My friend Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli of Haifa U writes a fascinating column in Calcalist where he examines our new digital world (if you’re one of my readers to whom Hebrew isn’t Greek, take a look!)   His last post examines the dilemma of WiFi use in university classrooms: some universities are turning the net off, to ensure students will listen to the lectures instead of mucking around in Facebook; others prefer to keep access available, claiming freedom of speech and the fact that with cellular web access the battle is lost in any case.

Sheizaf personally advocates the second position, which his university adopts. True, he says, many students are distracted by the connection, but regressing to pre-Internet times is not the answer. Our world, our society, have changed to the point that ubiquitous connectivity is a fact of life. Today’s good students are those who learn more and better by surfing, exploring and discussing things in real time in parallel to the formal lecture they’re hearing. As he concludes: “it’s time to concede the net’s victory and to accept it”!

Thinking this over, I certainly agree that there’s no turning back, and as I’ve been saying for years, management – whether in a university or in a company – can either adopt the new technology early and be a partner in influencing its usage, or try to fight it and lose. That said, the vision of the students using the net to deepen their studies, attractive though it is, troubles me. The good students will surely do so, because there’s no stopping a smart young person on a quest for knowledge and success; but there will be those at the other end of the distribution who may not be up to such self-discipline. To the extent that WiFi can be used for either learning or distraction, might it be introducing a differentiator that will increase the gap between the best and the worst students, depending on how they use it?

Since we want to create an education system where all students are helped to achieve their best, I sense a need for some degree of guidance here. Certainly, as Sheizaf points out in his article, the traditional frontal classroom needs to be replaced with a model where students are encouraged to interact online; being proactive in driving this transition is the way to go. But after providing the connectivity (technology is always the easy part), how adept will our universities be in inventing the new behavioral model? Do they really know how to modify the old one so the surfing enhances the learning experience rather than muddling it? How do we instill the required discipline (and how much is required?), and make the students live the exuberant possibilities of a learning model we have yet to fully understand? This will require professors who can guide such interaction and encourage the critical, intelligent use of web resources by all the students. Last time I checked professors weren’t even screened for lecturing skills, much less web-use facilitation ability; so creating a cadre of such brave new teachers (and retrofitting the old ones) will take some doing and time. At least, knowing that people like Prof. Rafaeli are on it makes this difficult task seem less scary.