The author of a study of laptop use in upper-level law school courses summarizes his conclusions.

Yet another student rages against the machine.

Otherwise, you risk losing your temper.

Yet another student – this one at Iowa State – gets it.

[T]he professors urging us to put away our laptops in favor of pens and notebooks may have a legitimate concern. After all, we go to college to learn from our professors; perhaps we should eliminate the monitor screen standing in the way.

And most of it’s coming from students, not professors.

… After members of the faculty voiced concerns regarding laptop use in their classrooms, [the Committee on Academic Technology] took the admirable first step of consulting with the student body before considering formal regulatory action.

… Professors should make clear where they stand on personal electronic device use in their classrooms. The syllabi that are given to each student at the beginning of the semester would be the ideal medium for professors to express their individual policies…

As students and faculty become increasingly frustrated by rude and destructive classroom laptop use, more and more universities are holding these discussions, debating the relative merits of across-the-board bans and case-by-case choice on the part of professors.

Longtime UD readers know what UD has predicted: In time, students will be allowed – nay, encouraged – to use laptops only in radically PowerPointed classrooms. If you’re a professor who wants to be left alone to read slides aloud for fifty minutes twice a week, what’s not to like about laptops? They’re your salvation.

Yet another article in a student newspaper – this one at Tufts – about professors banning laptops from their classrooms.

What’s a laptop-mad university to do if its professors won’t play along?

How about this? UD is surprised the campus tech brigade hasn’t come up with it yet. It’ll make looking at sixty laptops fun.

Universities will design and distribute paste-ons for the backs of student laptops. Each paste-on will be a large, lifelike image of an engaged and attentive student. Wide-eyed, perky. At the beginning of each class, when students flip open their laptops, the professor will experience a rush of excitement as she’s greeted by a roomful of eager faces.

If the professor can stay focused on the images while teaching, she may be able to as it were tease herself into giving an enthusiastic lecture.

The model here would be men and inflatable sex dolls.

A Boston University professor of music is about to retire.

From BU Today:

… [Joel Sheveloff] reflects on nearly half a century as not just a teacher, but a thorn in the side of the administration and a beloved but incorrigible nudge. With his gravelly, Mailer-esque voice and old-fashioned suspenders, Sheveloff has a way of wresting control of a room and holding forth on just about anything. He may grouse about everything from his department’s curriculum to the traffic on the BU Bridge, but if he criticizes his students at all, it is with affectionate bemusement. He likes them.

They like him back: “I was in Dr. Sheveloff’s class in 1973, and I remember him to this day as one of those rare people who inspire your life on all levels,” writes an alum on Ratemyprofessors.com. “Of course his knowledge is awesome,” writes a student, “but what makes Dr. Shev one of the best is his insight. He understands the paradoxes of the human condition and how music expresses the full range of this experience.” And from another student: “Professor Sheveloff is hilarious. He makes each lecture immensely enjoyable by joking, dancing around, and just creating a pleasant class atmosphere.”

… All of Sheveloff’s complaints are major, from whether BU’s orchestra and choir directors should be full-time (they are now, he says, thanks to him) to an increase in course credits from three to four (“they make the candy bar smaller and charge you more for it”) to what he believes is the pandemic misinterpretation of Bach’s Musical Offering.

… His passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Rogers and Hart songbooks are part of what fueled his friendship with John Daverio (CFA’75,’76, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at the age of 48. The loss devastated Sheveloff, who spoke in a eulogy for Daverio of how “for more than a quarter of a century, John and I discussed issues, shared intimacies, and otherwise interacted by employing strategically placed song lines in our dialogue. We both enjoyed finding relevant lines — this game belonged to the two of us.”

… When it comes to J. S. Bach, Sheveloff serves up a feast of superlatives. Bach, he asserts, is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music.”

As he expounds on a quirky meter in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, an assistant pops her head in the room to tell Sheveloff he has a phone call from his wife, whom he refers to as “She who must be obeyed.” He’s been married 48 years. “Feels like 75,” he says.

