You don’t need focus groups or fancy market research to find out how customers will use the Internet in the future. Just stop by the apartment of David and Juli Rasmussen.

On a recent afternoon, the married couple—Juli, 30 years old, and David, 29—sit on adjoining couches in their living room on the 14th floor on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are joined by a friend, fellow M.B.A. 2000 graduate Carla Huffman, 29. Portable computers rest on their laps. Carla and Juli play an on-line computer game. David, an Australian, is on-line, too, tuned to an Australian radio station that belts out music.

David displays his digital photo album, which includes pictures from trips to Costa Rica, Australia, and elsewhere—nearly all the trips booked on-line, of course. He pulls out a digital camera and snaps a photo of a visitor, then loads the picture onto his computer and pastes it into the album.

He recounts that, after returning from Costa Rica with stomach trouble, he and Juli second-guessed a doctor’s diagnosis by going on-line to WebMD and came up with an alternative theory. The doctor confirmed the Rasmussens’ diagnosis after the couple demanded that they be tested for giardia.

When a question about the weather comes up, the Rasmussens do more than look out the window; they call up an on-line forecast that is specific to their ZIP Code. Huffman says she uses her e-mail so much, and her phone so little, that she sometimes forgets to retrieve phone messages.

Wires snake around the living room floor, hooking the laptops to a "hub’’ that ultimately plugs into a high-speed connection in the university apartment and links them to MIT’s computer network. "We do most of our work sitting here,’’ David says, the Boston-area skyline jutting up through picture windows behind him.

The apartment is stocked with big bottles of juice and economy-size detergent "ordered on-line and delivered by the HomeRuns.com vans that are a common sight in the Rasmussens’ neighborhood. "You can order things in large quantities and not have to worry about carrying them,’’ Juli says.

Being college students, the Rasmussens prefer ordering out to cooking. So, David pulls up some menus of restaurants that let customers order on-line. They had Vietnamese food last night. Tonight, maybe pizza?

FOLLOW THE CHILDREN
Companies trying to figure out what the customer of the future will look like should keep an eye on the David and Juli Rasmussens of the world, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in an interview with Context. "The Internet is the way the students have signed up for their classes, researched their homework, submitted their homework, and stayed in touch with their university communities," he says. When a company has a technology-based product or service to test—which, these days, is just about every product—Gates says college students are the ones to test it on.

Many companies are already doing so. For instance, IBM, Fujitsu, and Nortel are letting students at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business test drive hundreds of next-generation wireless devices that could replace laptop computers.

College students offer such a good look into the future because they already use the Internet so aggressively. They have grown up with technology, so they don’t find it intimidating, or even surprising. They are, in the words of writer John Perry Barlow, natives in cyberspace while their elders are immigrants. Barbara O’Keefe, former director of the University of Michigan’s Media Union and now a dean at Northwestern University, says: "We’re just now starting to see the first kids come through who are a part of the Web generation. For them, it’s not a wonder. It’s the way the world works."

Students entering college today are as used to surfing on-line as the college students of the 1970s were to watching television and playing vinyl records. According to a 1999 study by Student Monitor, a research firm, 90% of the 1,200 undergrads surveyed use the Internet—66% of them at least once a day. Some 41% log on more than once daily. By contrast, just 13% log on daily among the population as a whole, according to Media Metrix, an Internet audience measurement firm. But, as the rest of the world becomes comfortable with the Internet, everybody will start acting, on-line, more as college students do today.

Students also provide a peek into the future because campuses are wired to give them the sort of superfast connection to the Internet that, while available in many offices, is not yet present in many homes. Example: Using a home PC with a 56K modem—the most common type today—to download a song consisting of five megabytes of data would take a minimum of 12 minutes. With a 1.5-megabit Ethernet connection—the type typically found on campuses—downloading that same song would take just 27 seconds. "Universities are a great broadband playground for these kids,’’ says Jeff Rutenbeck, associate professor and director of digital media studies at the University of Denver.

What is happening on college campuses will increasingly happen in homes, as companies work to speed up home users’ connections to the Internet and as a proliferation of devices makes use of the Internet ubiquitous.

WIRED, AND NOT FROM CAFFEINE
So, what does the world of the future look like? What happens when you have people who are fluent on the Internet and you give them nearly instantaneous access?

The short answer is that they use it a lot, practically all the time. But there are some subtleties, too—some surprises and some complications.

