Networking U

She wanted to engage the “we generation” in a new way. In 2007, Jean Adams, a professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, took two classes of almost 400 first-year business management students, divided them into groups and handed tablet PCs to those who didn’t have their own notebook computers. (That was made possible by a Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching grant that Adams won that year.) The students’ challenge: to work together in real time, through screen-sharing on their laptops, and create storyboards to solve the viciously difficult business cases Adams had presented to them. She then put their work on a projection screen in front of the class, where she could comment on and pull ideas from it—making the classroom experience more immediately gratifying and highly visual. “This ability to get what’s in their heads in a very practical way—it’s just really quite amazing,” Adams says.

Once upon a time—before laptops, cellphones and iPods—a professor’s only competition for attention in the classroom was her students’ wandering imagination. But at today’s leading institutions, the digital classroom is no longer a novelty. These days, high school graduates, armed with shorter attention spans but greater expectations that their teachers go beyond “chalk and talk,” pose a real challenge to educators. How to inspire students to conduct their own research or engage with course materials, when the traditional lecture no longer measures up to the eye candy and possibilities of new media?

The good news is, universities over the past decade have been adapting to meet students at the level of technology they’ve come to accept. That means not only deploying state-of-the-art hardware and software, but also embracing the concepts of social networking and virtual communities. “Learning is a social activity,” says Adams, who is now in the third year of her learning and technology project. “I’m trying to use the technology to make the face-to-face contact even richer.” There’s also the challenge of teaching students themselves how to use these new technologies productively—learning the ropes in university, Adams says, puts her students at a huge advantage.

Piggybacking on the popularity of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, educators see new opportunities to engage students in their studies. It’s now common for institutions to use an online learning management system, such as Blackboard or Moodle—“the academic Facebook,” as Adams’s students call it—in order to organize and distribute lecture notes, assignments and quizzes.

At the University of British Columbia, the Learning Enhancement Academic Partnership program—or LEAP—builds on the idea of multi-platform learning. It’s a portal for tools and resources that’s been online since 2005. Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at UBC, says that weblogs and wikis aren’t new phenomena at UBC—in fact, the university pioneered the use of these learning tools in Canada. LEAP takes online resources even further by giving students and those managing the site the ability to aggregate their own content. On LEAP, students blog about campus life and academics; there are also helpful links and tips on various tech topics, such as how to find and use academic podcasts, or where to find and download flash card software for studying. (The portal also lets students share the tools with friends via Twitter.) “Getting students to manage their own learning experience is extremely important,” says Michelle Lamberson, director of the Office of Learning and Technology at UBC.