… the morgue classroom. This is a classroom headed by a professor reading PowerPoint slides aloud and students playing on their phones and laptops. It is Death Perfected. It is the postmodern university interaction par excellence. Read and learn:

Walking by a classroom one day I saw a student sitting in the back row of the room, simultaneously wearing iPod ear buds and texting on her iPhone — which was sitting on top of and thus “hidden” by her Macbook (with the browser opened to her Facebook page)…

… I looked for the professor — and, yes, there he was, standing at the front of the room progressing a Powerpoint slide presentation with lots of bullets followed by perhaps three or four words. And he would use the laser pointer to indicate the specific word(s) he was reading aloud (which was odd, since presumably each of the students was technically literate) and he would then move on to the next slide. Tenured around the time of the Crimean War, he had definitely seen his share of students come through the university. But still, I wondered: Don’t you know? Don’t you care? Aren’t you, in theory, supposed to be teaching them — instead of just playing with your techno-toys while they parallel play with their own?

A Lehigh professor describes the death chamber to a T.

Professors at the University of Ottawa want the right to ban laptops from their classrooms; the school will soon vote on a proposal along these lines.

… If the doctor spends too much of your 15-minute visit typing or staring at a screen, you have to wonder: What if I have a symptom that just got missed?

“If the screen is turned away from the patient, they don’t know if you’re looking at their electronic health record or playing solitaire or looking up stocks,” notes Dr. Glen Stream of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Stanford now trains med students in the appropriate use of laptops while the students are with patients.

While laptops and smartphones can help enhance the educational experience, far more of them are being used inappropriately during class.

Walk into any classroom where teachers permit the use of laptops and you’ll find a sea of different screenshots not pertaining to the classwork. Students often take advantage of this technological triumph by browsing websites like Facebook, YouTube and even play full-fledged games like Minecraft.

Some students who bother to take notes with their laptop only does so when the slide changes or the professor writes something on the chalkboard. Even then, they often return to whatever distraction was previously holding their attention.

Texting is especially rampant during college classes, which shows a clear disrespect for both the professor and the material the professor is trying to teach them, as well as students around them who are there to learn without unnecessary distractions.

.. if that’s your thing…

It’s totally UD‘s thing… She can’t get enough of the genre. Favorite plot points from her latest can’t-put-it-down:

Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his [go-tech-in-the-classroom] talks: “I implemented your idea, and it just didn’t work,” Mr. Wesch was told. “The students thought it was chaos.”

It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. “They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose.”

Chapter Two: A Sense of Purpose and How to Get It.

It doesn’t matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.

… “PowerPoint [says a technophobe master teacher] takes away, I think, from a true engagement…”

Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens.

… “The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message,” he says. “If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about.”

Messenger… Oh, you mean professor! But that’s medieval, authoritarian, fascistic, you really have control issues, don’t you… Standing up there being all I KNOW SHIT, Il Duce strutting about telling people things instead of leaving them alone to teach themselves and the people sitting next to them. No, the thing to do is step aside, shut up, let them fiddle with the technology, drop by their desk and glance at their screen occasionally, say a few encouraging words… Or if you really want to communicate excitement and passion, turn out the lights and stand very still with your head down and read words on your computer screen that someone else wrote.  Sizzle!

The things that make a good teacher are difficult — if not impossible — to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught….

Think of it in terms of our country’s pill obsession. Americans are determined to believe that you can use fast mass-manufactured substitutes to achieve slow human things.

Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. “We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player,” she told me.

She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. “None of this work is off-the-shelf,” she said, noting that the group promotes a “scholarly approach” to teaching. “That means you aren’t just picking something and plopping it in there, but you’re really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it.”

… about technotrash in the classroom, UD stumbles upon this.

“The result of this ‘social media revolution,’ is a mass movement of people who stare at their screens engaging in mindless chatter and mesmerized window-shopping,” said [Timothy] Dansdill. “Their outlandish, subversive claim that ‘sharing information’ and sending and receiving ‘messages’ is essential for creating and sustaining social and emotional intelligence … is deeply damaging to the simple, but powerful human acts of face to face conversation, solitary reading, writing, and reflection, and the shared making of actual knowledge.”

Sometimes you have to hold your nose and keep reading. Sometimes, as Martha’s George says, “you gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.”

And what a boon it is for the kiddies! No one to bother them with conversation, or, I don’t know, human activity, of any sort… Just left all alone in their rooms… For years and years and years…

Some old bugger from Boulder – Boulder! tree-hugger city! – wonders how many internet internees “survive the boredom and isolation of school on a laptop” and actually graduate (their cyber-keepers make drop-out stats hard to get). He reviews the scandals that occur when teachers are air traffic controllers and administrators hedgies.

Like a lot of people, this guy is beginning to notice the class-based nature of school on a laptop.

Slick TV ads and corporate hucksters would have us believe the online school can teach even better than the best traditional elementary and secondary schools the nation has to offer. Yeah, right. The day that Phillips Exeter Academy replaces its teachers with laptops is the day I might start to believe them.

More and more people realize that online school represents a perfect 1%/99% matchup – it makes the first group even richer, and keeps the second group in the pointless nothingness which is its lot in life.

See the images on the Exeter website? This is how I spend my day, says the featured student. Out and about in nature with my buddies, and then engrossed in fascinating classroom discussion… This is the best education possible, and your public school will in various ways of course fall short of it. But your cyber school? LOL.

[V]ideo [has] surfaced of Indian ministers watching what appeared to be video of a sex act on a cell phone during a debate in the house assembly.

