[Professor] F. Schauer [to his students]: ‘One of you can look that up [on your laptops]. Whatever you’re currently bidding on can wait.’

As I sit and wait for one of my classes to start, I look around and see 10 kids typing on their laptops, undoubtedly browsing Facebook, while the rest of them race their thumbs, wildly texting their friends and significant others.

No one speaks. The professor walks in and immediately starts up his laptop to begin a PowerPoint presentation. What’s wrong with this picture? Almost nothing. Technology is a beautiful thing that has advanced this world further and faster in the past 10 years than ever before.

I often find myself wondering, though: Is technology ruining the social and interpersonal skills of people both young and old?

They don’t let only students cheat. They let professors cheat. Sometimes on a massive scale.

A high-ranking professor/administrator in India apparently decided to make big money by running his own fake institute under the umbrella of his legitimate university, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur.

He graduated a whole class of students, all of whom subsequently discovered that they had a worthless degree. The Hindustan Times quotes from their letter to the head of the IIT, asking to be repaid.

UD wondered how the guy got away with it (long enough, at least, to collect a lot of money)… I mean, wouldn’t other people at the university notice that fake classes were going on? How would he have gotten the classes on the academic schedule, etc.?

Then a commenter on the article mentioned that this was almost certainly an online operation. And suddenly it all made sense.

In the school newspaper, a student at Connecticut College writes about student laptop use.

[W]e’re creeping toward a point where college life is more about being social and less about being intellectually engaged. The whole point of having a laptop in class should be to expand scholarship and increase efficiency, but I’ve found that they’re having the opposite effect. Strangely enough, classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.

… All in all, professors seem to be supportive of the laptop trend, but I don’t think they know how widespread the problem is. After all, they can ultimately only see the glowing white apple on the back of their students’ computers. They have no idea what’s on the other side.

Sure they know.

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The writer makes an excellent point when he observes that “classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.” UD hadn’t thought of that; but yes, the laptop can be seen as the permanent fixture brought into the classroom to positively protect you from an otherwise intolerable experience. It’s not a sometime distraction for when the class now and then becomes dull or makes you drift off a bit; it’s a regular feature of the fifty minutes, a powerful shield that enables you to suffer the insult to your private life which a public classroom represents.

Nothing special about the classroom, though. The laptop shields you from dinners in restaurants with your family; from concerts; from most of social life. When the student writes that “college life is more about being social,” he doesn’t really mean social. He means screen social.

A professor at the University of South Carolina responds to an argument often made by fans of laptops in the classroom.

“Some say that if you’re not more interesting than Facebook, then you have no business teaching, but that’s not quite fair,” [one professor] said. “Facebook is seductive, and it’s hard to compete with that. We all love to be entertained, but I don’t think that’s what education is. I can’t teach you anything if you’re sitting there saying, ‘Teach me; I dare you.'”

“[W]hen you start reading your slides,” a University of South Dakota student writes to his professors in the school’s newspaper, “I’m picking my FarmVille crops.”

The student’s mainly complaining about mandatory attendance policies. He reasonably enough points out the absurdity of insisting that students attend morgue-like events — especially when everything coming from the crypt is already downloadable.

I don’t know which is more offensive: Being forced to listen to a person with a PhD read PowerPoint slides for an hour when I could have done it in 20 minutes at home or the fact that if I don’t go then I will be dropped from the course and thus robbed of a few hundred dollars.

How does a person with a PhD think reading PowerPoint slides is an effective teaching method? At least have the decency to not drop me if I don’t show up.

PowerPoint: I had not thought death had undone so many.

A history professor at Yale talks laptops.

In seminars, laptops are still more harmful [than in lectures], serving as physical barriers that prevent a group of students from becoming a class.

UD has taken to calling the relationship between professors who allow and students who use laptops Mutually Assured Cynicism.

A California high school student understands the meaning of laptops in class.

A student at the University of Manitoba describes a lecture there.

… The majority of laptops went from PowerPoint notes to anything but PowerPoint notes. Facebook.com profiles, Yahoo.com email accounts, music playlists, blogs, JUMP accounts — the list goes on.

My friend even searched Google images so she could show me how much the biology professor resembled a Bill Nye the Science Guy/Pringles mascot hybrid…

I began to wonder why so many people were so disengaged… Is it because all the notes are readily available on a student’s ANGEL account? Were the students uninterested because the teacher couldn’t possibly have made a connection with all [250] of them? And if the teacher can’t see you goofing off then you may as well goof off, right?…

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.

… dithers.

Carlo Rotella, Boston College, writes a column in the Boston Globe.

… I teach at [Boston College], where a year’s tuition, fees, room, and board currently add up to $52,624. What are the students paying for? What can’t they get online for free?

In my end of the academy, the humanities, it comes down to one thing, in essence: the other people in the room, teachers, and fellow students. … [Y]ou’re paying for the exclusive company of fellow thinkers who made it through the screening processes of admissions and faculty hiring. That’s it. You can get everything else online, and you can of course do the reading on your own.

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

You can spend the rest of your life surfing the web, emailing, texting. You’ve got one shot at college. So, at least until the novelty wears off (probably not in my lifetime), that means no laptops in my classroom.

Rotella might have added that most universities are all too happy to follow the logic of this to its money-saving conclusion and put more and more of their courses online…. And it’s not just about saving money. Many classroom professors, faced with techno-ghosts instead of students, take to Powerpoint. If they keep their heads down for fifty minutes, reading slides, these professors don’t have to look up and suffer the grief and humiliation of being ostentatiously ignored by almost every student in the room.

Thus is created the peculiar symmetry of the postmodern classroom: A professor lost to the world via Powerpoint stands in front of a classroom of students lost to the world through the internet.

It can’t last. Increasingly, both sides are seeing the absurdity of it, and going online. Online, there’s no need, ever, to acknowledge the existence of another human being.

Christine Smallwood, PhD student, Columbia University, gets it said. It’s in today’s New York Times.

When you leave your room for class, leave the laptop behind. In a lecture, you’ll only waste your time and your parents’ money, disrespect your professor and annoy whomever is trying to pay attention around you by spending the whole hour on Facebook.

You don’t need a computer to take notes — good note-taking is not transcribing. All that clack, clack, clacking … you’re a student, not a court reporter. And in seminar or discussion sections, get used to being around a table with a dozen other humans, a few books and your ideas. After all, you have the rest of your life to hide behind a screen during meetings.

Oh, and entire online classes! Quelle joie.

… completely bann[ed] the use of mobile computing or communication devices in his classrooms, barring extenuating circumstances.

Indeed McGill may be on the way to an institution-wide ban.

The professor cites “multiple studies linking evidence of the use of such devices in the classroom to poor academic performance, greater distraction for users and fellow students, and decreased ability to ‘digest and synthesize’ main points.”

… are beginning to ban laptops.

Reasons?

“… [M]isuse and lack of courtesy. But the biggest reason is that it’s a liability for professors to allow students to use these electronic devices in the classroom.”

…“Laptops have become barriers that interrupt dialogue between the students and the teacher … and education is a dialogue.”