Harvard launches wireless classroom

It's not what you'd expect a college classroom to sound like, especially at Harvard. It's as noisy as a singles bar on a Friday night. Students are talking to those beside them and in the rows in front and behind them. Some of the conversations are heated. Many students are clicking what look like TV remote control devices. Some are using cell phones or huddled over laptop computers. The teacher, Eric Mazur, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, checks his cell-phone screen to see how the students are doing.

It seems more like chaos than class. But Mazur sees this as the classroom of the future, where students teach one another with the help of wireless technology.

"I cannot make people learn," he says. "Learning is a hard process. Students have to do it by themselves. I see myself as an available and encouraging coach. If I can use technology to facilitate that role, I think it's marvelous."

The technology he talks about includes a Web site that students can access, in class or outside, with wireless devices such as cell phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants. On the screens are questions that Mazur expects only about half of them can answer. Those questions provoke animated discussions.

The questions are shaped by misconceptions that Mazur looks for and then corrects. The students learn the right answers from one another.

Mazur wants students to learn in the classroom, instead of spending their time writing in notebooks. With wireless communication, teachers will not be confined to the front of the class, tied to blackboards and slide projectors. "That is what classrooms will be like in 2010," he predicts.

Physics 1b at Harvard is not quite there yet. The University does not require students to buy Web-enabled cell phones or laptops, so those who don't have them use remote control "clickers" to register their answers on screens at the front of the room.

"We developed a hybrid system that lets us have a wireless classroom in 2006 instead of waiting until 2010 when all students will carry wireless devices with them," Mazur says.

Harvard started using clickers in 1998. Now the infrared gadgets are used in colleges all over the world in courses ranging from physics and economics to art and French drama. That's a path Mazur sees cell phones and laptops following.