Students with laptops and wireless connections are opening up \u201cback-channel\u201d discussions during classroom lectures, according to a New York Times article by Lisa Guernsey. While the lecturer is up there lecturing, clusters of students are back there working the instant-messaging circuit\u2014commenting, questioning and even blogging the proceedings. \u201cWe\u2019re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,\u201d says one participant. Enthuses Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University: \u201cThe intellectual quality of a two-track meeting is extraordinarily high, if it is run right and you have smart people involved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lecturers do not necessarily concur. \u201cYou realize that something is going wrong,\u201d says Syracuse University adjunct professor Indira Guzman, of her experience with back-channeling. \u201cYou think, \u2018Uh-oh, maybe they are talking about me.\u201d Some students also think back-channeling is rude\u2014not because it\u2019s distracting necessarily, but because they are left out of it. Then there is Joichi Ito<\/a> a venture capitalist, who agrees the \u201csecond track\u201d can be distracting. However, he says he is working on an quick-response technology, called \u201d\u2019 hecklebot\u2019…a light-emitting diode screen\u201d that the lecturer could use to display heckling messages, and responses, such as \u201cpay attention.\u201d<\/p>\n Most observers seem to agree that \u201cback-channel\u201d communications will only grow in popularity over time. Some trace its roots to VH-1\u2019s \u201cpop-up\u201d videos, \u201cin which commentary about artists pops up on the screen during the song.\u201d Indeed, as reported by USA Today\u2019s Janet Kornblum, a new study of 13-to-24-year-olds from Harris Interactive<\/a> and Teenage Research Unlimited<\/a> \u201cconfirms something other studies have shown: Young people like to multitask, watching TV while instant messaging and e-mailing while surfing the web.\u201d The Harris study also found that \u201cteens and young adults\u201d now \u201cspend more time on the \u2018net than they do watching TV.\u201d It reports \u201cthat young people spend and average of 16.7 hours a week online (not including e-mail), compared with 13.6 hours watching TV.\u201d As one participant put it, \u201cyou can\u2019t talk to your friends on television.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Students with laptops and wireless connections are opening up \u201cback-channel\u201d discussions during classroom lectures, according to a New York Times article by Lisa Guernsey. While the lecturer is up there lecturing, clusters of students are back there working the instant-messaging circuit\u2014commenting, questioning and even blogging the proceedings. \u201cWe\u2019re just moving the corridor into the room…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[670,669,276,671,668,21,667],"class_list":["post-2420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookmarks","tag-clay-shirky","tag-communication","tag-geek","tag-joi-ito","tag-laptops","tag-trends","tag-wireless"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}