of business people in these settings offer insights into what can be expected in the classroom. Already, a number of colleges have some form of wireless connectivity on campus, including Dartmouth College and Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. In secondary education, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative is introducing laptops for all 17,000 of the state's seventh-graders as an experiment this fall. In addition, many other school districts nationwide are implementing smaller wireless programs. As laptop use spreads among students, its use will extend outside of the classroom and into places such as bookstore cafes, lounges and homes. The technologies clearly represent an intervention in the classroom and a pedagogical challenge. Classroom etiquette may change; and learning potential may increase through healthy, intraclassroom, nondisruptive communications, as well as through the use of the Internet's timely, global resources. Blending of Revolutions in the Classroom About seven years ago I witnessed the combined wireless and portable Internet revolutions. Auctions of PCS (personal communications services) frequency by the Federal Communications Commission had launched the digital wireless voice revolution, and the Mosaic browser had launched the Internet revolution. I concluded that student and teacher behavior in Wi-Fi-enhanced classrooms would materially change, because there would be new options for interaction between: * Students among themselves; * Students with their teachers; * Students with outsiders; and * Students and teachers with the Internet. These new options would prove to be beneficial to the class at times and disadvantageous to the class at other times. Regardless, I concluded that the of people outside of the classroom and the variety of knowledge on the Internet would inevitably permeate the classroom even while in session. The principal argument of this paper is that the coexistence and interworking of several factors in the classroom's limited space is central to the understanding of new behaviors, not any technologies per se. The presence in a context, or agglomeration, principally determines behavioral change. Therefore, you have to take into account the availability of laptops in critical numbers, their ability to network with each other and the Internet, and their convenient wireless use. Also, you have to consider the topology of the room and the interplay of these technologies with the existing technologies, such as a projector or whiteboard. In classrooms today, the whiteboard and the projector live an uneasy coexistence. When the two are on the same wall, and the projection screen has to move up before the whiteboard can be used, a clumsy procedure results. Moving the projector screen to the side or having the whiteboard moved to other walls can redress this issue. …