To figure out just how wired students really are, Context decided to practice what the students preach. Context sent an e-mail request to several hundred students on a list compiled by a colleague. Within 48 hours, dozens responded with the suggestions that provided the outline of this story. Context also used ProfNet.com, an on-line service, to locate professors. Context supplemented those e-mails with a campus visit and, of course, the numerous phone calls that are the basis of good, old-fashioned, solid reporting.

Context found that, at one typical wired campus, the University of Denver, 18,000 ports have been installed where the school’s 9,000 students can plug in their laptops and get high-speed Internet connections. This includes every dorm room, faculty office, and staff office, the school library, and the new business school building. In addition, the university has 47 "smart-to-the-seat" classrooms—where students can plug in their laptops at their desks to take notes, send e-mail, or do research on the Web during class.

The University of Texas has even wired the campus bowling alley and pool hall. Between frames or tough pool shots, students can check e-mail, surf the Web, or do homework. Other campuses, such as Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, have installed kiosks for students who don’t want to schlep a laptop around. The kiosks are essentially PCs that leave only the screen, keyboard, and mouse exposed. The PCs are connected to the university network, so all a student needs is her password and logon.

At MIT’s Sloan School, students plug into speedy connections in the lounges and hallways, as well as in the residential buildings. E-mail kiosks are distributed liberally within the school buildings. Mac Chinsomboon, 30, an M.B.A. 2000 graduate, tells how one day he was expecting an important e-mail but had forgotten to bring his laptop to school. "I was trying to schedule a phone interview with a very busy venture capitalist on the West Coast," he says. He went to a kiosk to check his mail, and there was the message. "He had given me some slots in his schedule, and I picked one," Chinsomboon says. If not for the kiosk, he could have missed that opportunity.

Carnegie Mellon University has gone so far as to build a showcase wireless network, so people anywhere on the main campus don’t even have to plug in to get a high-speed connection to the school’s computer network. By summer’s end, the capability for wireless connections is to be extended to remote buildings off campus.

All these network connections have changed the way students communicate. In addition to phones, there’s not only constant e-mail but also "instant messaging," which lets people know when those on a buddy list are on-line and which lets the buddies send messages that appear instantly on each others’ screens. Instant messaging is becoming a whole new type of communication. It can also create amusing problems of overload, when a student going through his e-mail while talking on a cell phone gets an instant message and feels obliged to attend to that conversation, too.

Students wind up talking about things that might not have come up in the past. For instance, students at the University of Michigan business school recently did an e-mail survey to find ways to cut the waiting time in lines at the student snack bar.

Music, always a staple of dorm life, no longer focuses on the hit CD. Students play music stored on their PCs—music they obtained by downloading it from the Internet or by exchanging MP3 files with each other through services such as Napster.

Classrooms, too, feel a whole lot different than those of only a few years ago. At a business law class in MIT’s Sloan School on a recent day, seven of the 50 students were using laptops. Other classes have as many as half the students using laptops. In a course where there were guest speakers, students were simultaneously listening to a speaker, checking out the home page of the speaker’s company, looking for news on the company, sending e-mail, and taking notes on their machines.

In another MIT class, David Rasmussen surfed the Web for information about Excite@Home while its chief financial officer, Ken Goldman, was speaking to the class. Rasmussen asked about a partnership that the company, which provides high-speed access to the Internet, had formed with an Australian company—no doubt a far more detailed query than Goldman would have received in years past.

In an investment class taught by MIT Professor Andrew Lo, who is admired by students for his financial savvy, students listen carefully for comments on individual companies’ prospects. Some students, still sitting in their chairs, buy or sell the companies’ stocks based on the comments.

Of course, the possibility for abuse is there. "There have definitely been cases where people have spent more time on-line surfing during a class than actively participating,’’ says Jerry Aubin, 30, an M.B.A. 2000 graduate from the University of Texas. The university’s administration is among those that have installed network "kill switches’’ that let a professor isolate the room and bar Internet access during class. Professors try to keep students honest by asking pop questions of those who don’t seem to be listening, and some professors get annoyed enough to ban the laptops from class. Some professors consider laptop usage a slap in the face, a sign the students must be bored.

Not that professors aren’t embracing the use of computers. Some 54% of today’s college courses use e-mail, up from 44% in 1998 and 20% in 1995, according to a 1999 study by the Campus Computing Project. The research firm also found that 77% of the institutions made course catalogs available on-line in 1999, up from 65% in 1998. Some college admissions offices are also starting to use e-mail to quickly send out acceptances to those applying for admission.

