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MUSIC TO HER EARS: Worsley
is among the 44 percent of undergrads who own
digital music players.
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10 a.m. Wake up,
turn off alarm clock and immediately
turn on computer, enter my log-on password and go to
the bathroom to brush my teeth while it is loading up.
—Paola Worsley’s technology diary
Paola Worsley’s Sony Vaio desktop computer screen
is always the first thing she sees in the morning and
often the last thing she sees at night. Cars on Campus
Drive murmur outside the Pi Beta Phi sorority house
as Worsley, still dressed in flannel pajama pants and
a baggy T-shirt, checks her e-mail. Throughout the day,
she shares music (legally) via a wireless computer network
with Daniel and D.J., Stanford students she’s
never met but who share her passion for the Counting
Crows and Jay-Z. She uses instant messaging software
to check in with some of her 150-plus IM buddies from
California to New York. The junior communication and
urban studies major talks with her best friend on a
cell phone while riding her bike across campus and asks
professors for recommendations via e-mail. In a single
two-hour period, she might check her in-box 20 times.
The technology natives have arrived at Stanford. Worsley
isn’t even especially wired—she’s
typical. Ninety-eight percent of undergraduates have
their own computers—the majority of them sleek
laptops with wireless capability—and most have
never lived in a home without one. Three-quarters sport
cell phones, and many had them before they could drive.
For this generation of students, technology—from
the Palm handhelds in their backpacks to the iPods in
their front pockets—is seamlessly integrated into
their lives. “They are always living online and
offline simultaneously,” says Fred Turner, assistant
professor of communication.
In the 2003-04 survey of undergraduates by Stanford’s
residential computing office, more than half the respondents
reported using computers more than 20 hours a week.
Even more telling were their comments. “I love
my PC. It is my best friend. If it broke, I would be
sad,” wrote one student. “I don’t
understand how people used to live before the Internet
existed,” wrote another. “Seriously.”
To get a sense of how technology is transforming student
life, STANFORD asked a half-dozen
students to keep diaries of when and how they used computers,
cell phones, personal digital assistants and other electronic
gadgets. They documented both academic and personal
use over a three-day period. These journals reveal that
many students are wired almost constantly, moving effortlessly
from cell phone conversations to instant messenging
to web surfing and back again. Most do this without
giving any thought to the double-edged sword they are
wielding—the way computers can isolate users or
build communities, the ease with which students can
find information or misinformation and the overload
all of that data can create. Nope, they simply type,
click and dial away. After all, it’s all they’ve
ever known.
10 a.m.
Wake up, computers are already on. Reboot them. Turn
on hard drive, listen to some music using headphones
(roommate is still asleep) to wake up. Check e-mail,
then go to CourseWork
website to find out where my Math 42 section is. Use
campusmap.stanford.edu
to find it, then go to class there. —Andrew Buck
Andrew Buck can spend hours at a stretch alone in his
room, a dimly lit space in Lambda Nu that he has furnished
with seven computers. The junior biological sciences
major listens to selections from his massive music collection
(thousands of CDs, neatly catalogued by artist and album,
in binders), tinkers with the computers and exchanges
instant messages with a buddy list of 400 people. For
Buck, technology is a social catalyst: “I’m
a shy person,” he says. “I harness it to
get around that shyness.”
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One student replied to another’s
instant message with ‘LOL’ (meaning
). ‘I know,’
wrote back the other.
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E-mail, in particular, facilitates communication among
Stanford students. Enterprising high school seniors
seem to have set up Yahoo! Groups e-mail lists for the
Class of 2008 the instant they opened their admit letters.
At an activity fair each autumn, student groups collect
e-mail addresses of those interested in their organizations.
Push “send,” and everyone gets an announcement.
For example, Worsley, the editor of the yearbook, communicates
with her staff via e-mail.
These practices have pros and cons. Incoming freshmen
may make friends via e-mail before they arrive, but
they also may form impressions—or misimpressions—of
dormmates without the benefit of personal interaction.
E-mail lists walk a fine line between disseminating
information and spamming. Some students get hundreds
of e-mails a day—many from clubs with bloated
lists. It’s also easy to e-mail everyone in a
dorm or class or, as with one racist missive in 1999,
the whole University. “The ability to harm, to
injure with your words has multiplied exponentially,”
says Julie Lythcott-Haims, ’89, dean of freshman
and transfer students. “In good and bad ways,”
she says, e-mail lists “sort of shrink the community.”
