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Text messaging is transforming education(Connecticut Post (Bridgeport) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 14--If u cn red thz, thn u r on ur way 2 a colege eduktion. -n n That's because text messaging and Instant Message-ing -- once just ways for tech-savvy teenagers to chat with their friends -- are quickly becoming serious education tools, and the results are already impressive. Take, for example, Dr. Richard Regan, an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield. For the first time, when Regan wanted to get a point across to his students in the fall semester of 2006, he didn't turn to the blackboard. Instead, he uploaded a podcast -- a syndicated audio file that automatically downloads to a personal computer -- of his lecture. His students downloaded and listened. And, somewhat to Regan's surprise, it helped them learn better. "My second test of the semester in my Shakespeare class is about his more obscure works, and historically the students' grades always drop," said Regan. "Except this year." It was the first time Regan took his lesson plan on the Bard online to reach students through their iPods and computers instead of their textbooks. He recorded some of his lectures, edited together a few video clips of Shakespeare films and uploaded them onto Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store (http://www.apple.com/itunes), a free program that works with both Macs and PCs and comes bundled with all 88.7 million iPods Apple's sold. Something clicked. Suddenly, the test that usually caused students' grades to plummet wasn't so feared. "That's the first time that's ever happened," said Regan. "Sure, the students deserve a lot of credit, but at the same time they had the advantage of having all of this material at their fingertips." -- Fairfield University has a partnership with Apple's "iTunes U" service, which gives schools a virtual storefront for their professors in iTunes. It makes it even easier for educators to share their knowledge with students online. Regan's podcasting experiments -- and successes -- are indicative of what many educators are trying to do: Take a technology already popular among students and use it to teach. The same goes for instant messaging. For years, college students have used IM to get in touch with a classmate about a study session or arrange plans for a Thursday night. To capitalize on the trend, Fairfield's DiMenna-Nyselius library set up a screen name that students could use to IM the reference desk their research questions instantaneously. Like Regan's podcasts, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. "There are times when we have four questions going at once," said Leslie Porter, Fairfield's reference and instruction librarian. Since launching the service in November, students have begun IMing the library's screen name -- "FairfieldULib" -- to help with everything from statistical analysis to researching a topic for a paper. The screen name works with all the IM clients popular among students: AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN from Microsoft. Porter says that some professors have even gotten hip to the IM game, giving students their screen names and offering "virtual office hours" to answer student questions. "Students tell us that e-mail is old-fashioned," said Porter. "This is the best way to get in touch with them on their terms." -- Beyond instant messaging, educators are looking to tap into an even more ubiquitous way of getting in touch with students instantly: text messaging. "We think about the voice part of the cell phone, and its just the tip of the iceberg," said Richard Ferguson, the vice president/chief information and technology officer at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. "Text messaging is huge among the student population, " said Ferguson, who estimated that the penetration of text messaging among students "has to be around 95 percent." Ferguson recently attended a meeting held by Microsoft Corp. with people from the public sector. During the meeting, Microsoft's Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer stressed that cell phones weren't just phones but had become a package of software wrapped up in hardware. "They're pretty sophisticated communication devices, and there's a lot you can do with them," said Ferguson. While text messaging is hugely popular among young people, it's a fad almost completely ignored by most adults. "How quickly can you type on a 12-digit pad with your thumbs -- I couldn't write anything," said Ferguson. "But you can't presume these things." Quinnipiac's first campaign to get in touch with students through text messaging aimed to ease the most humbling tradition for any college freshman: The lowly campus bus shuttle. Using just their cell phones, students are able to see Quinnipiac's shuttle maps and whether a bus is on time or not. "This way, students are no longer left standing in the rain waiting for a bus that isn't coming," said Ferguson. "It's an advantage for us because students are using our transportation system effectively, it's safer and cuts down on parking." And while keeping on top of bus traffic useful, Ferguson says that's just the beginning when it comes to texting with students. "On a more basic level, it would be useful to use a cell phone as a response system in class," he said. "A professor asks a question, kids use their phones to answer and the teacher can immediately see what percentage of the class got it right and who got it wrong." -- But while all this instant communication has been good for schools, the news has not all been good. Some professors have found that as IM-ing and text messaging becomes more popular, so do the number of basic grammar mistakes, even in more formal correspondence. "I've noticed that when students write e-mails they are much more likely to confuse homophones," said Christopher Huntley, the chair of the information systems and operations management department at Fairfield. "A lot of them confuse 'there' with 'their' and 'they're', and 'your' with 'you're'. "On the whole, their language is much more IM-like." For a professor striving to ready students for communicating in the business world, breaking bad grammatical habits can be a struggle. "In business, written communication is 80 percent of all communication," said Huntley. "When I see a typo, I'll immediately question if they've checked their facts." The technology they use might evolve, but that doesn't change a professor's fundamental mission to educate. "We all have different tools now, but our role is still to help people critically evaluate information," said Porter. "We've come up with ways that are different and fun, and the students perk up." Keith Whamond, who covers regional issues for ConnPost.com, can be reached at 330-6388. Copyright (c) 2007, Connecticut Post, Bridgeport Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |