Good old Offices of Teaching & Learning. They’re reading (they’re supposed to be reading) the same studies professors are reading (supposed to be reading). In fact, they’re supposed to be the campus experts, the highest campus authorities, on best teaching practices. But although more and more professors are banning laptops (the article from which my post’s title is taken is all about how more and more DU professors are banning technology) in the light of overwhelming evidence that they damage comprehension, attention, and participation, most university teaching centers seem to have no policy on the matter – or they think laptops are terrific, wonderful, great…
DU’s office still thinks it’s clever to compare distraction through looking out the window or dragging your pencil across note paper to having instant access to the entire world of movies, stores, news outlets, and social media.
Why can’t the Office of Teaching & Learning learn?
January 27th, 2015 at 9:01AM
I suspect that, in most cases, if you saw a teaching center straightforwardly telling faculty what they should be doing, you’d mock that too.
January 27th, 2015 at 10:47AM
Ian: Only if the advice was bad. In any case, I don’t think of teaching centers as places that tell us what to do. I think of them as places that invite professors to think about classroom practices (by offering talks, etc.), and places that occasionally issue suggestions, or update important pedagogical research for us. Since I believe that the use of laptops in classrooms (especially when they’re combined with PowerPoint, clickers, etc.) is a drastically bad thing, I think it’s one of the few issues on which such centers should take a public stand.