Among the many student-authored attacks on laptop use in the classroom that UD has read, this one, by a student at the University of Maine, stands out. The writer specifies a destructive aspect of classroom laptop use that I’ve thought about but been unable to formulate very well. I’m grateful to her for helping me clarify it.

….This semester, I wanted to take an elective class outside my major, which had such high demand I had to e-mail the department, talk with the department’s administrative assistant and meet with the instructor before getting in.

After devoting all that time just to enroll, my classmates’ behavior has been extremely disappointing. Of the more than 20 students in the class, about half were there last Wednesday, and all but three were on their laptops, checking e-mail, playing games and surfing the Web.

It doesn’t end there. One who had foregone the computer was texting on her cell phone under the desk the entire class. That left two of us listening attentively to the professor….

Everyone talks about how distracting it is to have bevies of computer screens bursting with sports, porn, and Facebook surrounding you during a lecture or discussion. But few people focus on how demoralizing it is to realize that, although you’re in a university classroom, almost no one’s taking education seriously. No one’s even thinking. They’re just farting around.

UD is aware that students farted around in 1959 too. But puh-leeze. They doodled, exchanged notes, and stared out the window. They didn’t have an international command and control center on the desk in front of them.

This writer understands the institutional implication of a failure to be serious:

These laptop addicts should think about how their actions reflect on them, as well as their major and, ultimately, the university. With talk of consolidating colleges and eliminating programs, they should consider what affect their attention or apathy could [have on] future students at UMaine.

Indeed. Why hold classes if you can’t hold classes?

UD‘s heart goes out to this writer — this still-serious student. If it’s not too late, and if she can afford it, the student should drop out of UMaine and find a serious school.

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UD finds moving the writing of students who are aware of the contempt for professors and universities much laptop use in classrooms represents. But UD finds downright baffling statements like this one from a dean.

Jim McClellan, dean of liberal studies at [Northern Virginia Community College’s] Alexandria campus who has taught there for 35 years, said he is most concerned with how to reach millennial students and would like to see this matter discussed broadly [at an upcoming summit on community colleges].

“The nature of students has changed in the past few years as a result of technology,” McClellan said. “We see shorter attention spans. We see students who think there’s nothing wrong with texting or using laptops to message back and forth in class. We have students who arrive late and leave early or just don’t pay attention at all. I think I slept through most of my junior year of college, but I at least tried to do so [in]conspicuously. I think there’s no interest among students to cover up not paying attention in class. How can we teach students who have grown up in this environment and with technologies we just couldn’t imagine when we came up?” …

Well, let’s see what the problem might be.

Instead of banning laptops and other technology from your classrooms, you do everything you can to encourage classroom and out of classroom use of technology. You make this effing big deal about it! We’re special! Everyone at our school gets a Mac! And all that other technoshit too! We drag our faculty into special seminars on how to encourage their students to bring laptops to class! On how to PowerPoint everything so they don’t have to teach! Our professors get special introduction of new teaching techniques points on their annual reports for showing students how to download lectures so they don’t have to go to class!

Listen, McClellan.

Far be it from UD to keep you from attending an exciting summit with the vice-president’s wife where the international news media films you wringing your hands over your obnoxious students. If that’s the picture of your college you want to broadcast to the world, go to it.

But there are other things you can do about the situation.

In The Mark, a Canadian online forum, yet another professor — this one at the University of Ottawa — states the obvious.

After almost 10 years of teaching undergraduates, I’m through with the internet, at least in my classrooms. No more will I allow students to use laptops or other electronic devices in my classes. In the new attention economy of an always-on, everywhere-available wireless internet, I admit defeat. I cannot compete against the seductive spectacles offered by 1.7 billion internet users. I’m pulling the plug on the wireless classroom.

… [Students are] utterly addicted to the net, largely incapable of exercising discipline over their media use, and extremely uncomfortable at the thought of being offline for a 90-minute lecture.

A simple thought experiment should have made it clear to university IT departments that installing wireless internet in all classrooms without so much as an off switch was inviting trouble. Imagine giving all students a portable television to bring with them to class. Now connect a telephone and a typewriter to the TV. Throw in every available cable channel in the known universe. Add a database of most modern music and movies. Include direct lines to all of their friends, all of their classmates, and 1.7 billion strangers.

… Professors cannot police the laptop use of 60, 80, 200 students or more (nor should they be expected to). Education is not a problem to which technology is the solution…

Emily Harnden, University of Illinois:

[Many of our classes post] lecture notes, labs, assignments, paper topics, vocabulary lists, extra credit opportunities and even online office hours …

[Although we all laugh] at what a “joke of a class” these technologically inclined classes may seem, in reality [it’s not] that funny. Because guess what? We’re all paying for that “joke of a class.” Whether it is you personally or your parents, sooner or later, we’re going to realize the joke’s on us. For even though I love to joke around about how easy some of my classes have been, the fact of the matter is the only thing it is helping is my GPA…

… By forfeiting their right to teach students face-to-face, professors who rely heavily on online-based coursework are giving us an easy out for our education…

On the bright side — it’s a step up from a diploma mill. It’s accredited.

Deakin lecturer Paul Nicholson is teaching a course to students at the Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool campuses called ”creating effective learning environments”. There are no physical lectures.

”It’s a mediaeval technology, the lecture, and it’s so inefficient,” he said.

