A reporter from the George Washington University student newspaper came by today and asked me questions about my no laptops thing. To prepare for the interview (UD prepares) I read Georgetown Law professor David Cole on the subject. He bans laptops for two reasons:
1. They turn students into stenographers rather than note-takers.
2. They distract the student with the laptop, who spends a good deal of time using it for non-class purposes; they also distract students who aren’t using laptops but can’t help looking at the screens around the room, which might be showing basketball games, porn films, etc.
The GW Hatchet article about this should come out on Monday; if I’m quoted, I’ll link to it.
Meanwhile, here’s some weird shit.
… Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman isn’t bothered by what his students do in class. If students want to play poker or watch porn during class, so be it, he says, though he knows his opinion is out of the mainstream.
“I have students who don’t come to class. I have students who are paying attention and say dumb things. But so be it,” Berman says.
Berman’s only concern is when one student’s behavior distracts another’s learning experience. It is a lesson he learned all too well when sitting in on a colleague’s evidence lecture during the March NCAA basketball tournament.
“I noticed a student’s laptop with the basketball scores on the screen,” he says. “I got distracted looking at the scores.”
He doesn’t think a student watching porn distracts other students? And… I dunno… the whole I don’t care what they do rhetoric makes me wonder… The way he says it – it sounds like a boast. So take the porn — what’s that going to turn into? Say you’ve got five guys in the back of the lecture hall clustering around a naughty movie, plus a bunch of others scattered about pleasuring themselves on private screens… What’s that gonna be like? Heavy breathing, orgasmic groans. But so be it.
From the University of Pennsylvania newspaper:
… There’s no reason why students should use the Internet so heavily during class. Unless a professor asks everyone to navigate to a certain page, open laptops do nothing more than attract eyeballs that should be attending to lecture notes. Bright, shiny monitors in front of a college student during lecture are evolved bug-zapper lamps.
Sure, you may say that you’re not affected by it. That you can pay attention, take good notes and still catch up on the latest headlines at nytimes.com. Or that you have the discipline to remain oblivious to your neighbor’s open PennLink page. But then you’d be lying to yourself.
The evidence? Take this annual example. Every spring, there’s that one fraternity pledge who causes a stir in a big lecture class because he’s watching porn in the first row. If no one was paying attention to the laptop ahead of him or her, the annual commotion would never occur – but it always does, without fail. Just wait a few weeks from now.
… [L]ast spring, the University of Chicago Law School … cut out non-class related computer use. As Dean Saul Levmore said in his letter to the school’s students and faculty, “we know that class time is not for shopping and e-mailing.”
… In the name of the New Year, let’s all make a resolution to cut our internet activity while a professor is talking. If not in the name of our own GPA, then for the sake of our classmate whose notes may suffer because they’re distracted by the porn two rows up.
When you’re helping run what is arguably the worst public school system in America, openly shopping online for dresses during important school board meetings really says I want to make this situation better. And what a special role model for the children of your district you are as you lie about what you were doing.
Arthur Pania of Baton Rouge, who attended Thursday’s School Board meeting, took to Facebook Saturday afternoon to rebut Bernard.
“I personally watched her for about eight minutes, attempting to decide between a beige and red dress,” Pania wrote. “The only thing I had issue determining from my sight was if it was a short dress or nightwear.”
Of course anyone who teaches at a university that allows students to bring laptops to class knows what it feels like to be, say, sweating your way through a careful presentation of Kantian philosophy and notice some guy in the front row watching pornography while you talk. (What alerted you to something amiss? His erection.) So while the bruised and aggrieved and long-suffering people of Baton Rouge discuss racism, this school board member tries to decide between beige and red. As with the panting guy in the front row, it’s a spectacular way to say hey lol fuck you.
The simple expedient of telling school board members not to use laptops during meetings never occurs to the ninnies who run schools into the ground.
The Onion captures one of UD‘s favorite memes – she’s covered it for years on this blog – the Criticism of any Form of Financial Activity is Merely Jealousy of Someone Richer than You Are meme. It’s been fun to quote Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow (read the whole page) on the “politics of envy” over the decades.
Last time I checked, using sensitive information to enrich yourself at the expense of hundreds of millions of other people was totally fine.
Absolutely; and you can read article after article calling for the legalization of insider trading, a move blocked by the petulant resentment of the many against America’s winners. And now Burr’s getting sued over something that should be totally legit!
Alan Jacobson, a shareholder in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, sued Burr in federal court on Monday, alleging that the senator used private information to motivate a mass liquidation of his assets. It is illegal for senators to use nonpublic information in conducting securities exchanges.
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There’s something so bracingly, so utterly, so fundamentally human about pleasuring yourself at the thought of screwing the unwashed, of being first in line for goodie bags at events no one else even knows are happening… In a great piece of satire – The Christmas Letter – Gregg Easterbrook captured the pleasuring perfectly. Here’s how it begins:
What a lucky break that I’m in first-class on the plane back from Istanbul, because there’s room to take out the laptop and write our annual Christmas letter. My brand-new laptop receives wireless satellite Internet from anywhere in the world. While I was at the board of directors session during the Danube cruise, I pretended to be listening to the chairman but actually was using the laptop to watch Emily’s oboe recital on live streaming video from Chad’s digital minicam! So the world really is growing smaller. And if you haven’t gotten one of these new laptops, you should. Of course, now there’s a waiting list.
Of course, now there’s a waiting list. When these rare birds are captured, we can, like Diana Henriques, interview them; but the secrecy at the heart of their pathology makes it difficult to yield much.
