A student at Maryland’s Loyola University (UD‘s mother attended Mount Saint Agnes, a school that disappeared into Loyola many years ago) notes that all of her professors this semester have banned laptops. She goes on to say this:

The Aristotelian pursuit of knowledge for the sake of its virtue is over. Whether one believes that this is something to mourn or laud, the fact remains that most students attend college to get a job after four years of trudging through the core requirements.

I do not fault Loyola professors for wanting to prohibit laptop use so that they can better engage their students during the short periods in which the pupils, slumped in their seats and battling exhaustion, ennui or something of a bit more dubious nature, appear in class.

Yet, I do take offense to the haughty tirade that accompanies this announcement. Professors can ban laptops without making scathing generalizations about our generation.

I agree. Just put it somewhere on your syllabus that the devices aren’t wanted and let it go. That’s all it takes.

As to the death of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Yikes. Especially sad to read this from someone who’s attending a Jesuit school.

… the concert hall. UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this essay by the LA Times’ music critic about the invasion of the concert hall by mobile devices.

[Some symphony] orchestras [are now] inviting audiences to wile away an hour with Tchaikovsky by tapping on their smartphones and iPads. [People have pointed out that] light is a disruption and that tweeting is an engagement in tweeting, not music.

… This has nothing to do with technophobia but with big and serious issues, and ones that go beyond classical music. But first let us note who is primarily advocating bringing phones and tablets into the concert hall. Social media consultants are increasingly being hired by orchestras and other arts institutions and given the mandate to fill theaters and museums with young bodies by creating online video games, misleadingly marketing classical music as if it somehow related to pop culture like, say, reality TV. Any novel idea to scam the social networking system to get the word out is apparently also OK.

Unfortunately, if the scammers have their way, the result could be an updated “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Treating classical music as if it were pop culture is no attempt to move an art form in a new direction but rather to find a convention for everything. We’re not talking pop people but pod people impelled to respond in a certain, single way. Technological fascism is not, I think, too strong a term for it…

The important point is that a classical concert provides an opportunity to untie the digital umbilical cord and replace it with chords that really do resonate. I don’t know about you, but I find turning off the cellphone a liberating experience.

… [H]olistic hearing comes from within — within music and within ourselves. Real innovation is what we don’t expect and tends to come when we don’t expect it.

It’s the inviolability of one’s private thoughts, one’s own consciousness, against the onslaught of mass consumption devices, that the critic is defending. Like UD, he’s trying to conserve environments in which the flow of fantasy, imagery, feeling, and idea, can remain free.

Audiences deserve the opportunity to approach something new without being told what to expect and be allowed the mental space to take it in.

Yes. Students deserve the same thing.

A lengthy, thoughtful account of the expensive, destructive, technology revolution in our schools.

Another new semester, another lap around the laptops in the classroom issue.

Steve Kelman, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes a pretty sensible post about them. He tells us, in a parenthetical whisper, of rumors involving this or that entire school banning them… Universities will increasingly ban them, for all the obvious reasons Kelman cites and more (they keep you from paying attention and learning anything; they distract the students around you; they are seriously rude, etc., etc.); but for now most schools are shilly-shallying. They know how horrible mobile devices are in class, but they’re afraid of pissing off students if they ban them… and, after all, it makes the schools feel like idiots to have spent so much money and rhetoric on the glories of classroom laptops and now to have to admit that they invested their money and their rhetoric unwisely.

But do not fail to note that in Kelman’s second example the pressure is coming from the students themselves. They know more intimately than professors just how these devices are being used, and if they have a smidgeon of intellectual seriousness they want them out of their faces.

Here’s Kelman’s policy, as stated on his syllabi:

In class, use of laptops to take notes is fine. However, use of laptops in class to check e-mail, surf the Web, use Facebook or Twitter, text, etc. [is] unprofessional and disrespectful to everyone in the classroom. All mobile devices must be switched off during class.

(He uses “mobile devices” to cover iPhones.)

The problem with this policy is that almost no one will follow it; so Kelman has condemned himself to life as a policeman.

In its lame, cynical, stupid way, the university tech office has begun its utterly predictable retreat from all of the devices it’s been foisting on students in classrooms, and on professors and administrators in meetings. Turns out it’s rude and unproductive to stare at a screen! And here we all thought it was so Real World, so frabjous, so multi-taskular!

