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College life in the Internet age The college campus, long a place of scholarship and frontiers of new technology, is being transformed into a new age of electronics by a fleet of laptops, smartphones and connectivity 24 hours a day. On a typical modern-day campus, where every building and most outdoor common areas offer wireless Internet access, one student takes her laptop everywhere. In class, she takes notes with it, sometimes instant-messaging or emailing friends if the professor is less than interesting. In her dorm, she instant-messages her roommate sitting just a few feet away. She is tied to her smartphone, which she even uses to text a friend who lives one floor above her, and which supplies music for walks between classes. Welcome to college life in the 21st century, where students on campus are electronically linked to each other, to professors and to their classwork 24/7 in an ever-flowing river of information and communication. With many schools offering wireless Internet access anywhere on campus, colleges as a group have become the most Internet-accessible spots in the world. Students say they really value their fingertip-access to the boundless amount of information online, and the ability to email professors at 2 a.m. and receive responses the next morning. “I always feel like I have a means of communication---in class and out of class,” says one engineering major. Many are using smartphones, not only to create their own dialects when texting, but also to do more serious work, such as practicing foreign languages and analyzing scripts from their theater classes. In a university class on the history of American radio, students use smartphones to record their own radio shows. The course instructor said, “It’s adding to students’ sense of excitement about the subject.” Professors have been encouraged to tape their lectures and post them online. “We realized there might be some potential for a device that could get attention and encourage sophistica