This excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise…

No, it’s from the Hartford Advocate, sent to UD by chris, a reader, and it’s an actual statement from an actual Trinity College student in which she notes that her efforts to focus on the murder of six million Jews are sometimes interrupted by previews of coming attractions.

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A history professor at Trinity says, “The laptop isolates you from your classmates. Your relationship in the class is no longer as part of a community.”

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The laptop works kind of like a burqa.

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Another Trinity professor also thinks laptops discourage discussion.

If you make a comment in class, you are very aware that others are paying attention to you. As a professor, I’ve accepted the fact that some people aren’t paying attention to me. But when a student takes a risk, it is important that they are taken seriously. If the other eyes are on a laptop, contributors are aware that people are not engaged with what they are saying.

It’s a subtle and important point. Let’s consider it more closely.

Offering comments in university classrooms takes a bit of nerve, because smart people in those rooms are taking what you say seriously.

But of course that’s exactly why you want to say things in a serious university classroom. The setting forces you to focus and reflect before you speak; the mere mental formulation of your idea or your objection or your question, the very preparation to speak, is a kind of education in honing your language, refining your point, thinking seriously.

Again, this is because you know that serious people are going to listen to you carefully and take what you say seriously.

These are people, after all, who have decided to spend weeks concentrating on the subject on which you are about to speak. Not only that, but in front of the room is a professor who has dedicated a good deal of her intellectual life to the same subject.

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The classroom theater is intense, highly lit. It is the supreme antithesis to Plato’s cave.

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It’s not a comfortable place to be, exposed out there in search of the truth. One reason the university has always been a profoundly idealized cultural location is that people instinctively respect the collective effort toward intellectual clarity and maturation.

You’re in the university classroom to be changed.

… For all the weighty material, [he] had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

… As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled.

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

… But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

[He] chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change … [H]e liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled…

Professor Obama, at the University of Chicago, relied on the fact that his students were engaged, willing to be unsettled, willing to risk responding to his provocations. … Why do you think Jose Bowen calls his movement the Teach Naked movement? At its best, in its essence, teaching has always been about exposure: Exposure of the thinking self, exposure of complex, contested truths.

Exposure over time, which is why a lot of PowerPoint use, with its Here it is, folks bullets, is bullshit. The classroom theater is narrative drama — You come back to that room again and again as, through slow and intense intellectual and social interaction, the deeper realities of the world reveal themselves.

Another Trinity professor gets it: “The kind of interactions that make a class dynamic get muted [with laptops]. Just keep typing, keep clicking, rather than … think on your feet or mull over an idea that a classmate or professor has just presented.”

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Does the classroom picture I’ve drawn describe every valuable and authentic university course? No. But it certainly describes the ideal of many university courses, no matter what the subject.

University courses are teaching you how to think about anything, not merely how to think about their particular subject matter. Professors are modeling the disciplined and unimpeded and active use of reason generally.

Listen to what the Trinity professors are trying to tell you.

“Sitting in a room with people to talk about ideas is a very precious experience. Once people graduate, they won’t necessarily have this experience on a daily basis.”

… you start to get militant. Here’s the Boston College student newspaper editorial board.

[A]n overload of technology in the classroom has become a hindrance rather than a help to the learning process and that a return to the basics of teaching and note taking methods would benefit all.

All too often, laptop screens flash Facebook news feeds, the latest from “The Sports Guy” on ESPN.com, or the newest headlines on The New York Times. These online activities are a distraction not only to the participants, but also to those in the surrounding seats.

The issue of technology abuse is happening both in the desks and behind the podium. Increasingly, professors are relying heavily on teaching aids such as PowerPoint instead of the classical and traditional method of lecturing. A professor’s use of technology in the classroom, if not utilized properly, can create a teaching crutch that may be indicative of a larger wound. Appropriate teaching with technology is possible, but it can only be undertaken and utilized by the professors who are already skilled and excellent communicators.

Concerns about the overuse of technology in the classroom have created a new and vocal “teach naked” movement spearheaded by educators like Jose Bowen at Southern Methodist University. Additionally, research presented in both The Chronicle of Higher Education and the British Educational Research Journal suggests that students are more disengaged when computers are used in the classroom, and it is the lively debate and round-table discussions with peers that they found most valuable and memorable.

If this is an issue for students watching a PowerPoint, just imagine the additional negative effects of retreating behind a personal computer screen.