I mean, let’s not even talk about online high schools and universities… Let’s just not go there at all. A moment of silence, rather, for those lost minds and souls.

Let’s just talk about the atmosphere in wired Duke University gatherings.

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And are you surprised that it’s the Office of Information Technology that’s getting its ass out of online first? Don’t be. They’re the ones who follow the studies and know exactly what’s up. So they’ve gone from being arrogant pushers of wired classrooms and meeting rooms – they’ve gone from ridiculing resistance to their electronics as antediluvian – to what we see now.

Now they’re Big Momma and Big Poppa, lecturing their immature, screen-addicted kiddies on how they have to grow up and throw it all away.

(A little historical self-consciousness will serve all of us well in this matter, by the way. Five years from now, these same people will start in on us again about how collaborative, interactive, Real World, and cutting edge the latest tech machines are.)

Yeah, so now the head of tech at Duke announces he’s had it with tech in meetings because it makes nothing happen; and a Duke professor announces it causes anxiety; and another Duke professor announces it makes you stupid.

Wow. Pretty much everyone without a financial or emotional investment in the technology knew this, said this, and published this ten years ago. I guess we had to waste the educations of hundreds of Duke students and spend a lot of their tuition on technology before Duke began to get to the same place.

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Oh, but there are hold-outs. There remain true believers.

To minimize distraction in the classroom, some faculty ask students to put away laptops – but that’s not always the best approach, said Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services for Perkins Library.

Instructors are better off asking students to work together in pairs, calling on individuals and using other strategies to engage participants, so “you’re at risk if you’re not paying attention,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien clings to the Barney approach: Okay kiddies now choose a partner and let’s learn Heidegger together, as a team! What’s on your screen, Katie! Ooh, that’s great! Show Jodie! And Billy – over there – are you paying attention, Billy? I’m afraid you’re not…

… that boosters of in-class technology are going to have to bury.

… cornucopia.

In class.

A law professor conducts a study which reveals what we all know: Most students on laptops in class spend most of their time farting around.

“[W]hat causes students to vote with their fingers to ignore us [?]” he asks. He assumes it’s something having to do with us, with professors.

But here’s the thing. Certainly some professors are bores or worse, and students ignore them. Okay. But many professors are reasonably engaging… some are insanely engaging … not as engaging as Joel Osteen (UD‘s in Rehoboth and doing her yearly tv watching) but really quite engaging.

Even less than scintillating, less amiable, professors can, if they’re smart and enthusiastic about their subject, be quite tolerable. I mean, you know, there’s a variety of human personalities out there, and part of the jolt to your system college is supposed to be might include your coming to appreciate the fact that not everyone has to be as chipper as Kathie Lee Gifford to command your attention.

UD, that is, doesn’t think this news about students and laptops and texting should prompt an agonized reappraisal of the way professors do things. She thinks the phenomenon is mainly about the massively online culture which birthed the American college student. College is really the country’s only counter to that culture, being about sustained intellectual focus and real-world verbal interaction.

Times Higher Education has a longish article stating the obvious: You can’t learn with your laptop open.

It also states the less than obvious: American university professors are beginning to realize this.

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Course, if y’all’d been reading University Diaries starting back in – I dunno – 2007 – you’d have had post after post screaming about how stupid it is to let your students use laptops in class.

Universities have dropped millions for technology (“The backlash against technology comes after universities have spent fortunes wiring their campuses for access to the internet.”); they’ve conducted all kinds of research to prove the self-evident (“[T]he students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.”); they’ve laptopped everything only to realize how stupid it is to laptop everything (“We have put the whole course online. We’ve videotaped it so that [students] can stay home and watch it in their rooms. We’ve put everything online so they have a reason to open the laptop. We’ve done this for them thinking it was progress. It confuses [students] when we now say: ‘Don’t open your laptop.'”).

So now where are we? Duh. Backlash territory. More and more universities are banning laptops from classrooms.

Sherry Turkle says it’s “the time of repentance,” but that’s horseshit. Universities weren’t thinking in the first place, so they’re not returning to thought now. They’re just embarrassed and confused by the mess they’ve created, and they’re trying to clean it up.

Universities created the mess because they’re lazy, and because they’re afraid of students. “[W]e make [laptop use in class] easy and allow people to get away with it. But if universities allow or encourage it, or don’t actively discourage it, then you’re creating a situation that does not just have short-term but also long-term effects.”

