Even at high-tech schools like Case Western Reserve, the techno-divide between professors and students widens. The campus newspaper notes the scandal of faculty running counter to the technolust of the IT people.
One of the IT people exults that “Twenty-first-century learning allows us to be immersed in a digital landscape.” She, like the student journalists, seems confused by growing numbers of professors for whom the phase immersed in a digital landscape doesn’t correlate at all well to what they want students in their classes to be.
I suppose we can anticipate an alliance developing between IT and students at some universities, in which these two groups sort of gang up on faculty as it bans the classroom laptop.
September 16th, 2011 at 10:21AM
My students are “immersed in a digital landscape” – they can multitask – they are web saavy – this new digital era requires new forms of learning – they know more about technology than I do – texting makes them smarter – etc. etc.
Yet when it comes time to turn essays in, their sources are all from the first page of Google searches on the subject, and they have no idea how to insert a page number in the header of a Word document (I tell them to use the “help” feature, and they stare at me blankly).
Excuse me if I fail to find the arguments about my student’s amazing technological expertise convincing.
September 16th, 2011 at 10:52AM
[…] has a link up this morning to an article about banning laptops in classrooms at Case Western which is actually […]
September 17th, 2011 at 10:40AM
I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a graduate student, and I prefer to take notes on my laptop in Word Notebook, in which I can also handily record the lectures of that professor who speaks too quickly, and the program automatically time-stamps the notes I’m taking so I can skip straight to the relevant point in the lecture. I type faster than I can write, and my notes are actually legible. This has been very useful for me in classes where professors allow recording.
On the other hand, I’ve also been a teaching assistant and have sat in the back of classrooms watching students play games and chat on Facebook during class. They always think I can’t see what they’re doing on their 17-inch MacBook Pro screens from three rows back, and are surprised when I call them on it.