Electronic messaging requires a different kind of social
awareness. “You don’t know when someone
is joking or not over IM, so it’s hard to gauge
how you should respond,” Worsley says. Senior
Emily Butler says she and her roommate regularly edit
each other’s e-mails to be sure they haven’t
said anything that could be misconstrued. “I have
often had e-mail misunderstandings, particularly with
my boyfriend—romantic situations make it easy
for a little word to bite more harshly than it was intended
to,” she says. Rich Holeton, head of residential
computing, thinks the absence of nonverbal cues simply
requires some getting used to. “Our bias is that
face-to-face is better, but really it’s just different,”
he says. “Look at the divorce rate: maybe face-to-face
is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Indeed, these electronic modes of communication can
both isolate and unite students. Christine Alfano, a
freshman writing instructor, talks about how students
will IM each other even when they are within earshot,
say, in the next dorm room or across the hall. A student
of Alfano’s once witnessed the following exchange:
one student replied to another’s instant message
with “LOL” (meaning “I’m laughing
out loud”). “I know,” wrote back the
other. “I can hear you.”
Such practices sometimes facilitate bonding. Buck,
for example, recently started dating a woman on his
hall with whom he had previously communicated only via
IM. Still, he sees how technology can be distancing.
“The vast majority of people are very intimidated
or scared when they come in here,” Buck says,
gesturing to his seven mostly home-built computers.
“I get a lot of negative emotions—‘whoa,
this is insane.’” In March, he got rid of
two of his five monitors because his girlfriend called
them “scary.”
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STAYING CONNECTED: Ajegbo sometimes
logs on to an international online community 10
times a day. |
Then there are the questions of overload and overuse.
Holeton, ’75, praises the multitasking these devices
allow, but one could characterize it as frenetic behavior
that leads to shorter attention spans. While Worsley
talks to her mom on her cell phone, she pays her credit
card bill online, checks her friends’ IM away
messages and plays with screensaver pictures. Junior
Jen Wang synchronizes her laptop and her Palm two or
three times a day. Kome Ajegbo, a freshman from Nigeria
who attended high school in England, logs on to a Microsoft
online community that connects friends on several different
continents up to 10 times a day.
Alfano, PhD ’95, holds IM office hours so students
in e-Rhetorics: Writing Persuasively in a Digital Age
can pop in and ask a quick question. She can see from
their sign-on how long they’ve been online. “It
will say 14 hours or two days,” Alfano says. “They
just don’t turn their computers off, ever.”
This behavior can have serious health consequences.
Tim Bowman, a physical therapist at Vaden Health Center
who has been treating Stanford students for 20 years,
sees an increase in repetitive stress injuries. They
now account for 10 to 20 percent of his caseload.
8 p.m.
I disconnect my laptop from the network and bring it
out to the common room, so I can work comfortably on
the couch. I use it to transcribe music—I listen
to a CD, in short bursts, then write the notes I hear
on a computer music notation program. In this instance
I am transcribing my father’s improvisational
piano music, for which he pays me. After completing
most of the transcription, I listened to another CD
(of my own compositions) on my computer. My suitemate
asked for a copy of the CD, so I gave her a burned one.
—Emily Butler
Students don’t just use electronic devices to
communicate—they use them to pursue everything
from passions to hobbies to the necessities of life.
Pianist and singer Butler, for example, uses her Macintosh
iBook to write and transcribe pieces, to make copies
of her own recordings, and to listen to and analyze
the work of other musicians.
Popular music is a perennial big deal among college
students. These days, some 44 percent of Stanford undergraduates
have digital music players—pocket-sized devices
onto which they’ve loaded hundreds or thousands
of songs. Students wear the white wires and earbuds
of Apple’s distinctive iPods while they bike,
sunbathe, lift weights at Tresidder and make photocopies
at their work-study jobs. There’s even iPod etiquette:
when friends run into each other on campus, each removes
one earbud so they can converse and listen to music
simultaneously.
Of course, there’s the question of whether students
have gathered these thousands of songs legally. Most
students interviewed for this story swear they don’t
download copyrighted music or movies anymore—although
nearly everyone admits doing so in the past, and professors
and administrators say the practice is still widespread.
Last year, Stanford got 600 complaints from copyright
owners about illegal downloading. (Users are asked to
erase the files in question; repeat offenders have their
Internet access cut off until they comply.) In March,
the Recording Industry Association of America sued 89
people for allegedly swapping songs illegally over 21
university networks, including Stanford’s.
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SUCCULENT SMACKDOWN: Wang takes
aim at a Sabotender, a malevolent cactus in the
online game she plays.