… Where they once scrawled in spiral notebooks, students now sit in class tapping away at laptops. “Students think they can get anything they need from Google,” he says, an arm swiping the air in the universal sign for oy vey. “My colleagues are concerned about kids sitting in class e-mailing and looking at Facebook. In my class I say, go ahead — I’m not your mother.” …

Glenn Gass, a music professor at Indiana University, is too diplomatic to say the other part of this. Not all professors are passionate, or care whether students learn anything. These professors are happy – grateful, really – to Powerpoint their way through fifty minutes of Laplandic silence.

Gass speaks.

“It drives me crazy as a teacher to see a bunch of glowing laptops, and they’re doing a bunch of things that aren’t related to class,” Gass said. “If you really want to learn, you can’t do something else while you’re listening.”

An IU lecturer, Michelle Mosely, speaks:

“I don’t allow laptops at all in my class,” she said. “It’s a distraction. I don’t even allow cell phones or laptops on their desks.”

Mosely, like Gass, has fairly large classes, and she said students in large classes believe themselves to be invisible in the crowd.

Mosely penalizes her students for using laptops or cell phones in her class, which results in a verbal warning, deduction of participation points or students being asked to leave her classroom and not receive credit for that day.

Sitting in my women studies class, an odd tranquility filled the room. [Awkward opening sentence. Makes it sounds as though a tranquillity was sitting in the room. Rewrite along these lines maybe: “An odd tranquillity filled my women’s studies classroom.”] Although the day’s topic revolved around sex-change surgeries, there were no obscene noises made by keyboards, no glare from a computer screen logged on to Twitter, and I was not subjected to watching a random YouTube video playing on a screen in front of me. Perfect tranquility for those of us who were trying to learn.

From day one, our professor was very adamant about her non-computer policy — simply, no computers allowed. “The following activities disrupt an educational environment and will not be tolerated: talking, texting, phone calling, giggling, playing Texas HoldEm or other games, im-ing, emailing and surfing (on the web). Should you engage in any of these, you will be asked to leave,” states the class’ syllabus. [Giggling?]

The student paints a scenario:

“I’m only going to take notes,” you might be telling yourself, but let’s paint a scenario. You’re in your chemistry class and your professor is rambling on about something you learned two quarters ago. You are, at the moment, taking notes on your laptop. What to do? Option A: Google something random. Option B: continue to take notes, despite the fact [that] you are falling asleep. Most if not all would choose option A. Although I myself take pride in my note taking abilities, I have been known to wander the path of YouTube occasionally during class. It seems as though human nature takes part in this attempted compensation for boredom. Even with insane multi-tasking abilities, students will more than likely miss a vital part of lecture and end up suffering come grade time.

… is the headline in the Seton Hall University newspaper.

Subhead:

STUDENTS LOSE PRIVACY IN CLASS

**********************************************

If UD had written the article, the subhead would be:

PROFESSORS LOSE DIGNITY AND TRAIN OF THOUGHT IN CLASS

All a matter of perspective, I guess. But UD, a professor, sees mainly the pathos of academics reduced to spies… Instead of lecturing and leading discussions, the Seton Hall classroom monitors are as distracted as their laptop-using students.

These professors must constantly run their eyes over their surveillance screens and — while trying to think and talk about civil engineering or geology or absurdist plays — interpret the images they see in order to determine whether or not they are relevant to the class. And then I guess they must decide how to punish wrongdoers…

Some Seton Hall professors have begun using surveillance software to monitor student activity on their laptops during class.

DyKnow software allows professors to monitor student’s laptop activity during class. The professor downloads the DyKnow software, which allows the professor’s laptop monitor to become a surveillance screen.

… Professor James Kimble of the communication department is one professor who uses this software.

“I’ve grown increasingly concerned that internet access is a distraction for my students, so much so that I feel confident in my growing belief that it is affecting student learning and, ultimately, student grades,” Kimble said…

The students are pissed; they defend their right to show contemptuous disregard for the person addressing them from the front of the room.

So this does not seem to UD a good solution. She feels sure, what with American ingenuity and all, that students will evolve DyKnow-blocking software (it probably already exists), in response to which the professor will install DyKnow II, etc.

Laptop wars. A bit unseemly. Time to get on the ban-wagon.

… going viral.

The British start covering the American university laptop ban story.

As the controversy grows, University Diaries will of course follow it.

… in the Cal State Fullerton newspaper.