We’ll see how many professors and universities have the guts to cross laptop-loving students.

William Deresiewicz, in The Nation, talks about the future of university education.

Nearly all [proposed university reforms] involve technology to drive efficiency. Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction: this is the future we’re being offered. Why teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail? … [But learning] isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement — the leading forth of new ideas and powers — that can happen only in a seminar. …It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

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Update: From Robert Nozick’s obituary in the Harvard Gazette:

Nozick’s teaching followed the same lively, unorthodox, heterogeneous pattern as his writing. With one exception, he never taught the same course twice. The exception was “The Best Things in Life,” which he presented in 1982 and ’83, attempting to derive from the class discussion a general theory of values. The course description called it an exploration of “the nature and value of those things deemed best, such as friendship, love, intellectual understanding, sexual pleasure, achievement, adventure, play, luxury, fame, power, enlightenment, and ice cream.”

Speaking without notes, Nozick would pace restlessly back and forth, an ever-present can of Tab in his hand, drawing his students into a free-ranging discussion of the topic at hand.

He once defended his “thinking out loud” approach by comparing it with the more traditional method of giving students finished views of the great philosophical ideas.

“Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it.”

Students at the University of Georgia interviewed their fellow students about the university’s mandatory online alcohol education course.

The student researchers found that My Student Body, the University’s online alcohol education course that students are required to complete, is considered ineffective and may actually encourage irresponsible drinking.

“Through our focus groups, we found that students felt the My Student Body course was ineffective. People thought that it was a joke,” said team leader Mary-Kerstin Lindqvist, a senior public relations and fashion merchandising major. “Our most surprising finding was that some students turned it into a drinking game and did it with friends.”

How might it be improved?

After talking to students at the University and studying alcohol education programs at other colleges, [the] researchers thought a program based on personal testimonials would be more effective.

Their research suggests the University start a program similar to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s ACE IT, which combines a theatrical performance and discussions led by older students to educate new students about alcohol.

You mean you think actual physically present people would be better than an online experience??

… in this article from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus newspaper.

… “I have a blanket policy: no phones in my class for any reason, period,” said Chris Bell, director of the Oral Communication Center. “Laptops are fine, but I walk around a lot and I have grad TAs with me a lot of the time. Any of us ever see you doing anything other than taking notes, automatic full letter grade loss for the overall course. No questions, no excuses. My class is not your ESPN time.”

… “As far as phones go,” [said Todd Waters, a GTA,] “I have no tolerance whatsoever. Texting on a cell phone is the single rudest thing anyone can do to disrupt any communication context, including when the teacher is speaking, but primarily when another classmate is speaking/contributing to discussion. Basically, it’s a big, fat, massive [sic] you to everyone.” …

A Boston Globe editorial concludes:

[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them.

How was that again?

[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. [Yes. The paper is right to stress this primary point.] It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. [UD thinks something dumb like this probably was the original motivation. Since that time, she’d argue, some professors have grown quite, quite fond of a technology which removes students from their teachers’ sphere of responsibility. In many cases, a student with a laptop is essentially a student who’s absent….  Laptops make it so that professors don’t have to teach – especially if the professors are themselves using PowerPoint. They walk into a room and read slides aloud while students do fuck all on their laptops.] This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them. [This last statement will bring out all the I’m an adult and can do what I want; don’t talk down to me language from students and their cynical, laptop-lovin’ profs. How dare a university have codes of conduct!]

Laptops. The view from Boston.

… [MIT] professors complain about students trading stocks online, shopping for Hermès scarves, showing one another video clips on YouTube — leading some faculty to call for the unwiring of all lecture halls.

“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’

… Jonathan Zittrain, a [Harvard] professor and Internet law specialist who cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has banned laptops and all mobile devices from his first year torts class since 2004.

“If you sit in the back of the room and see what’s going on, it’s so demoralizing,’’ Zittrain said. “It’s not just poker or Minesweeper, they’re shopping for shoes as you’re talking about some fascinating Supreme Court case.’’

… I always wonder, ‘Why are they in class?’, because it’s clear they are not paying attention,’’ Jones said…

…on the scourge of the laptop in the classroom.

Yes, it’s one of many such pieces UD links to on this blog. Eventually laptops will disappear from the college classroom. This blog is chronicling their disappearance.