Now that Burr’s been unveiled, he’s calling for an ethics investigation into himself because, in the immortal words of George Costanza, “if anyone had said anything to me at all [about how] that sort of thing is frowned upon…”
The remarkable spectacle of university students reminding their professors of their basic pedagogical responsibilities continues. This Emory student has done more than most professors – he has reviewed the now-extensive literature on the vile effects of laptop use in most college classrooms, and he has arrived at the obvious conclusion. As have many responsible professors. But so many others who continue to allow laptops – are they lazy? cynical? – have not.
A study published in the journal Educational Psychology found that students who had cellphones or laptops present while a lesson was being taught scored five percent, or half a letter grade, lower on exams than students who didn’t use electronics… The study also found that students in the device-permitting classroom who were not using devices also scored lower. The researchers attributed this to distraction from the devices around them.
Once again, students must instruct professors on the gross negligence of failing to restrict/outlaw laptop use in their classes. This Northwestern University student nicely rehearses the by-now almost universally accepted arguments against laptop use in the classroom; he goes on to note that plenty of professors still don’t give a shit.
UD has amused herself over the years, compiling various stupid maneuvers professors perform to avoid banning laptops in their classrooms.
There was York University’s Henry Kim:
Kim is fully aware that his students aren’t listening to him because they’re watching shit on their laptops. Instead of banning laptops, however, Kim has taken a page out of Erich Honecker’s East Germany and turned his students into a spy network. If a student sees another student using her laptop for non-class purposes (Kim has already had his students swear some ridiculous pledge, etc.), she is to report that to Kim.
“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class.”
Comrade Honecker speaks! Creating new social norms by encouraging students to turn in other students – that’s the solution to the laptop problem!
And now there’s some person at the University of Pennsylvania:
I had a professor last year who had the TAs sit in the back of the lecture hall, where they could see the screens of the students using their laptops. If they saw someone goofing off or not simply taking notes, they would ring a bell, and everyone would have to close their laptops for several minutes before they could reopen them to continue taking notes. This didn’t help anyone focus; rather, it stirred up anger in the students, that they were being treated like animals who needed to respond to the ring of a bell.
Same basic Honecker approach – designate a person or persons who tell on the naughty laptop user – but I love the addition of a bell… Like Captain von Trapp’s dog whistle… Another thought experiment generating new social norms…
What also stood out was [Neil Gorsuch’s] ban of laptops in the classroom. He forbade students in his [University of Colorado] legal ethics class from using computers — an unusual move within law schools, where laptops are ubiquitous.
The computer exile was intended to eliminate distractions, boost engagement, and prompt students to listen carefully to each other, according to Jordan Henry, a second-year Colorado law student who took Gorsuch’s course last semester. And it was so effective that Henry voluntarily stopped using her laptop in several other classes.
“When you close the computers and get rid of distractions in class, you respond to each other and bring up counterpoints,” she said. “It makes for a true discussion and a much more engaged class — and frankly a more interesting class.”
Allowing laptops, as UD often says, is academic malpractice.
Professors who continue to allow laptop use fall into the following categories.
1. I could give a shit. It’s easier for me to do virtually nothing up there if students are sedated with their fun screens. To make matters perfect, I use old text-heavy PowerPoints and drone and dribble over them. Eventually my teaching will resemble my deep calm when sleeping off benders, and my classroom will be a morgue.
2. I hate and fear humanity, especially students. I look forward to the day when all of them will be hidden from me behind their screens.
That’s about it.
…and another article UD found it difficult not to giggle through. (Like this one.)
Highlights from the career of Murdoch University’s Vice Chancellor Richard Higgott:
“[A]ccessed adult websites on his work laptop almost 500 times… When he was asked to return the laptop, Professor Higgott downloaded scrubbing software onto the computer in an unsuccessful attempt to delete all evidence he had accessed the websites.”
In an email to a colleague about the faculty senate, complained about the f***king cheek off [sic] these people”.
In another email to a colleague, wrote of the Chancellor, “I will not spend the next two to three years thinking he is the boss and I must seek approval before I fart.”
Circumvented hiring processes to push through the appointment of a woman who referred to him (again those pesky emails) as
“my dearest Higgy”, “Higlet” and “Your Higginess” and signed off with “xoxo”.
He refers to her as “Honey”, “Capling my luv” and “Capling my dear”.
Your Higginess is good.
A Tufts University professor says no.
After having a laissez-faire policy on laptops in my classrooms for my first decade of teaching, I have pretty much banned them. I knew that taking notes by hand is much, much better for learning than taking notes on a computer (the latter allows the student to transcribe without thinking; the former forces the student to cognitively process what is worthy of note-taking and what is not), but I figured that was the student’s choice. The tipping point for me was research showing that open screens in a classroom distract students close to the screen. So I went all paternalistic and decided to eliminate them from my classroom. The effect was immediate — my students were more engaged with the material.
Same for PowerPoints and Lecture-By-Skype and so on and so on.
MOOCs (as UD has discovered) can be great as non-credit-bearing world-outreach sorts of things, but they can be just as cheesy as many online and PowerPoint-heavy and Go-Ahead-And-Use-Your-Laptops courses when you try to pretend they’re equivalent – in intrinsic value, and in credit-worthiness – to non-laptopped, in-class courses.
It begins to dawn on yet another university that laptops in classrooms are lunacy. In a nicely titled article (Bodies Present, Brains Unaccounted For) students at Loyola University Chicago feature the unsurprising results of polls and interviews that underscore the brain-removal service that is the personal computer in the classroom.
As always with such pieces, the journalists find a couple of give-a-shit finance professors who say it ain’t my job to create classroom conditions in which students pay attention…
The other half? Students with laptops.