Video in all pockets: Comcast everywhere at Drexel, UD

What do professors think at Drexel, Delaware and the other schools signing deals with Comcast to give all dorm-dwelling students, not just cable TV, but also cloud-based app-linked Xfinity TV on their smartphones, laptops, iPads and Android tablets (as I wrote in today's Philadelphia Inquirer)?

Drexel political scientist Richardson Dilworth says video was in over-supply even before it became 'free': "Students are already so inundated with moving images and other screen data that I think it's a matter of what they tune out -- rather than when they have access, which is already all the time, and what they have access to, which is already pretty much everything."

Dilworth is among the profs who still try to enforce an in-class laptop ban, "because inevitably students are emailing or watching shows." But even as his ban leaves students hand-inking notes on old-fashioned paper pads, "they still often are peaking at their phones under their desks, he added. "Maybe it's just that I'm a boring professor."

Mark Stehr, economist at Drexel's LeBow business school, tried to look on the bright side: Once Comcast adds a promised video-recording feature, "I could see one advantage -- it would make it easier for students to watch any videos I assign or video lectures I might record for them" on a Drexel internal channel. "It may be something that works, given people's shortening attention spans."

At Delaware, Prof. Michael Chajes can afford to be blase': He teaches engineering students, who are presumably less distracted, or already adept at managing overloads. "I don't see this having a big impact on students' attention spans," he told me.