"Several of our professors don’t even hand out a syllabus any longer. All of their information, including homework assignments and solutions, are posted to their individual Web pages,’’ says Mak Azadi, 29, an M.B.A. 2000 graduate from Carnegie Mellon. "Even the administrative functions—such as registration, reporting job offers, or adding and dropping classes—are done on-line."

Automation may be improving the quality of classwork. "More and more students are reading my lecture notes before they get to class,’’ says Ken Graetz, an assistant professor of psychology at University of Dayton. The students are better prepared, he says, so "we have much deeper discussions." Graetz says these changes mean he is moving away from the standard lecture format, where a teacher stands at the front of the room and imparts information. "Students don’t need to write down everything the teacher says or flashes on the screen because they can go to the class Web site and get [the lecture notes] whenever they want," he says. "Teachers are spending less time lecturing and much more time collaborating with students." Many teachers supplement classwork by requiring that students participate in weekly discussions on-line.

At the University of Texas business school, Ricardo Cantoni, 31, recounts how an ill classmate used teleconferencing software to listen in on an e-commerce forum. "This way, our colleague who was out sick could at least hear the class presentation," Cantoni says.

At the University of Michigan, students in a teacher-certification program unveiled a whole new form of classwork. Asked to write a paper about tasteless Web sites, a group of students took the assignment a step further. They made a movie of a person viewing the sites and broadcast, or streamed, the movie over the Internet.

Teachers report that technology is not only making their lives more interesting but also easier. They say e-mail allows them to limit their office hours yet still be accessible to students. Susanne Woods, provost of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., says that a decade ago she’d get two or three phone calls a night at her home during finals period. With e-mail, she can reply to queries from her night-owl students in the early morning hours that suit her best. "Students and faculty can reach each other in a civil way at hours that accommodate each other," she says. "It actually helps your privacy. I’m getting many fewer phone calls during dinnertime."

All that dependence on on-line communication does have its downside. "It creates a special challenge for the faculty," says Peter Mitchell, president of Albion College, a liberal-arts college in Albion, Mich. "We find the students are unable to discern quality information from misinformation and junk information." Faculty members at Albion now insist that at least a third of students’ references in term papers be references from somewhere other than the Internet. They want students to recognize there are different levels of quality, with something like a book representing a higher commitment to quality than a posting on a list-serve does. The policy is also aimed at keeping students from becoming too isolated—spending all their time sitting in front of computers in their dorm rooms, Mitchell says.

Some teachers also report trouble controlling the flow of communication from students. Teachers occasionally find themselves deluged with e-mail questions and requests. A few even report feeling stalked by students, who use instant-messaging systems to see when professors are on-line and then pester the teachers with small talk.

Of course, not every college student today is a geek, glued to the Internet and buying the latest digital gadgets. "It’s really a comparatively small number who are creating massive Web sites or downloading large amounts of video, images, or anything else," says Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Project.

MIT computer science student David Maze, 22, is among those who don’t rely on on-line shopping. He worries about the security of his credit-card information on the Internet and besides, he enjoys shopping. "I like to go off and buy things in person. I have the physical product in my hand and that makes me feel more comfortable,’’ he explains.

But there is no doubt that the ultrawired students, like the Rasmussens, are paving the way for the rest of us. At the end of 1999, only 27% of U.S. households could get high-speed Internet access via a cable modem and just 11% could get high-speed digital subscriber line service, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm. But by 2004, 79% of households are expected to be "cable ready," and 70% are forecast to be "DSL ready."

By then, of course, the kids in college will be on to the next thing. Already, at the University of Toronto, students of Professor Steve Mann are testing his cutting-edge inventions, such as a "wearable computer." The teeny PC is carried in a shirt pocket or elsewhere on a person’s body. The keyboard is a hand-held control that is smaller than a Coke can. Another Mann invention, "EyeTap" technology, uses ordinary-looking eyeglasses to beam images into the user’s eyes. By the time these or similarly wild-sounding inventions are in widespread use, the e-mail kiosks and smart-to-the-seat classrooms may look as low-tech—even quaint—as vinyl records and transparency projectors look to students like the Rasmussens now.

Fillion is a free-lance writer based in Evergreen, Colo. He can be reached at rfillion@mindspring.com.