CyberOne started yesterday at HLS, and today I had the opportunity to attend the second lecture. (The Extension School / Second Life class has no formal kickoff, though the courseware, wiki, and other websites went live this weekend). I haven’t been in a law school class since 2002, so sitting in the classroom again was a refreshing reminder of how things “normally” work in formal education.
One thing that struck me right away, of course, was the physicality of it all. The typical law school classroom is set up as an ampitheatre with the professor front and center. It assumes that the professor will be teaching in lecture format — and since the tables and chairs are bolted down, it’s very hard to overcome that assumption. Lani Guinier, probably among my professors the one who worked hardest to change this top-down class dynamic, tried to get us to work in pairs and groups, but the chairs are definitely not made for talking peer-to-peer. We often found it necessary to ditch the seating area altogether and switch to sitting on the desks, the aisles, and the leftover spaces in the room.
What’s fascinating to me is that, at least from our experience a few weeks ago, the lecture-style format actually encouraged more cross-chatting in There, in contrast to real life. Or perhaps that’s not entirely a contrast. What I also saw today is that most students are multi-tasking in their chairs. Decades ago students passed notes; in our time, they surf the web and IM (one of my classmates also played Mike Tyson’s Punchout.) In theory, then, students in the relative anonymity of a lecture audience can cross-chat as they would in There, Second Life, or WebEx. In reality, while it was interesting to watch a student look up Charlie Nesson’s Wikipedia entry (today’s topic being wikis), most of the students who were multi-tasking were having personal conversations and keeping up with news or sports. Further, I should qualify that only about half of the class brought laptops, and a good number weren’t using them.
Is it possible for a class to use a chat-based backchannel productively? I know Charlie and other professors had experimented with it in some of his classes back in 2002, and it’s now de rigour at many conferences. I also know that many law professors are considering banning laptops altogether from their lectures. It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up in the next few years.
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I was just posting about what I thought backchannels may add to a course on the cyberone wiki and moodle sites.
In one sense it has the potential to focus some of the energy that is fractured by having a laptop in front of you, sending it back into something that is productive to the class (I also think it would add valued for the extension students to have a window into the HLS student minds).
In another sense are students really paying that close attention when their attention is divided between a lecture and chatting and browsing?
I relied heavily on my laptop in my first semester of law school and then stopped using it altogether for the next two semester and found that I absorbed much more of what was happening in my lectures, but then again that’s just me, and my grades went down the last two terms, so what does that mean?
I think Lawrence Lessig would say something along the lines of, “who are we to judge the students, give them their laptops and let them create” but I don’t know what his policy on laptops in class is, that’s just what I imagine him saying.
IKt could be a good thing for students to give them a backchannel to release their pent up browsing, give them an IRC channel and maybe another channeld for a wiki and let them discuss and update while the lecture is happening. Prof Nesson proceeds and such a pleasant place that if it is doable in any class it should be in his.
The other side of the coin is you could put in a channel connected to a wireless sniffer and embarass all the students in class by broadcasting the sites and images they are browsing.
Hah, that last suggestion is evil >:)
With respect to multi-tasking, I think there is a big difference between checking ESPN.com and engaging in backchannel discussion related to the class. There are probably different physical ways to set it up as well — for example, along the lines of what you (facetiously?) suggest perhaps the backchannel is displayed behind the professor and is therefore “officially” acknowledged as part of the class. There is a question tool that we are going to experiment with as well in CyberOne to push questions from students to the top of the heap to be addressed by whoever is up there in front of the class.
As Lauren or others can attest to based on my behavior sitting in on her and others’ lectures in State of Play Academy, I learn best by actively engaging with the materials, often by typing side comments or questions. It interests me that in There and Second Life, the chat comments aren’t in “back” but actually right in front of the speaker and therefore are harder to ignore. Someone not used to this state of affairs can easily be distracted by too much “frontchannel” discussion; perhaps it is a learned skill to figure out which comments to address, which to ignore, and which not to even read in the first place.