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Another popular form of digital entertainment is online
gaming. Wang spends 12 to 15 hours a week playing MMORPG
Final Fantasy XI, a role-playing game, with people around
the world—and with her drawmates on the other
side of the thin wall of her Mirrielees apartment. In
it, Wang’s alter ego, an Elvaan (read: elf) named
Celestianna, heals and enhances others with magic. Although
the mechanical engineering major spends a lot of time
on the game, she points out that it has a sophisticated,
compelling plot. “It’s not one of those
video games that gives immediate satisfaction, only
to be thrown away after two weeks of play because the
player has already achieved everything in the game,”
she says. “As I understand it, half of the current
players have been playing since autumn 2002. I myself
haven’t completed all the missions after playing
for more than three months.” Wang also explains
that it’s one of her primary social outlets. “Unlike
most college students, I’m not partial to alcohol,
so I spend my ‘off’ time socializing with
my drawmates or playing with non-Stanford friends instead
of getting drunk,” she says.
This generation is turning the personal check into
an endangered species. The Stanford Federal Credit Union
reports that student customers often go online to pay
bills, check balances and apply for car loans. They
pay for everything from photocopies to cappuccinos with
debit cards. (“Plastic is my life,” Butler
writes in her technology diary.) Sam Tuohey, vice president
of information services, says these practices enable
the credit union to serve 45,000 members with just 100
staff—very efficient by industry standards. But
he observes that it’s harder to pitch new programs
when your customers never walk through the door.
Later that evening,
I set about fixing two viral computers. One of them
was easy—fixed in 20 minutes. The other one was
quite a bit trickier, and the problem is still not resolved.
This resident asked me why viruses exist. I explained
that even in the world of computer nerds, there are
good and bad people, and some people just get a kick
out of wreaking technological havoc. —Ian Spiro
In the midst of cell phones ringing and instant messages
chiming are a handful of students who are thinking about
the consequences of this wired world. And some of them
are logging off. Senior Ian Spiro is visibly tech-savvy:
not only is he a computer science major, he uses FreeBSD,
an operating system that among computer geeks is considered
the “next level of elitism after Linux”;
he works as a residential computer coordinator, helping
his dormmates fix their machines when things go awry.
Yet he has stopped using instant messaging, he refuses
to have a cell phone, and the gadget he is most excited
about is his used bike. The decision to stop using IM
“is causing my friends more problems than me,”
Spiro says. “They have no concept how attached
they are to this. The friends who aren’t lazy
will call me on the phone and arrange to do something
in person.”
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UNTANGLING: Spiro doesn’t
carry a cell phone and has stopped using instant
messaging.
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Spiro, who describes himself as a semi-Luddite, is
interested in exploring the effects of technology. In
winter quarter, he took Communication 269: Computers
and Interfaces, which asks students to come up with
a prototype of a computer-based product to improve life
in a developing country. A guest speaker got Spiro thinking
about connections between technology and wealth disparity.
He toys with the idea that his pared-down lifestyle
could have global impact. “This may be a stretch,
[but] maybe my approach to technology would have some
greater implications,” Spiro writes in his technology
diary. “If I stay on my current trajectory, 10
years from now I will drive an old compact car, use
a relatively old computer, live in a small, slightly
crappy house or apartment. If everyone did this, there
could be a lot more technology and resources for lesser-developed
countries.”
A few students take the low-tech approach a step further
and choose not to own computers—although that
doesn’t mean they never log in. Vic Wu, for example,
is as technologically connected as the next guy. The
senior political science major reads the New York
Times online each morning, checks his e-mail regularly
and uses the postal service’s website to track
job applications he has mailed. But his computer is
down a cold set of concrete stairs in the basement of
Castaño House. When Wu and his parents visited
Stanford from their home in Taiwan, they saw the nicely
appointed computer clusters in each dorm and decided
he would be fine without a CPU of his own.
And even after nearly four years in a computer-crazy
student culture, Wu thinks they made the right choice.
Isn’t he missing out on something? “People
tell me that. I’m like—no,” he says,
shaking his head and laughing. “I only need what
I need.” He often has his pick of the five Macs
and three PCs in the dorm cluster and he keeps his files
on a central Stanford server, so he can access them
wherever he goes. “I don’t even have to
carry a disk,” Wu says.
But he does carry a cell phone, and uses it about a
half-dozen times a day. And, like many, he doesn’t
have one of those old-fashioned phones that plugs into
a wall jack in his dorm room. “I switched over
to the cell phone because it gives me greater mobility
and enhances my ability to be reached and to reach others,”
Wu says. Director of communication and network services
Jay Kohn says there has been a 25 percent decrease in
land lines in undergrad rooms during the past five years
and a corresponding increase in cell phone usage. That
raises a safety concern: when students call 911 from
a cell phone, police can’t quickly determine their
location.
1:15 p.m.
Smart boards in class, easy-fold and moveable tables.
