… if the laptops in college classrooms problem were solved not by professors, but by angry students! I can’t keep up with the editorials in university newspapers calling laptop use rude, outrageous, distracting to others in the room, an intolerable problem. Where are the professors willing to say this?
True, more and more of them, like UD, ban the machines; but the vast majority seems – cynically, lazily, indifferently – to be perfectly okay about mandatory attendance policies (Duh – The next step after being allowed to surf on a laptop all class is deciding not to attend the class at all. So the professor, to avoid speaking to an empty room, must force people to attend.), and about lecture halls and seminar rooms full of people resentfully, flagrantly, ignoring them.
So here’s the latest student protest – a woman at Indiana University. She notes increasing numbers of professors “making attendance an important part of the grade,” and shudders at the thought of all the online flunkies who would have stayed home now showing up and being in-class online flunkies. The problem as it stands is bad enough:
No matter how hard you’re trying to pay attention to the professor, if the person in front of you is on Facebook or Popeater or Tetris, your attention is going to be drawn to whatever he or she is doing.
Quite frankly, it’s rude. If you’re not interested in paying attention during class, don’t come. You’re a distraction for the rest of us, and you’re probably annoying the professor.
She argues for what they’ve done at the University of Chicago law school: Disabling the internet in classrooms. But she also notes that this won’t stop her fellow students from playing distracting off-line games… And I can tell you, from the professor’s point of view, that as long as there’s a vertical screen between you and the student’s face, the same problem of total non-interaction pertains.
February 28th, 2011 at 9:33AM
Actually, I think it would be brilliant if students took charge for ending the trend of laptop distraction in the classroom.
It’s my experience that students are far more willing to listen to their peers. I can ask a couple of buddies four or five times to stop talking during class and they’ll ignore me, but let the student in the row ahead of them turn around and go “SHUT UP. I can’t pay attention to what’s going on in class!” and they’re more likely to listen.
Fortunately, this semester, I have zero laptoppers.
February 28th, 2011 at 11:12AM
After watching kids in the big lecture courses for which I TA spending all of their time on facebook, I banned laptops and iPads in my discussion sections. Oh, the horror! “But but but but Shannon, I read the book online instead of spending $8 for it, so how am I going to reference it in discussion?” “But I have really bad handwriting, and I have to take notes somehow, and how am I supposed to do that without typing?” Some of them complained to the professor, and one young man, after rolling his eyes at me throughout the first discussion section, sent me an email to say that my attitude was “totally unacceptable” and he would switch to a new TA as soon as possible.
I’d like to think that change would come from the students, but the frightening thing is that I think they’ve managed to convince themselves that they are more productive with computers, and that they can browse facebook and take good notes at the same time. Call me gullible, but I believe them when they tell me that they believe they need their computers for legitimate purposes. They don’t, of course, but they think they do. I’m not sure that the ones who are writing editorials about the numerous problems of laptops are representative of the entire population. They, after all, care enough to actually spend a few minutes creating content instead of passively absorbing it. They’re really pissed off, in other words. The vast majority? I don’t know.
February 28th, 2011 at 1:41PM
Regarding attendance grades: many of us are, in essence, “forced” to have some sort of mandatory attendance policy now, in the name of “retention and student success”; in other words, because a student who doesn’t attend class is less likely to pass, we must force them to attend (which I’m sure you probably already have linked to somewhere here, for instance the GPS devices one CC is proposing to equip their students with to track their activities). Look, I think that a lot of students only react to sticks, so you’ve got to get them in their however possible; it is up to us however to make them not resent it.
February 28th, 2011 at 2:32PM
ReadyWriting: Nothing against mandatory attendance policies in principle — I take attendance almost every day, and it counts toward my students’ grades. I’m talking about the particular case of classroom policies that all but guarantee few students will show up — putting your lectures online, allowing internet surfing in class, robotically reading PowerPoints… All the things that, combined, make it almost inevitable that students won’t take the class seriously and will see no reason to attend it.
February 28th, 2011 at 3:07PM
I’ve banned laptops in my undergraduate classes. I make an exception for students sitting in the first two rows. That way I can tell if they’re using it to take notes.
March 1st, 2011 at 5:55PM
I’m empathetic to the professors who have to combat this, but how many bad teachers are there out there who can’t hold the attention of the students? If I am not learning something in class and it’s a useless lecture, what measure do I have to combat this? I’m pretty much stuck. It’s amazing when I see good professors teach, that the laptops find a way of going back into the bags. It’s a chicken-egg problem. Which came first? I’d say teaching was on the decline long before MacBook’s swept American college campuses.
March 2nd, 2011 at 8:45AM
I think the use of laptops in class is cultural. When I taught in Kyrgyzstan it was a real problem. Most students had them open during lectures and often they were facebooking or otherwise not taking notes. But, here in Ghana I have not seen a single student bring a laptop to class, not even the American exchange students. I want to say it is because Ghanian students are just more academically inclined than Central Asian students. But, there might be some other reason.
March 3rd, 2011 at 1:14PM
Well, I teach one class where many students without laptops don’t pay attention (they chatter away), and the one following what I say the best is the one taking notes on his tablet (he scribbles notes on a digitized version of the course material).
Go figure.
March 3rd, 2011 at 1:18PM
By the way, dear Margaret, I’ve recently seen a humanities professor do what you criticize: give a lengthy presentation using PowerPoint, reading pompous text off the slides. What he was talking about was not uninteresting per se, but the way he delivered the talk was likely to have people doze off, or at least impatiently wait for the end… He had an all-academic audience, but imagine with students!
My personal way of using “slides” (not PowerPoint – LaTeX/Beamer) is to use them as a guide not to lose the continuity of what I wanted to talk about (in much the same way that many people use handwritten notes), and also to show diagrams, equations, definitions etc. that I otherwise would have to draw with a chalk (and I’ve got a terrible handwriting). I don’t see any interest in reading lengthy text off slides.