… you start to get militant. Here’s the Boston College student newspaper editorial board.

[A]n overload of technology in the classroom has become a hindrance rather than a help to the learning process and that a return to the basics of teaching and note taking methods would benefit all.

All too often, laptop screens flash Facebook news feeds, the latest from “The Sports Guy” on ESPN.com, or the newest headlines on The New York Times. These online activities are a distraction not only to the participants, but also to those in the surrounding seats.

The issue of technology abuse is happening both in the desks and behind the podium. Increasingly, professors are relying heavily on teaching aids such as PowerPoint instead of the classical and traditional method of lecturing. A professor’s use of technology in the classroom, if not utilized properly, can create a teaching crutch that may be indicative of a larger wound. Appropriate teaching with technology is possible, but it can only be undertaken and utilized by the professors who are already skilled and excellent communicators.

Concerns about the overuse of technology in the classroom have created a new and vocal “teach naked” movement spearheaded by educators like Jose Bowen at Southern Methodist University. Additionally, research presented in both The Chronicle of Higher Education and the British Educational Research Journal suggests that students are more disengaged when computers are used in the classroom, and it is the lively debate and round-table discussions with peers that they found most valuable and memorable.

If this is an issue for students watching a PowerPoint, just imagine the additional negative effects of retreating behind a personal computer screen.

Some may argue that taking notes with a computer allows one to be more thorough, as most of us can type faster than we write. In reality, however, laptop note-taking prompts students to mindlessly type word-for-word what professors say or project in a presentation. With a notebook, students are forced to process what the professors say, to fashion ideas in their own terms, to paraphrase. Computer note-taking provokes regurgitation; manual note-taking provokes thought.

[W]e as students need to consciously make the decision to set aside our Facebooks or “farms” during the time we spend in lectures.

It’s a sad sad situation… Though I’m sure we’ll be able to find some stuff to laugh about… Like…

Like the fact that many universities have committed gazillions of dollars to high-technifying every second of class time — making laptops mandatory onaccounta they’re so great; making everybody buy cartloads of clickers — and now students are in rebellion.

Like the fact that universities are going to have to start trotting out their technospecialists on staff to give speeches to the students about how it’s actually obviously in their best interests to be taught by technoids instead of people… Latest thing and all… you won’t be ready for the big bad world out there if you’re not a technoid too…

But the students won’t listen and they’ll keep getting more naked in the classroom and insisting on their professor being naked and the school will keep issuing the professor more techo-clothes and putting the professor in more how-to-teach-like-a-technoid workshops…

When all that technology outlay turns out to be wasted money… When students become human beings and professors become technoids… Well, it’ll be fun to watch is all I’m saying.

… some of the links between technology and a dead classroom.

An except:

… “[C]lickers” [are] little anonymous devices that allow students to answer multiple choice questions in class without having to raise their hand and be singled out as correct or incorrect.

There are profits being made out of “classroom response systems.” With these systems of clickers, graphics and software, shy people don’t have to step out of their comfort zone…

…Historiann.  Historiann’s proprietor comments on UD:

Wow … and I thought I was the crankiest young fogey around! 

But hey babe, check it out: UD ain’t young.

UD‘s campus, George Washington University, also begins to acknowledge the obvious.

Facebook, video-chatting and instant messaging may soon be a thing of the past – at least in some GW classrooms.

A growing number of professors are banning or restricting the use of laptop computers in their classrooms in an attempt to get students to pay attention and engage in classroom discussions.

… Sophomore Joe Goldman … said he does not mind that his professor bans laptops in his class.

“I find the use of a computer to be terribly distracting. I already have a BlackBerry, if I had a computer in class I’d literally be staring at a screen all day,” he said.

… “Students pay a lot of money to attend this institution, but I’m sure it’s no one’s intent that people should be throwing that money away,” [one professor said]. “If lectures are being compromised, it’s not in anyone’s best interest to use them.”

… Georgetown Law professor David Cole said 80 percent of his students who were anonymously surveyed reported that they are more engaged in class discussion when they are laptop-free, 70 percent said that they liked the no-laptop policy, and 95 percent admitted that they use their laptops in class for “purposes other than taking notes.”

GW professor Tapan Nayak also said he has banned laptops in his statistics courses.

“In the past, some of my students were using laptops to do other things, checking e-mail, surfing the Internet,” Nayak said. “For my class it is not necessary or that helpful to use a laptop.”

“In general I’d say that laptops are kind of like a double-edged sword in the classroom. We are only using what is given to us, but we all know what people are going to do in the classroom and that’s not pay attention,” said Zach Hanover, a student in SMPA professor Carole Bell’s class. Bell has also banned laptops in her class….

UD thinks that eventually the only professors to encourage laptop use will be those who already stuff their classrooms with PowerPoint and clickers and anything else that will allow them the same screening from their students that the screened students have from them.

If UD‘s right, students who want to stay on Facebook during class should identify professors suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome. Or borderline Asperger’s.