PowerPoint used for discussion—used hearing-aid
microphone to communicate with teacher Larry Leifer.
Sat in height-adjustable chairs and used laptop to share
information with class and project onto the smart boards.
—Kome Ajegbo
Mechanical engineering professor Leifer’s classroom
in Wallenberg Hall looks like a futuristic scene come
to life. The small tables are on wheels, allowing the
class to reconfigure into groups. Students scattered
about in ergonomically correct chairs can bring their
own laptops or check them out from a rolling metal cabinet.
Anyone in the class can type in commands that display
a website on a large screen. And the notes from the
classroom whiteboards can be saved or printed. This
particular class, a freshman seminar called Designing
the Human Experience, also benefits from a tiny wireless
microphone that feeds into Leifer’s hearing aid,
amplifying his students’ voices.
Some, like Ajegbo, just watch and listen to Leifer,
while others type silently on their laptops. Leifer,
’62, MS ’63, PhD ’69, acknowledges
he can’t be sure whether the laptop users are
taking notes or chatting with a friend on the other
side of the world. “If you are downloading music,
you have to play it for the rest of us,” he jokes.
Leifer’s class, however, is relatively unusual.
Many Stanford classrooms look much as they did 10 (or
50) years ago: students, taking notes with pen and paper,
listen to a professor lecture—with perhaps the
substitution of a PowerPoint presentation for a blackboard.
Some students take notes on laptops, but many say that
computers are too cumbersome to carry around campus.
That’s true even in Wallenberg Hall, a showpiece
in the Main Quad outfitted in 2002 with high-tech classrooms.
It looks great, but in the lobby you might overhear
students complaining that the technology is “gratuitous.”
That’s not to say that computers haven’t
improved the learning experience. Their democratizing
influence allows a student who might hesitate to approach
a faculty giant during office hours to pop her an e-mail.
And because the Internet is always on, students can
more easily collaborate on projects when their schedules
don’t mesh.
Technology has also made a big dent in course management,
says Lois Brooks, the director of academic computing.
About 40 percent of classes use CourseWork, a homegrown
program that enables professors to create course home
pages, post syllabi and other documents, make announcements
to students and give online quizzes. Similarly, panFora
allows students to discuss classwork in an always-available
online forum.
In some cases, students don’t even have to leave
their dorm room to hear a lecture—they can view
it online. Mehran Sahami, a lecturer who teaches an
introductory programming course in the computer science
department, admits that this has pros and cons. Classes
like Sahami’s—mostly in technical fields
like CS—were initially taped so continuing-education
students with full-time jobs could take classes through
the Stanford Center for Professional Development. Now,
however, anonymous surveys show that 10 to 50 percent
of on-campus students take advantage of recorded classes.
Some, like Spiro, register for conflicting courses knowing
that they can watch one online. Others, Sahami concedes,
use the service to avoid getting out of bed in time
for 9 a.m. lectures.
The recorded classes are “a nice resource if
students miss a course for whatever reason or if they
want to review a lecture and watch it at their own pace,”
says Sahami, ’92, MS ’93, PhD ’99.
“But they might in some cases be less inclined
to go in person, which means they have no opportunity
to ask questions.” He also worries that students
who watch online might be more apt to multitask—and
get distracted—than those who are present in the
lecture hall. “I do get a sense that the students
who come to class seem to perform better, but I am not
sure a direct causation can be drawn.” Butler
provides some anecdotal evidence: “I once tried
to skip a statistics class because the prof posted lecture
notes online, but that was a disastrous idea,”
she says. “I flunked two exams that way.”
Of course, attending class doesn’t eliminate
the possibility that students will become distracted.
Students have always written each other notes during
class or read the Daily underneath their desks.
But the wireless Internet access available in 80 percent
of courses provides new opportunities. Spiro’s
technology diary, for example, mentions a student talking
on IM during one of his lecture classes. Most professors
in classes with wireless access address the issue head-on.
Alfano, for example, prohibits personal web surfing
during class, but is thrilled when a student tracks
down an article online that illustrates a point under
discussion.
Overall, though, technology has not wrought the kinds
of dramatic changes in the classroom that it has in
students’ personal lives. “Professors have
not caught up with how this new modality works,”
says communication professor Clifford Nass. “That’s
not to say they are not trying to rethink it—they
are just not sure what to do. It takes a long time to
figure out new ways to educate.” Nass, who is
an expert on digital interfaces, rarely does more than
project a webpage onto a screen, using his computer
as a sort of glorified overhead projector. “We
haven’t figured out the killer app for the classroom
yet,” he says. Even if Nass and his contemporaries
never do, you can bet one of their wired students will.
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