With specific reference to yours truly and Tung Yin, Scheherazade asks:
Professors, what do you think about the fact that your students are chatting to one another via wi-fi during your lecture, and how do you structure your presentation so that the presence of the backchannel is acknowledged and will add value?
As someone who got kicked out of Corporate Tax for doing a crossword puzzle in class, I lack the moral high ground on which to condemn students who do this! Anyway, I touched on this subject quite a while back in a post called Why instant messaging might kill the socratic method, which oddly enough linked to one of Sherry's posts. As I more or less admitted in that post, I have no idea how to use the backchannel to add value. In very small classes, I have occasionally asked a student to Google something for me and report back. In large classes, however, my style is mostly lecture, so my main concern with the eChatter is to keep students sufficiently engaged that they aren't spending the entire class IMing and emailing and so on. Sorry, Sherry!