Some may argue that taking notes with a computer allows one to be more thorough, as most of us can type faster than we write. In reality, however, laptop note-taking prompts students to mindlessly type word-for-word what professors say or project in a presentation. With a notebook, students are forced to process what the professors say, to fashion ideas in their own terms, to paraphrase. Computer note-taking provokes regurgitation; manual note-taking provokes thought.

[W]e as students need to consciously make the decision to set aside our Facebooks or “farms” during the time we spend in lectures.

It’s a sad sad situation… Though I’m sure we’ll be able to find some stuff to laugh about… Like…

Like the fact that many universities have committed gazillions of dollars to high-technifying every second of class time — making laptops mandatory onaccounta they’re so great; making everybody buy cartloads of clickers — and now students are in rebellion.

Like the fact that universities are going to have to start trotting out their technospecialists on staff to give speeches to the students about how it’s actually obviously in their best interests to be taught by technoids instead of people… Latest thing and all… you won’t be ready for the big bad world out there if you’re not a technoid too…

But the students won’t listen and they’ll keep getting more naked in the classroom and insisting on their professor being naked and the school will keep issuing the professor more techo-clothes and putting the professor in more how-to-teach-like-a-technoid workshops…

When all that technology outlay turns out to be wasted money… When students become human beings and professors become technoids… Well, it’ll be fun to watch is all I’m saying.

Starts like this.

When it comes to using technology to foster education, the prevailing wisdom has been that more is better. Over the past decade, universities around the globe have invested heavily in the wired classroom, adding everything from external laptop connections to Blu-ray DVD players. But there is little evidence that these gadgets enhance learning–and, critics argue, they might actually hinder it, making both students and teachers passive. What if classrooms were restored to the pre-Internet days of wooden tables and chalk?

Then there’s this bit about José Bowen, Mr Teach Naked.

Then it concludes.

Technology has a place in education, but it should be used independently by students outside the classroom. That gives them more time to absorb lectures via podcast or video, and frees teachers to spend class time coaching students in how to apply the material rather than simply absorb it.

Duh.

… and an enemy of PowerPoint, is featured, along with other anti-PPers, in a Wall Street Journal piece.

Excerpts:

… José Bowen, a SourPointer who serves as dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of the Arts… is a jazz musician who has played with Dizzy Gillespie and written for Jerry Garcia. So he knows performance. And he insists that PowerPoint undermines it, serving as a crutch for professors and lulling students into boredom and passivity. He encourages his SMU colleagues not to use the program in lectures—to “teach naked,” as he says.

T.X. Hammes brings a quite different background to the ranks of the SourPointers. A retired colonel in the Marine Corps and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, Col. Hammes wrote in this month’s Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint “is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making.”

In the Defense Department and military, he writes, the agenda is driven by vague, oversimplified and easily misunderstood bullet points. While decision-makers once read and slept on “succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues,” today they are harried by PowerPoint’s pace and “are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought,” Col. Hammes charges.

As Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, Mr. Bowen, Col. Hammes and other SourPointers are propped on the shoulders of Edward Tufte. A design guru and former Yale University professor, Mr. Tufte travels the country giving six-hour lectures that people in advertising, programming and publishing pay hundreds of dollars to attend. Upending PowerPoint is a chief goal of his work.

Mr. Tufte’s case against PowerPoint is lengthy, detailed and not subtle. The program is evil and wasteful, he wrote in 2003—a “prankish conspiracy against evidence and thought.” On the cover of his self-published pamphlet, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Mr. Tufte depicts Josef Stalin overlooking a large, rigid Soviet military parade and declaring “Next slide, please.”…

Tufte sent UD the Stalin poster, which you can see on the wall next to her office door.

… as the Cowardly Lion sings…

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

Dream on, you fool!

… And yet…

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He’s not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. “The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

But…

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors…

Yes well. You know how irritable you become when you’ve been sleeping and people try to wake you up.

“[S]tudents … are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says [one observer]. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive.”

Duh! The professor’s been socialized to be passive too, sitting there like a pointless nothing watching a movie or staring at slides along with the kiddies. What a rip-off. You’re paying a lot in tuition for your professor to warm her ass on the seat next to you. To read bullet points aloud to you like a kindergarten teacher.

UD certainly sees the benefit of PowerPoint to professor and student. Nobody has to do anything, and the only negative is that everyone’s bored out of their gourd.

But, as this enlightened dean notes, college professors are supposed to do something. So are college students.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.