From an article in Slate about laptops in university classrooms:
… George Mason Law professor Michael Krauss has been banning laptops for five or six years now.
The way his first-year law-school classes are taught, Krauss said, is by asking questions for the students to answer in discussion. Distractions and the Internet aren’t Krauss’ concern in banning laptops; the reason for the ban is that laptops have “become a substitute for thinking.” The material in a law class requires a lot of thought to help understand concepts, and students who type verbatim what is said in class into their notes aren’t giving themselves any time to absorb and analyze.
… Tablets like the iPad will only make it harder for students to pay attention in class and for schools to ban the device. Since the iPad can be used to read textbooks, professors might be unsure which students are goofing off and which are legitimately studying. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to mind. In the fall, the school is going to give each new incoming student a MacBook and an iPad. How distracted will those students be?…
April 20th, 2010 at 10:01PM
GW has the right idea: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100416-709971.html
April 20th, 2010 at 10:30PM
The problem is that law professors don’t comprehend the massive disconnect between what they teach, how they teach it, and how the material they teach is examined – usually in a 4-hour exam that is worth 100% of the grade. This produces a huge amount of anxiety among students, which is alleviated by obsessively typing everything. Also, it makes students tune out when they “know” (as you learn eventually) what won’t be on the exam and what will be on the exam, and that’s when the Facebook / gchat / shoe shopping happens.
Now, I don’t know how Michael Krauss teaches his classes, and certainly in seminars — small discussion classes where students generate papers and don’t write exams — are terrible for laptops. And, most students wouldn’t want laptops anyway, unless they were legitimately using them to look stuff up, such as cases. (Looking up cases and laws online, as well as annotating material while in class can be a benefit of having a laptop, but to be fair most students don’t use it that way.)
Anyway, I’ve been following this discussion with interest. But, as somewhat who has taught Engineering and is now learning Law… yes, students shouldn’t have laptops in science and engineering classes. Nor should professors be using powerpoint, at least not in the traditional way. If you teach science with a chalkboard and occasional recourse to slides, then no one should have the time to use a laptop anyway, and they should be keeping up. Teach the class so no one even thinks of bringing a laptop, let alone use it to surf the web.
But, banning laptops in law school classrooms has much more to do with the obsession of the professor over controlling the classroom and the strange way in which they think that they are teaching a humanities class, when in reality they are teaching a more vocationally-oriented class that is tested in a structured way. The way to fix law school classes isn’t by banning laptops, but by changing the way they are taught and tested.
April 21st, 2010 at 7:02AM
When I used to teach freshman classes at U-Paris-9, many students would not really try to solve the questions I ask, but then, once a “correction” was written on the board, they would copy it verbatim.
Apparently, in highschool they were trained to do “typical exercises” such that the final exam was guaranteed to be a collection of them.
In short, they were discouraged from original thinking or original problem-solving – which is precisely a skill that is expected of people in a management position, rather than a mere subordinate role.
April 21st, 2010 at 8:08AM
An old friend, who has run several startups and done a lot of consulting, is teaching a business class at some university. She described some situation to the students and asked them to *think* about it…apparently, every single one of them reached for their laptop or iPhone or whatever and immediately started googling….
April 21st, 2010 at 8:16AM
I still don’t understand the ‘type verbatim’ meme: hardly anyone types that fast, even in this keyboard-raised generation. Why would people typing notes be more inclined to transcribe than people taking longhand notes? Anecdotes are not data, but I try to get verbatim quotes in my notes longhand, if a phrase catches my attention and I act quickly enough to remember it; so am I guilty of not thinking becuase I think experts are people whose exact words are sometimes illuminating? I don’t think so.
April 21st, 2010 at 9:13AM
Ahistoricality is right. It simply isn’t possible – unless you know Gregg shorthand – to transcribe a lecture directly to a computer. I’ve been trying to do this recently with videos.
Taking notes in a science class used to mean putting in your notes what the instructor put on the blackboard, then taking your notes home and working on/with them.
This actually did lead to a certain amount of passivity. Nowadays with all the instructor supplied teaching aids, you’d wish that students would sit there and THINK about the material and maybe even ask questions.
I’ve even heard that this even sometimes happens.
April 21st, 2010 at 11:46AM
Okay, I’m just going to ask a question that may or may not have anything to do with this topic, but it still needs to be asked. As a graduate student, I was repeatedly denied funding because my university “just didn’t have any.” As a (relatively) newly-minted Ph.D., I have been repeatedly denied jobs because, quite frankly, they don’t exist in the humanities–tenure lines are being cut, monies are sent elsewhere, funding for the humanities is drying up. All of which means that I am now moonlighting as an adjunct for usually lousy pay and no health benefits.
Given all of that, I have to ask, Where the eff are these schools getting all of the money to dole out MacBooks and iPads and such to students? Is all of it coming from Apple?
April 21st, 2010 at 3:11PM
Somewhat related to this: I just posted a think piece about the impact of Internet video, and would be interested in thoughts from UD and others here.
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:19AM
They bury the MacBook & Ipad & Ipod money in the tuition and fees.