Glenn Gass, a music professor at Indiana University, is too diplomatic to say the other part of this. Not all professors are passionate, or care whether students learn anything. These professors are happy – grateful, really – to Powerpoint their way through fifty minutes of Laplandic silence.
Gass speaks.
“It drives me crazy as a teacher to see a bunch of glowing laptops, and they’re doing a bunch of things that aren’t related to class,” Gass said. “If you really want to learn, you can’t do something else while you’re listening.”
An IU lecturer, Michelle Mosely, speaks:
“I don’t allow laptops at all in my class,” she said. “It’s a distraction. I don’t even allow cell phones or laptops on their desks.”
Mosely, like Gass, has fairly large classes, and she said students in large classes believe themselves to be invisible in the crowd.
Mosely penalizes her students for using laptops or cell phones in her class, which results in a verbal warning, deduction of participation points or students being asked to leave her classroom and not receive credit for that day.
May 24th, 2010 at 8:49AM
See also http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/featured-news/the-digital-divide
May 24th, 2010 at 9:01AM
chris: Many thanks! I’ll feature the article you link to (and feature in) on the blog today.
UD
May 25th, 2010 at 2:49PM
Technology is at the forefront of college life and there is no stopping, nor is it the problem we think it is.
In my experience, I have sometimes seen students engaging in such “unproductive” activities. However, to me, this raises a very simple question, one seemingly unasked: If students are using laptops and other media to distract themselves from lectures, what is the real problem?
I would argue that the issue is not the technology itself, but that the students are not being engaged in class. Great teachers engage their students at a level that surpasses the need to be distracted. Perhaps a better approach, to banning tech in class or embarrassing students by “cold calling” them, would be asking students why they are not engaged and excited to be learning… WHY, in other words, are they bored to the point of banging their head on the desktop?
In the context of a boring classroom, nearly anything will be more engaging than listening to the lecture. This could be anything from a computer or cell phone, to a piece of paper and a pencil. The odd thing to me is that, instead of finding out why students aren’t engaged, teachers instead insist on regulating what they deem as a problem. In fact, the distracted students are not a problem, but are pointing to the solution: How do we become more effective teachers?
Yes, it could come down to the simple fact that the student just doesn’t care about the class, which raises another question: Why should he be required to take it?
We should be asking these questions:
-What if we tried different teaching styles?
-Is the subject matter engaging/important?
-Should this particular student even be in this class?
-Why is this class required/taught this way?
-What are the student’s goals for education?
(My first comment with you. Thank you for your time and attention. I hope we can engage in discussing more interesting topics. I’d like to know your personal take on this.)
May 25th, 2010 at 3:51PM
Ryan: I appreciate the thoughtful comment.
A number of articles on this subject, including the one I excerpt and link to, respond to the claim you make – that professors are boring, and they should allow all the technology students want into the classroom and at the same time be so scintillating the students wouldn’t think of texting their friends, checking their email, or catching an episode of Lost.
As a number of people have noted, university education isn’t entertaining in the way tv, Gchat, and texting is. It calls for all of your attention to be devoted to one thing for an extended period of time. It is difficult, challenging. It may (note the Obama example I included in this post) offend and confuse you. It may make you unhappily aware of your limitations. Serious university education cannot compete with entertainment, which wants to make you happy.
You are, in other words, making a category error. Serious university education is not the same as entertainment. You might argue it is the opposite of entertainment.
By this I don’t mean that it’s excruciating. I do mean that it demands a quality of seriousness, cerebral focus, and social engagement that many people find challenging.
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Of course a professor can look at the situation we’re discussing and decide that pedagogy needs to look more like the internet world that some students prefer in the classroom. Like the constantly shifting windows of the online world, the professor should mix things up in the classroom, acknowledging in this way that Americans are no longer able to follow an idea or an argument even for as short a time as a half hour. Guest speakers, breaking up into little groups, field trips, films, student presentations … The important feature of this hyperactivity, note, is the disappearance of the professor as the mental and physical focus of the classroom. Since so many students find looking at one person talking (a lecture), or listening to a group of people talking (a discussion) boring, a professor can decide to vanish from her own classroom.
We can see this process well under way at a number of universities. Exams and papers, the correction of and commenting upon exams and papers, the giving of lectures themselves — all of these have gone online. I can now outsource the correction of my students’ exams and papers to India.
I’m describing a breaking up of the classroom experience into a bunch of entertaining fragments for the student.
For the professor, well… It’s all about her withdrawal from teaching itself, isn’t it? If students make it graphically clear that they don’t want passionate teachers bursting to share with them, in intense, face-to-face interchange (again, look at the Obama example) the ideas that mean so much to them, okay. What’s left for the person putatively teaching the course, the person listed as teaching the course in the university schedule of classes, is let’s say a patter of PowerPoint combined with getting out of the way of the entertainment.
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Let me respond to each of the questions you ask at the end of your comment.
All committed and thoughtful teachers always think about how they’re teaching and how they can teach better. That thinking should have nothing to do with capitulating to insultingly anti-intellectual students who openly prefer bazoombas.com to a discussion of distributive justice.
If you have no faith in the importance of the subject that you as a professor are teaching, you should ask for different course assignments. Lots of universities have dumbed-down curricula with unimportant subjects being taught. If you are trapped teaching such a subject, break free. Do something with your life that will enable you to respect yourself.
Yes. This particular student should be in the class. She was admitted to your university. It is your job as a professor to have faith in her intellectual aptitude, and to appeal to her capacity to be serious about serious matters. If she finds she cannot be serious, she has the option of dropping the course or taking it Pass/Fail (if this option is available). If she stays in the course, she earns a low grade.
This class is required because thoughtful people over centuries have determined that a liberally educated human being should be able to understand and talk and write about certain ideas and phenomena in certain ways. You ask “Why is this class taught this way?” What way? This class is taught in many different ways by different people.
Goals are for football fields.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:07PM
Just so that I’m clear on what is meant:
-Students should not have goals or be searching for meaning in their own lives because goals are for football fields.
I earnestly disagree with this notion. However, that is a discussion for a different time. (In other words it conflicts with the topic of your post.)
I never would say that students should be given free reign of technology use in the classroom. There do have to be standards. Most particularly students should not be engaging in activities that are distracting other students from learning. If they want to do something other than listen to the lecture or pay attention themselves, then that is there agenda. The idea I was getting at was:
-We have identified a gold mine of information. The student is sending up signal flares that they are not interested in what is going on in class. Do we not think that “WHY?” would be an important question to ask? WHY is the student not engaged? WHY are some students engaged but not this one? WHY is the student bothering to come to class at all if she does not want to participate?
Technology, in my opinion, may not be the culprit we think it is. If, instead of calling it a distraction, we called it a signal or a notification I think we would be better suited to deal with the actual problem. The problem is not technology, the problem is student interaction and attention. Technology has become the scapegoat.