My father-in-law forwarded this article from the Washington Post about laptops in the classroom. NPR covered a similar story yesterday on Weekend Edition. You may remember the article in the Chronicle last year. The two recent stories have a similar tone (NPR even uses this phrase): “be careful what you wish for.” Many universities offered laptops to all incoming students. More and more schools are doing this. But now that the students all have the laptops, they have the problem of laptop distraction in the classroom. Both NPR and the Post include a bit about Kieran Mullen freezing a laptop with liquid nitrogen and destroying a laptop in class to make the point (see the video).
The NPR story includes a point that you can also find made by Chris Heard last year. An undergrad interviewed in the story says: “I went through a history class that was just every single day death by PowerPoint. And it just, it was awful.” A professor interviewed agrees: “I think if no one in your lecture hall or your classroom is paying attention to you and you complain about that, that is like the baker complaining about the bread.” Chris believes that “enforced Ludditism does nothing but flex the professor’s power muscles.”
The Mullen laptop destruction presentation is a great example of professorial power muscles. Bolstering this perspective is the further point that distractions did not begin with electronic devices in the classroom. Chris makes this point, as does the professor interviewed in the NPR story. On the other hand, Jared made a good point last year as well, that doodling does not have the same sort of distraction power as does the connected laptop.
So, on the one hand, students have always found ways to embrace distractions. On the other hand, the distractions truly are more accessible and more difficult to avoid with the internet at one’s fingertips. Not only that, someone checking sports on their laptop screen is much more distracting to other students than someone doodling or even reading the newspaper. I had one professor at Fuller adjust for this by asking any students who plan to distract themselves online to sit in the back row, so as not to distract any students behind them. An interesting approach.
This getting a bit long, so I will stop here with the promise of a “part two” later, on my own experience as both student and educator. . . .
For further reading, you can see older reflections from Tim and Tyler. Tim touches on another point raised in Chris’ post, that of needing to change the way we teach, to encourage more active learning. I’ll come back to this.
