Sharing my own experience, I would like to follow-up from my earlier post on what to do about laptops in the classroom. I feel like I’m embedded in the generational transition into this technological problem. I am part of the “in between”. When I was an undergrad, nobody brought laptops to class — even my senior year (2002). After three years had passed and I entered seminary (2005), everybody had a laptop in class (all but a very, very small minority). From what I’ve seen, UCLA students are somewhere in between (though, my wife tells me that her Master of Public Health classes at UCLA had about the same laptop numbers as my Fuller Seminary experience).
From what I can see, there are at least two types of classrooms that need to be addressed: the lecture hall and the discussion classroom. So, here’s a bit about my own time in both:
Taking notes in lecture. I was not the ideal student as an undergrad. Let’s not go into too many of those details, but one of my problems was my entry into the digital age before it really took off in the classroom. For me, taking notes in class by hand felt so useless because I couldn’t search for things later. Relatedly, I was terrible at organizing papers, whereas I’m great at organizing things on my laptop. After the semester ended, both problems escalated: there was no way I was going to be able to control dozens of pieces of paper from each class each semester in any useful manner. Taking notes on paper just seemed (and still seems) futile to me. The notes I have taken on my laptop as a graduate student, however, have been invaluable, even years later. “I remember David Scholer mentioning some interesting Greco-Roman parallel to the Lukan prologue . . . what was that? . . . [searching files] . . . ah, yes, there it is. . . .”
I also tend to agree with the college student from the NPR story I mentioned last time: “‘It’s like high school. I mean we’re college students. I mean we’re paying tuition to come here, a lot of tuition to come here. We shouldn’t be treated like we’re elementary school students.” Yes, laptop computers (particularly when connected to the internet) are a bit risk for distraction. But in the lecture class (I’m talking somewhere over 50 students), I think students need to make the decision for themselves. If they decide to play Farmville instead of listening to the lecture on the agricultural revolution, they will probably get lower points on the exams. They should be free to make that choice, as long as distractions to others can be limited.
Laptops in the discussion-based classroom. Jared believes that laptops should be banned in discussion classrooms, while Chris believes we should be leveraging student attachments to technology. In my discussion sections at UCLA, I have found that there aren’t enough students with laptops to really leverage their presence as Chris suggests. But I am far from coming to Jared’s conclusion. I suppose it is from my own experience as a student. I can’t imagine myself without my Bible software in a doctoral seminar on, say, Deuteronomy. The extreme ease of going from one passage to another to a ancient near eastern inscription to a commentary to a lexicon to a Bible dictionary, etc., makes discussion so much more enriching. Not to mention how helpful it is to take notes on my laptop, as mentioned earlier.
While the undergraduate class on Western Civilization that I teach doesn’t need to be jumping around so much, it may help them to search for a key term in the primary documents we read for that week or to jot down some notes from the discussion. Perhaps even jot down a question before they ask it and then write down any responses to it after they ask the question.
Since attention is so essential in creating an effective discussion environment, I still deter nonessential laptop use by penalizing students’ grades. None of this frivolous “bring donuts in for everyone next time if your phone rings” stuff. If you’re messing around with the laptop, texting on your phone, or even doing the old school newspaper reading, you get one point off on your final grade each time. So, I may not ban laptops, but I have found that my policy (and my demonstration that I mean what I say) allows for a healthier laptop-to-discussion-classroom relationship. And I still (usually) have excellent participation.
Okay, I still have more to say, but I’ll will leave that for a “part three” to come, addressing different teaching methods we might take for different types of classrooms . . .
