Emerging Technologies Consulting

Just a month ago, I pointed to two discussions around the idea of banning laptops in the classroom, and this week Tim Burke references Margaret Soltan’s pulling out a quote from an interview with Douglas Grooothuis, author of The Soul in Cyberspace.  How’s that for a tangled web.  So here’s my thought.  Laptops, netbooks, mobile devices, they’re here to stay.  Students are going to use them, sometimes effectively, sometimes not.  Did we, do we police their handwritten notetaking?  Do we ask if they’re jotting down the key points or drawing a cartoon version of us?  In junior high and high school, maybe.  In college, no.  My general feeling is that students are grownups and while I think we can do things in our classrooms to model best practices for using electronic devices, as many suggest, for example having students look up information, I think it’s up to the students themselves to learn how best to engage with the class or to find classes that work for them.  And I don’t have a problem with wandering around a room so that students are inclined to keep their laptop screen clean.  And yes, I’ve seen students with Facebook up.  I don’t call them on it.  Instead I ask them a hard question related to the discussion.  If they’ve been paying attention, they’ll be able to answer it.  More than 9 times out of 10, they can.  For a student perspective on this, read Shannon Hauser’s comment.

I think we should ignore the naysayers.  It’s their perogative to ban laptops if they want.  They can’t tell the rest of us what to do.

Two posts about this issue caught my eye yesterday.  One, from Mike Bogle at Tech Ticker that points to a faculty member using wikis right in the classroom in a really interesting way.  He points out that some students do use technology inappropriately in the classroom, posting status updates to Facebook about how awful the lecture is, for example.  The solution, he says, is not to ban laptops, but to figure out a way to use them effectively.  The professor he uses as an example has the students collectively build lecture notes while he’s lecturing.  This strikes me as a really good use, especially for lecture-based classes.  Many students want Power Point slides or some kind of lecture notes to refer back to, and thanks to lecture recording and course websites, the professor often provides these; however, having the students do this themselves means that they’re learning good note-taking skills and probably remembering the content better.  I haven’t watched the whole video that Mike embeds, but it looks like a really good explanation of how one might implement this in a class.

The second post is from Wired Campus at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it references a talk by Cole Camplese (someone I get to meet in a month) where he suggests ways that students might draw information from the Internet during class and bring that to the class discussion.  I know someone who does this regularly.  Anyone who has a laptop in class (and we’re a campus where laptop usage is fairly sparse) gets called on to look stuff up.  This means that they usually don’t have time to be in Facebook or on IM.  They have to be ready to respond.  The comments on the post are representative of the camps people tend to fall in: those that outright want to ban laptops and those that think professors should find a way to use them effectively.  I do think it’s okay to tell students to close their laptops for portions of the class; I’ve done this in my classes.  But I think one needs to treat students like the adults they are.  Maybe they’re taking notes, maybe they’re not.  This would be true without laptops.  I can remember writing letters home during some particularly boring lectures.  Most express a concern that the students are not concentrating, and that may indeed be true, but there may be ways to use laptops to help with concentration.  The wiki example above might help students focus.

One comment on the WC post really struck me as odd:

I teach in the sciences, like the two physics professors in the article. I agree completely with them. So do virtually all my peers… the only holdouts are the folks teaching the non-majors courses. There isn’t as much priority in teaching critical thinking, so those instructors can goof around a lot more.

There seemed to be a lot of assumptions going on in this.  First, that teachers teaching non-majors weren’t also teaching critical thinking.  I would guess, based on the science faculty I’ve talked to, that those teaching non-majors try harder to connect their subject to students’ lives, helping them see science at work in everything they do, or helping them understand and critique science as it gets reported in the news.  Also, the idea that figuring out effective ways to use technology is goofing around is particularly galling.  The easy way out is to ban them altogether, and in part, I don’t blame faculty for doing this.  It’s hard enough to teach without also figuring out what to do with this new element.  And that’s the conclusion I increasingly come to about using technology, whether it’s laptops in the classroom or a blog or a wiki.  Using these tools effectively requires a lot of creative thinking, a lot of work to set up, and a lot of retraining of students who are used to being lectured at, and that’s really hard work, not goofing around.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Has the Sage on the Stage Run Amok? Banning Technology in Class (languagelabunleashed.org)