Georgia State University students who don’t want to yell their questions from the back of a cavernous lecture hall now have another option: They can send text messages to their professor, who reads the queries from an overhead screen.
David McDonald, director of emerging technologies and an associate professor in the Atlanta-based university’s business school, is inviting the use of text messaging during class while many educators are instituting strict rules against the practice.
The texting program—similar to handheld student response systems—is being used in about 15 Georgia State business courses this school year.
Students’ names and phone numbers will not be included in their on-screen questions, but texting queries will raise students’ class participation grades. Each question is screened before it’s posted on the ticker for the class to read.
“Rather than trying to fight [texting], let’s use it,” McDonald said, adding that that text system has a “very strict” filtering feature that censors obscenities. “If they’re going to be doing it anyway, have them pay attention to what their teacher is saying, not what Ashton Kutcher is Twittering.”
Text-messaged questions, McDonald said, are compiled on a class web page—known as a wiki—where other students can answer the questions.
“It creates a knowledge base, and a knowledge base has real power,” he said. “And students love to show how smart they are.”
Georgia State is working with mobile technology company Entercation to bring the text-to-screen technology to more lecture halls, according to a company announcement. The texting option could appeal to students too shy to ask questions in front of hundreds of peers or students whose primary language isn’t English, communications experts said.
“This will allow shy students to have a voice,” said Michelle Cimino, author of two books on technology etiquette, including NETiquette, Online Etiquette Tips for Adults & Teens. “It’s a way to relay a question that they might feel embarrassed to share in a huge auditorium in front of their peers. … At least this way, the professor is engaging his students in a modern way in a language they can understand and think is cool.”
J.B. Vick, president of Entercation, said the same text-to-screen technology is used at professional and college sporting events, where fans can text and have their messages scroll across the stadium’s big screen. If other campuses adopt McDonald’s text-message approach, Entercation could make $25 million annually from classroom use, Vick said in a company statement.
Electronic communication, whether by text message, eMail, or instant message, has become pervasive in colleges and universities, according to recent research. Eighty-four percent of students who participated in a 2007 Fresno State University study said they “regularly” use their cell phones to text, and seven in 10 said they had sent and received texts during class.
Research from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that half of teenagers surveyed send 1,500 text messages a month, and one-third of survey respondents send 100 texts every day, or 3,000 per month.
Fifteen percent of teens who text said they send and receive more than 200 messages every day, or 6,000 per month. The Pew research shows that girls are more likely to text than boys; girls send and receive 80 texts a day, on average, compared with 30 daily text messages for boys.
Taking an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach to in-class texting, Cimino said, could signal a new approach to a problem that has drawn students’ attention away from lectures for several years.
“Depending on the teacher’s policy on cell phones, kids are adept at texting under their desks or in the pockets of their hoodies. They find a way without having to look at the keys on their phones,” she said. “The students would be texting no matter what. And as annoying as that seems, it’s very difficult for teachers to police this activity.”
Some in higher education have taken a far more hard-line approach to electronic chatting during lectures. The University of Chicago Law School in 2008 became the nation’s first institution to shut off wireless internet access during class, although laptops were still permitted for note taking.
Saul Levmore, dean of the Chicago law school, said the decision was an easy one.
When officials discovered they could turn off wireless access in classrooms, “we felt that we ought to move in that direction,” Levmore said.
Professors at law schools across the country said webless classrooms have not been students’ favorite policy, but some University of Chicago students supported Levmore’s decision.
“When a student visits my office, neither the student nor I would dream of surfing the web or eMailing while communicating with one another,” he said. “That is the level of attention and engagement we should expect in the classroom.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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Georgia State University College of Business
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