@Honesty Just So People Know:
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2013/04/10/classroom
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#classroom

In a lecture earlier this week, our professor asked all 70-something of us a simple question. “Do you intend to use new or social media during this class?” Only two brave hands went up. Admittedly, although I fully intended to tweet the hours away, mine did not.

After a few minutes of conversation, he clarified that our honesty would not be punished. I raised my hand and so did several others. In doing so, we declared, with tinges of both guilt and pride, that yes, we might tweet or Facebook or send emails during this class, and no, we had no intention of trying to stay off the social web for 75 consecutive minutes….
Our professor accused us of wanting to “check out” during the class and of not wishing to engage fully. Slowly, my peers also began to pass similar judgments. “They’re clearly incapable of paying attention for an hour and 20 minutes,” one girl said. “It seems as though they care less about the subject matter than the rest of us do,” another voice chimed in. “They’ve made the conscious decision to basically not be in this room.”

OK.

Of course, as a self-proclaimed social media “addict,” I take issue with these allegations—first and foremost on a personal, emotional level. So I’ll put my bias on the table and I’ll say it: I was offended.

But, more importantly, I take issue with the statements that were made because I think they are based on dangerously outdated assumptions. Most urgently, I disagree with the assumption that being active on new media necessarily implies “checking out” from one’s physical environment. Sure, that is one potential outcome, but the other option—one that I believe professors should capitalize on—is the potential for social media and new media to enhance and complement our engagement with classroom goings-on.

Just as taking notes by hand commit them to my memory forever, so should tweeting a fact I learn in class. Just as study groups once acted as venues for inter-student discussion and support, so should Facebook groups. Just as the classroom has gradually evolved, over years of debate and resistance, to incorporate newly introduced technologies which now seem commonplace (projectors, laptops, iPads), so it should evolve to accommodate social media, an inarguable component of the average college student’s everyday life.

When I reached out to Sree Sreenivasan (Columbia’s Chief Digital Officer, a professor of social and new media at the J-School, and himself an avid user of most major social networks) for comment, he laid down the general rule that “social media is only as useful a tool as professors encourage it to be.”

“I would encourage professors who want to try it out to experiment with it,” he said, “but at the same time, if they’re uncomfortable—if they feel students are disengaged—then they have the right to stop students from doing it.”

Professor Sreenivasan is right. There are certain classes in which even the most creative professor wouldn’t find a use for an Instagram filter or a hashtag (here’s lookin’ at you, Calc III), but, whenever possible, I hope professors will embrace his recommendation to recognize the social web as an educational tool whose potential simply hasn’t been tapped into yet. A classroom at Temple University serves as a perfect example of such an experiment.

“At this school,” Prof. Sreenivasan continued, “the discussion of technology in the classroom has been going on for years—more than a decade—and we’ve had to talk about things like laptops in the classroom. … We, as a society, change and adjust our use of technology and where we see it and where we’re used to it.”

In the spirit of coupling evolution with discussion, I encourage all four of Columbia’s undergraduate schools to follow the Graduate School of Journalism’s lead and establish a set of guidelines for the use of social media in classrooms. The J-School’s social media guidelines account for several gray areas created by the meeting of academia with social media (e.g., classroom confidentiality). At the same time, they give professors free reign to determine the extent to which they would like social media utilized in their specific classrooms.

As Associate Professor of Music Jordan Shapiro said in Forbes recently, “Colleges shouldn’t be jittery about students who are Twittery.” Rather than establishing knee-jerk bans and reactionary judgments, they should deeply consider the educational potential of the social web and, with open minds and careful consideration, establish classroom cultures tailored to optimize learning in the 21st century, for 21st century students.

Rega Jha is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. Rega-rding Columbia runs alternate Thursdays