UD‘s only question, as you know if you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, is What took so long?
This article about NYU is amusing. One professor, who points out that laptops create a physical barrier between students and professors, says that if you love laptops in the classroom, “Drop out of NYU and go enroll in the University of Phoenix.”
The NYU student reporter is way down on no-laptop professors like UD. It turns out we’re motivated by fear:
[E]ducators are always afraid that their lessons will be overshadowed by the outside world. Often, that’s because their lessons are boring.
Digital media scholar and professor Melanie Kohnen, also of the Media, Culture and Communication department, thinks that teachers who enforce a draconian laptop lockdown are “motivated by the fear of losing students’ attention.”
It is scandalous. The idea of trying to arrange your classroom so that people pay attention…
Anyway. Read the comments on the article. They’re very thoughtful.
September 13th, 2012 at 8:19PM
One of the comments got to my pet peeve – that a student’s use of educational opportunities only affects that one person. Students who are unprepared or distracted impoverish the classroom for their classmates. It’s a pity that so many students don’t understand this…or don’t care.