Two Karnataka State Ministers C.C. Patil and Laxman Savadi are being accused of watching porn when they were supposed to be doing the people’s work.

A third minister who resigned allegedly owned the cell phone with the lewd images on it.

UD calls it technolust, a sudden humping action at the sight of a screen.

UD and this guy in the LA Times think “the nirvana sketched out by Duncan and Genachowski at last week’s Digital Learning Day town hall was erected upon a sizable foundation of commercially processed claptrap.”

As you know, UD just a few days ago attended a small gathering that featured Genachowski, a genial man promoting not really education but American riches via exploitation of technology. UD‘s all for that as a broad sentiment, but she, like the LA Times guy, has actually read the research on technology and classroom learning, and it ain’t pretty.

No comment. Just wanted to put that out there.

UD never tires of touting the advantages of online education — the most amazing of which is that no one can ever know whether you, or someone smarter than you, took your online course or exam.

Online gets even prettier with financial incentives. The Tennessee county employees featured in this post’s headline were offered $6,000 if they finished a University of Tennessee continuing education course. They’re charged with pocketing the money and getting someone else to do the course.

They can’t justify it. But they can allow the poor professor to ban laptops and other devices. That would help immensely.

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

Colin, a UD reader, reminds UD that the author of the article I’ve linked to was at a tender age diagnosed with “Written Output Disorder,” a condition which made it mandatory that he use laptops in all classrooms. Colin questions the diagnosis, so UD looked it up.

I’m afraid the author of the article is being a bit irresponsible. There are, first of all, at least five kinds of WOD (aka Dysgraphia), and the author would have been more persuasive had he specified his particular subdisorder, since not all seem to necessitate giving up the act of writing with your hands.

Further, experts seem to agree that therapies for all forms of this disorder exist, which suggests that the author’s parents were a mite overhasty when they decided to allow their son – at the age of ten – to abandon the effort to make his fingers form letters.

Audience members [at a recent conference] — mostly professors — sat heads down, eyes trained on smartphones, tablets and laptops. At the front of the room, panel members tweeted, checked messages from the audience, and followed the conference Twitter stream. It was hard to tell whether anyone was paying attention… We once knew and accepted the unwritten standards of etiquette: When a speaker spoke, we paid attention. We may have taken notes, but we listened respectfully, eyes forward. Being present and attentive was simple courtesy.

… is written by a high school student.

She’s not very happy.

Wait until she gets to a university.

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

This year, most teachers here at Joplin High are having a hard time motivating their students to complete and turn in assignments. Hour by hour, I sit down, open my computer, turn into a zombie, shut the lid, and head to the next class. Some periods there is hardly a need to even look at the teacher. To many students, beating a high score in Tetris sounds a lot more productive than wasting time doing an assignment that can easily be downloaded at home. If someone were to ask me a year ago if I would prefer a paperless campus, I would say that our current situation sounds like a dream come true. Who wouldn’t want to ditch heavy textbooks for sleek laptops? In reality, I question the value of technology in the classroom on a daily basis.

The absence of all human interaction all day long enters you into a Michael Fassbender-intensity trance. Get ready to learn!

Don’t we already spend too much time staring at screens instead of physically interacting with our families and friends? According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it’s estimated that, on average, young people spend up to 7.5 daily hours in front of a TV, computer, or video game. These hours are outside the school day.

Au contraire: Education should be as much as possible an extension of whatever daily shit you’re doing outside the classroom.

Simply dumping more information on students through technology by advising them to visit numerous websites and watch tutorial videos, as many of my teachers do now, will not make for a smarter, more creative student body.

But it will make for a much happier teacher!

Unlocking the ingenuity, drive, and enthusiasm within a student tends to become virtually impossible when they all become Internet-absorbed zombies. If this is what 21st-century learning looks like, then maybe there’s no reason for students to attend school. After all, there’s not much to learn from Tetris.

Oh puleeze. Do it yourself! It’s all about self-directed now, baby! Just do what you want. Follow your bliss.

And on the not attend school bit — Where have you been? All your friends are home onlining their high school years.

This earnest Harvard student, writing for the campus paper, even goes to the trouble of interviewing Facebooking fellow students. Why do they do it?

Two reasons emerge:

1. The professor is dull, confusing, off on tangents all the time.

2. They’ve got other urgent business to transact during class.

It’s true that you can now run, say, a real estate agency and sit in a lecture hall at the same time (Jared Kushner ran a real estate empire and went to Harvard – undergraduate – at the same time); and I think UD speaks for all professors when she says Fantastic. She wouldn’t think of interfering with her students making money while she talks about Keats.

The article writer takes the quality of teaching thing very much to heart; he notices that some of the famously good teachers at Harvard experience little Facebook use in their classes. But he makes a mistake when he concludes that the solution to the problem lies in professors being more like Facebook:

Rather than perceiving technology as a competing force in the classroom, our creative and distinguished faculty should explore innovative teaching methods that harness the same technological force to uniquely personalize class content and deliver it in a powerful, Facebook-type manner.

The hot professors the student singles out – Niall Ferguson, for instance – don’t compel attention because they’re Facebooky. They compel attention because in their lectures they meld a strong – even charismatic – personality with a restlessly polemical understanding of their field, and indeed of the world.

Ferguson wows classes by candidly sharing his strong opinions on world history and current events.

Far from the just-sitting-there information available on the web, strong teachers are up and about, exhibiting to students the crackling synergy of mind and material.