Universities Try Out New Digital Devices

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Back To School Tech

• Universities Try Out New Digital Devices
• Slide Show: Taking Technology to College
• Cell Phones Make Headway in Education
• Students Will Help Save Apple
• Video: Laptops and Cell Phones for Students

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For college administrators and faculty members who grew up before the Internet, keeping pace can be a challenge. "I had a student who said he thought e-mail was really old-school. He mostly used Facebook to communicate with his friends," Rogerson says. Those same administrators and professors are quickly creating their own Facebook accounts, joining the students (whose addiction to technology they'll never be able to beat).

Jen Golbeck, an assistant professor of information at the University of Maryland in College Park uses Facebook to interact with students in all her classes. Faculty are also organizing their own Facebook groups at such schools as Columbia University in New York, or organizing students according to major, at such places as the Economics Dept. at Georgetown University.

Other Webs

But adapting the university to the tech needs of Generation Y takes more than giving Flips to freshmen and befriending students on a social network.

More than 200 universities—from Brown University in Providence to Washington State University in Pullman—are part of a consortium connected by Internet2, a fiber-optic network begun in 1996 that allows downloads and uploads many times faster than over the commercial Internet. Corporate backers of Internet2 include Cisco Systems (CSCO), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and IBM (IBM).

The University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., is among several schools using a package of interactive tools from Dell (DELL) that includes PCs and handheld devices that link to digital projectors and electronic whiteboards. UVA recently said it's embracing the Sakai Project, an open-source system at Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, and other schools. Sakai lets students collaborate on group projects using chat rooms and wikis; keep up with class assignments via announcements from instructors; and even submit homework, all from within a single Web-based application. Instructors can use Sakai to manage assignments, grading, and course planning.

Media Assignments, Not Papers

But does all that tech fluency make today's students better learners—or does it simply make them easier to distract with every instant or short-text message that pops up on a handheld? Cara Lane, a researcher who studies learning and scholarly technologies at the University of Washington in Seattle, says all that time spent searching for Hannah Montana videos on YouTube can help make teens better at searching the databases, including Lexis-Nexis and J-Stor, they'll need for academic research—those IMs, texts, and status updates are a primer for participation in online forums related to classwork. "Students usually arrive not knowing how to use education-oriented technology tools," Lane says. "But they quickly surpass their instructors in their ability to use them effectively."

And what about the writing and persuasive skills students need to sustain an academic paper or master's thesis? Instructors can cite students who insert smileys and other text-message abbreviations into homework assignments. At the same time, research projects that used to be called "papers" are morphing into "media assignments," containing audio and video presentations given by students, says Duke's Lombardi. "There's a lot of writing and preparation that goes into them," he says. "In fact, a media assignment can be a powerful writing assignment. It turns out the students do a lot more revision and rewriting, on average, than they would have done writing a conventional paper."

Few would doubt the academic merit of the work being done by Meredith Barrett, a PhD candidate in ecology at Duke, who's researching the health of lemurs in Madagascar and producing a regular blog, complete with videos shot with a Flip camera.

The benefits of experimentation aren't lost on the administrators at Duke. Today, some 100 of the university's classes use recorded audio lectures, all available for download to an iPod, Lombardi says. Much of what was gleaned from Duke's iPod project laid the groundwork for a section of Apple's iTunes store called iTunes U, which provides recordings of lectures from hundreds of other colleges that, like Duke, are willing to take a chance on tech.

For more on technology on campus, see the accompanying slide show.

How has your school used tech to enhance how instructors teach and how students learn? Let us know in our Reader Comments section.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.