I have a love/hate relationship with the wireless access in our law school classrooms. On the one hand, it saddens me that my students surf the Internet during class. On the other hand, Socratic dialogue goes so much faster when the students can IM each other answers. (Although I wish they’d be a little more subtle about it. It’s so obvious what’s going on when the student you’ve called on initially looks shocked and clueless but then glances down at her computer screen — not her casebook, where the answer may actually lie — and spits back a perfect answer.)
I was a little sad to learn from these NYU students that “no one IMs anymore.”