Subject: [NEXTEL-1] >> Instant Messaging in the Classroom

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 16:36:34 -0400

>> Instant Messaging in the Classroom

University of Maryland students have started an informal "I.M. Circle"
during lectures. While attracting students to the lectures, the practice of
using I.M. during lectures and presentations raises the issue of I.M.'s
utility during lectures versus a ban on the use of I.M. Some argue the
use of I.M. during lectures stimulates additional discussion on lecture
topics, while others argue I.M. distracts the audience.

============================================================================
July 24, 2003

In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus
By LISA GUERNSEY

T the University of Maryland, it started as an innocent question posed in an
e-mail message to those attending WebShop, a three-week lecture series about the
Internet.  "Does anyone else think it would be a good idea if we all had IM
available to us during these lectures?" asked Sinan Aral, a doctoral student at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, referring
to instant messaging. "Several times after questions, I wanted to 'whisper' to
someone across the room or send a relevant link."

Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the auditorium, which
was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a group of people booted up
their laptops, opened their IM programs and spent the next three hours happily
exchanging notes during the presentations. The "IM circle," as it became known at
the June lecture series, soon attracted more than a dozen people at a time. As the
speakers ran through their PowerPoint presentations, the room hummed with the
tip-tap of IM chatter. "Is this really an economic issue?" wrote one audience
member in response to a presenter's remark. "Experiments like this are too
structured," wrote another. "Did he really just say that?" asked one. "Wow! He
did," someone responded. Over the past year, as wireless networks have been
introduced in hotels, university auditoriums and conference halls, people with
laptops have realized that they do not have to sit idly during the presentations.
Some people, of course, ignore speakers entirely by surfing the Web or checking
their e-mail - a practice that has led some lecturers to plead for connectionless
auditoriums or bans on laptop use.'

But others are genuinely interested in a lecturer's topic and want to talk
concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass around links to
Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker's point. For them, wireless
technology allows a back channel of communication, a second track that reveals
their thoughts and feedback and records it all for future reference.
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and blogger who has experienced this
back-channeling at several international technology meetings, likens the chatter
to what happens in the corridor just after people leave a conference session.
"We're just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,"
said Mr. Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during
conferences, enabling people to follow the speaker and Mr. Doctorow's take on the
speaker at the same time.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive
telecommunications program, has run experiments using
messaging software to supplement face-to-face meetings of 30 people. Many
participants find the experience highly stimulating,
he said, explaining, "The intellectual quality of a two-track meeting is
extraordinarily high, if it is run right and you have smart
people involved."

But many speakers at the front of room are less enamored of the practice. "To me,
it's a little irritating, frankly," said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of
Ludicorp, a company that is developing Neverending, a multiplayer online game. In
April, Mr. Butterfield addressed a conference on emerging technologies as
listeners experimented with messaging software, including a program called Confab
offered by his own company. The next week, when he spoke at a conference without
any Internet access, "people were a lot more attentive," he said. (He added,
however, that many of them kept opening their laptops during the speeches in the
vain hope that somehow the Internet might have magically become available.)

Indira Guzman, a doctoral student and adjunct professor at Syracuse University who
was at the WebShop lecture series, said
she had become aware of the back-channeling while teaching her classes. "You
realize that something is going wrong," Ms.
Guzman said. "You think, 'Uh-oh, maybe they are talking about me.' " Some people
who have experienced the phenomenon cite a speech given last year at a computer
industry conference by Joe Nacchio, former chief executive of the
telecommunications company Qwest. As he gave his presentation, two bloggers - Dan
Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, and Doc Searls, senior editor
for The Linux Journal - were posting notes about him to their Weblogs, which were
simultaneously being read by many people in the audience.

Both included a link forwarded by a reader in Florida to a stock filing report
indicating that Mr. Nacchio had recently made millions of dollars from selling his
company's stock, although he complained in his speech about the tough economy. "No
sympathy here," Mr. Gillmor wrote. "When Dan blogged that, the tenor of the room
changed," Mr. Doctorow said. Mr. Nacchio, he said, "stopped getting softball
questions and he started getting hardball questions."

Some people are hoping that conferences will evolve to allow the undercurrent of
conversation to be projected on a big screen in the front of the room. They say
that such public disclosure will enable speakers and unconnected audience members
to feel less isolated. Mr. Shirky, the adjunct N.Y.U. professor, considers
openness to be critical to productive discussions and conducts his
messaging-software experiments so that all speakers can see what is being posted.
At the University of Maryland, where the use of IM became a matter of a heated
debate, several students said they were perturbed by the back channeling not
because it seemed rude (although some argued that point, too), but because they
felt left out.

The split focus of two-track meetings and back-channeled conversations have other
drawbacks, not the least of which is that they can be utterly distracting. "There
were times when I'd follow a thread and come back to the lecture and feel a little
disoriented," Mr. Aral acknowledged.

Joichi Ito, a venture capitalist and former chief executive for the Japanese
branch of the Internet service provider PSINet,
opened a chat room for back-channeling during Supernova, a communications
conference held this month in Crystal City, Va.,
just outside Washington. But Mr. Ito readily acknowledges the downside. "There is
definitely a lot less focus in the room," he
said, "but I think we were already starting to suffer from that."

At high-tech conferences where everyone is already wired to the gills with
BlackBerry pagers and cellphones and can cope
easily with constant connectedness and streaming information, the concept of
multitrack communication channels almost seems
matter-of-course. "This is not something that is going to go away," Mr. Ito said.
As many technology experts point out, if laptops were banned, people would use
cellphones. If wireless Internet access were not officially available, networking
gurus would find a way to create ad hoc connections.

Some observers say that the multitrack channels will simply be considered a given
by a young generation that has honed
multitasking to a fine art and grew up on VH1's "pop-up" videos, in which
commentary about the artists pops up on the screen
during the song.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ito is already creating a new riff on the concept. He said he was
working with a group on designing a
"hecklebot," a light-emitting diode screen that displays heckling messages that
are typed during online chats at conferences. "I
want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences," he
said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about
the significance of the back channel. From the chat room, he said, "you could send
something like, 'Stop pontificating.' " If the speakers were logged on, they could
play the game, too. Maybe some would type, "Pay attention."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24mess.html?th

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