From today’s Yale Daily News.
Facebook stalking in class is no longer an option for a growing number of Yale students.
In an attempt to encourage students to pay attention to lectures and to facilitate class discussions, at least two dozen professors and teaching assistants have banned, or at least discouraged, laptop use since classrooms were outfitted with wireless in 2006. Despite the inconvenience the policy poses of taking notes by hand [God yes. The whole taking notes by hand thing. It’s like not having a dishwasher.], many of the professors said in interviews that they have not received any complaints about their no-laptops policies, and a handful of them even said they received positive feedback.
It’s no secret that students using laptops often multi-task in class — answering e-mails, instant messaging, reading the news and occasionally even taking notes.
… Five professors interviewed said laptops put up a literal barrier between students and the professor, hampering discussions and a sense of community within the classroom.
“I want to interact with the students. I want them to be paying attention,” said political science and religious studies professor Andrew March, who banned laptops from his Spring 2008 seminar, “Islamic Political Thought.” “It is impossible, even with the best intentions, to stay off e-mail, the Internet, Solitaire.”
… English and political science lecturer Mark Oppenheimer ’96 GRD ’03, who is teaching “Classics of Political Journalism” this semester, said his policy against laptops is no different from any other classroom regulation a professor might have — such as no swearing and timeliness.
In discussion sections, laptops also make it difficult to read the teaching fellows’ or other students’ body language, said Robin Morris GRD ’11, a TF for “Terrorism in America 1865-2001” this semester.
“By looking at students’ faces during discussion, I can look for signs of confusion, disagreement, boredom, excitement — all signals that help me determine my next move in the classroom,” she said. [Why not trash all of online learning! Hasn’t this woman heard that faceless technology’s sweeping the nation? The Atlanta Journal Constitution quotes a distance educator who tells her students “Give me a smiley if you get it.“]
Taking notes by hand not only eliminates the noise of typing — often distracting in a small seminar — but also forces students to filter information, instead of passively taking notes verbatim, Oppenheimer added.
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies professor Shimon Anisfeld, who banned laptop use from his two courses this spring, “Water Resource Management” and “Organic Pollutants in the Environment,” even used a comic strip to illustrate his point that laptop use takes away from the atmosphere of the classroom. The strip, which Anisfield showed his class the first day, depicts a student having an online conversation in class — a humorous exaggeration of the consequences of classroom laptop use. [UD‘s gotta admit that if she found herself in Organic Pollutants she might seek some form of relief … I mean, Water Resource Management, okay, sounds riveting… But Organic Pollutants might pose a problem… ]
Since enacting the policy, professors said they have seen levels of classroom interaction and grades improve.
“I have seen marvelous results,” March said. “I was ambivalent at the beginning, but I would never go back to allowing laptops.”
And at least some students are warming up to the idea, too.
In his course evaluations for “Eastern Europe Since 1914” in Fall 2007, history professor Timothy Snyder asked students how they felt about his policy on laptops. He received unanimously positive responses. One student even asked why more Yale classes don’t enact a ban, he recalled.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:08AM
"Taking notes by hand not only eliminates the noise of typing — often distracting in a small seminar — but also forces students to filter information, instead of passively taking notes verbatim"…not so sure about the second part of that statement. I knew a philosophy professor who told the following story, which is from pre-laptop days.
After teaching an intro class for a couple of weeks, he got tired of the glazed-eyes students who were taking notes but showed no sense of actually being psychologically present. So he announced to the class, "You need to forget everything I told you for the last two weeks–it was all wrong."
At least as he tells it, there was still no reaction–just 25 students, each making an entry in their notebook along the lines of "forget last 2 wks–was all wrong."
January 28th, 2009 at 12:34PM
This is funny.
I remember taking notes in Organic Chemistry class. Going home and recopying them and making annotations etc. Since Organic Chemistry – the scourge of pre-meds – is visual, this really helped.
Laptops in organic = not a good idea
A whining dinosaur.
[Now let’s see, maybe we could use a WACOM tablet to take organic chemistry notes so they are transferred to a computer, that would allow us still to be high tech and keep the president and the governor happy…]
January 28th, 2009 at 3:39PM
The comic in question actually mentions some organic pollutants.
Laptops are not very good for taking any kind of notes at all. Even at a computer programming conference, laptops are excellent for a hands-on coding demonstration — possibly analogous to lab equipment in chemistry class — but no one uses them to take notes, not even during a technical presentation about programming the laptops.
There really is no application that would let you effectively input salient but forgettable information in real-time through a keyboard.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:31AM
Dom, I’ve taken quite good notes (okay, closer to transcriptions, but my handwritten notes are also close to transcriptions) with laptops. The ability to apply hierarchical styles in one-click helps make up for the inability to draw arrows. But I don’t understand your last sentence—well, I comprehend the words but cannot imagine what you mean.
And I would just like to mention that the inconvenience of notes by hand is not the taking of them, but the inability to search them, to copy and paste into re-organized thematic study files, possibly the inability to re-read them, etc.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:17AM
Hmmm…
I guess it depends on the subject matter. Hard to put a benzene ring into your notes on a laptop. Could be done, but there is no way you could keep up with a good lecturer.
Of course if the lecturer provided you – before the class – with power point slides of the lecture, you probably could take notes with a laptop.
I don’t think this is a good idea. But this matter has been talked to death so I won’t go there.