That whole physical thing where you’re a human being and I’m a human being and we’re in the same room at the same time looking at each other and listening to each other, working through ideas by tossing them around, or sitting quietly and pondering someone’s spontaneously expressed thoughts about something…

Yucko.

Embarrassing. Inefficient in a markedly medieval way… It would be so pre-modern for Nicholson to have to take your (shudder) embodiment into account… It would be like trying to get pregnant by having sex …

So, you know, as an efficiency move, more and more Australian – as well as Canadian – university students are skipping lectures, but that’s fine because qua physical entities universities are these insanely creaky medieval devices…

A few defiant antiquarians among students and professors persist. An international law lecturer at Monash keeps threatening to turn off  class-obliterating technology: He thinks “it’s bad for us,” reports a student. At the University of Ottawa, students report extremely high levels of dissatisfaction, in large part because of “lack of contact time with professors.”

Nicholson needs to explain to these people how icky and reactionary and … obscene, really …  it is to indulge these “contact” fantasies.  

You hide behind your computer screen. I hide behind mine. 

We do that long enough, and we’ll make the whole physical thing of a university go POOF. 

Once that happens, you’ll stop drooling all over yourself about “contact”….

… going viral.

… makes a direct appeal to her fellow students. Final paragraph of her opinion piece:

… As a student who does well in her classes without the use of a laptop, I implore you to try spending a few classes without your laptop. Take notes by hand and underline important parts of readings as you discuss them in class, rather than just scrolling through an on-screen PDF. I think you’ll find it much easier to focus on the material at hand and you’ll learn a lot more…

… says Lady Bracknell. And the professorial ideal emerging in our own age is a curious, double-edged one.

Both edges have as their essential condition an enslavement to technology; but while one annihilates the instructor’s self, the other makes her a multitasking hypomaniac.

The hypomanic ideal is based upon imitation of the professor’s students. They are surrounded by distracting technology; she is surrounded by distracting technology. An English professor at the University of Maryland

… lets students bring laptops to her class, uses technological aids in her lectures, and has even received e-mails from students while class was taking place.

The other ideal is the online nullity, the nowhere woman who sends hundreds of faceless names a smileyface when they get an answer right.

… responds to a student who complained in the campus newspaper about his banning laptops from his discussion sections.

… The embarrassing sight of members of Congress texting their way through the State of the Union address shows us that not even the rich, powerful and old are immune to [the always-online] compulsion. At the same time, the phenomenon of texting while driving offers clear proof that people will stay online even when doing so endangers their very lives.

These extreme examples demonstrate why a ban on laptops in the classroom is sometimes necessary. For whatever reason, we – not just college students, but all of us – are unable to resist the lure of constant online access. Yet certain activities require the sustained attention that the Internet impedes. Driving a car is one such activity. Discussing complex ideas is another. Everyone knows that students with laptops in class frequently use them for non-class activities such as Facebook and e-mail. At this time, the only answer I can see is to remove the temptation.

… [My student writes that] “it is a student’s individual choice to pay attention – or not – in class.” She is right to point out that students ought to be responsible for their own learning, but wrong to suggest that this responsibility is merely individual. Quality education results from the collaborative interaction of engaged thinkers, not from professors imparting content to passive individuals. Distracted students hurt not only themselves, but the rest of the class as well.

… [W]e must try to reap the benefits of the online world without subordinating every aspect of learning, and life, to its subtle coercions.

The British start covering the American university laptop ban story.

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

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to push the off button on the trend of text messaging during meetings of the Board of Supervisors and various city commissions.

The tech-savvy mayor, himself an avid texter on his beloved iPhone, has asked the city attorney’s office to draft legislation curbing electronic communication during public meetings for fear of city officials being unfairly influenced by lobbyists’ texts.

… Ideas being discussed include banning text messages from lobbyists during meetings, though it would be virtually impossible to enforce; prohibiting the use of all cell phones during meetings, while acknowledging receiving messages from family members and staff may be crucial; and even banning the use of laptops, which allow for instant messaging and e-mails during meetings.

… Several states’ legislatures have restrictions on electronic communication during meetings, ranging from self-policed no-texting rules to making inoperable any device used to transmit data, including cell phones and computers…

All trends start in California.

… laptops.

The Washington Post covers increasingly popular laptop bans at local universities.

A recent Drexel University graduate writes an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… In a classroom, there is a person standing in the front of the room talking, and naively believing, or vainly hoping, that these portable-computer enthusiasts are listening to what he is saying.

To a person in the back of the room, it is plainly obvious that none of these keyboard assailants is paying any attention to the person in the front of the room. They are too involved with Facebook, AIM, Twitter, or the myriad other interactive-media outlets available to be aware of anything taking place in class. These students contribute no more to class than the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s would have. Actually, that particular cadaver would have been much more engaged than the student with a laptop.

[These students] are vacant shells. Their presence is strictly corporeal. What’s more, their frequently furious typing is disruptive…

… has already attracted a number of thoughtful responses. If you’re interested, it’s here.

A student at the University of Wisconsin River Falls talks about clickers.

What happened to raising your hand? What happened to being able to answer out loud? Reliance on technology may be the reason people with doctorates resort to PowerPoint and point and click in order to manage their classes. I understand the application in rooms of over 200 students. However, if no one else has noticed, our school holds a 30-1 ratio.