Why yes, Brad, that's a great idea!

Is this really a good idea?

The project was designed to incorporate wireless technology into large classrooms to address the "chronic problems" of large lecture classes--impersonality, isolation, and difficulties in engaging students intellectually.

I agree that there are parts of my lectures during which students would rather have the options of using IM technology to flirt with each other and of surfing the web. But are they good judges? Is this a capability we really want to give them?

Would you rather that students be doomed to play Solitaire, or god forbid, FreeCell on their laptops during lectures? The more we expose America's young people to card games, the more likely they could become compulsive gamblers, and just maybe, could pursue a life of crime! We can't have that!

I remember a class I took at Berkeley last summer (PS 140D: War Violence & Terrorism), in which there was a student who usually sat one or two rows in front of me in the lecture hall, with his laptop. He spent the bulk of most of the lectures -- nearly two hours a pop, no less -- playing a freeware "snowball fight" game of some sort. And he'd always cheat: He'd take two members of his team and drag them to the bottom corner of the screen, where enemy balls could not reach, due to programming shortcomings in the game. If that young man had wireless access, at least he'd be reading, or downloading better games, or something.

And Brad, "flirt"? All wireless access would do would be to eliminate the passage of paper notes... thus helping the environment! Don't you know where you work?

Full disclosure: I am, uh, a student. And I often use IM technology. (-: