Trying a laptop ban without being a Luddite
Posted by Jeremy on August 23, 2010 · 3 Comments
I love technology. This is why I am banning the use of laptops in my big lecture course, Media & Society, this coming fall.
Wait, that didn’t sound right. But it’s true. I love technology so much that I know that I would be distracted in a course should I have the choice between paying attention to the course or looking around online. I’m just a year out of grad school, and even in some of my amazing graduate courses the temptation was strong.
Now, self-discipline is the best policy, and generally I will let a student suffer the grade consequences if they want to screw around during class. So while a recent article about professors observing bad grades among students and using that to justify laptop bans did resonate, it wasn’t the bulk of why I decided to do it.
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I’m more concerned about the “halo effect,” frankly. When a student has a laptop open, invariably the cone of people next to and behind that student get caught up watching as well. The movie playing or the Facebook page on the screen can be a huge distraction to both those students and to me, frankly. It’s hard to keep your train of thought going when you see students looking, pointing, and laughing at something on a screen.
So at some point it became a larger issue for me. If a student wants to kill their grade by not paying attention, fine, but when it starts to affect those around them it becomes an issue of respect, both for their students and their professor. Respect is a key value in my classes; if I ask for it as students express their views, it makes little sense for me to not expect it in other areas.
Now, some of this is on the professor. A professor has to be engaging enough to warrant the ban. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I think I do a lot to make my classes plenty engaging. Even a lecture course like this with 55-65 students has a good mix of A/V, lecture, and discussion. The students tell me the class is engaging, and my reviews to this end have been pretty good.
So, mission accomplished, right? Well, no. While the reviews are good, the test scores don’t always match. And this is why I worry about the halo effect, that research is showing that there is a relationship between having no laptops and improved scores. Perhaps we just haven’t figured out how to structure curriculum to match the age of laptops, but then again maybe in this case technology in the context of class time for a course so heavy on lecture and big-idea concepts isn’t consistent with course goals.
Look, laptops and computers are great. For the engaged student, they can open up new avenues of inquiry and help you sort material. But I don’t buy the notion that they are always good in all contexts. That’s technology optimism without any real thought. I’m worried of being seen as a Luddite, but the extreme opposite isn’t exactly tenable ground either.
As I said, I’m not worried about the student who doesn’t care. I’m worried about the poor student who has to sit next to them, distracted from class even though they really want to pay attention to material they find interesting. I’ve been there, and quite recently. And I worry a little about a society that uses technological innovation as a reason to avoid certain things such as respect and courtesy. Imagine if I had a laptop out the whole time during student presentations in my M&S course, what kind of message that would send?
The other point I make is that education is communication, and communication is co-created in classrooms. Even in big lecture courses. Students might gripe about me being boring, but in classes like this where I try to engage them and open things up, what are they doing to make the environment more vibrant? Are they prepared for class, thinking and listening to the material, and ready to discuss? The greatest teacher in the world would seem boring if nobody talked, and honestly it’s hard to be at my best when I see groups of students distracted by a laptop. I have to bring it every class; so should the students.
All that said, my ban is a soft one and I’m taking a more incremental approach at first. For one, I know some students with disabilities need them for note-taking. So here is my policy:
Use of laptops in class is forbidden except if you can show me that it will improve your class performance. Thus you must be given prior permission. If you are granted permission to use a laptop in class, you must sit in the back row of the class. If there are no seats in the back row, you may not use a laptop at all. All laptops must be closed for group presentations.
This seems like middle ground that allows for some students who need them. Others have to jump through a hoop, but it lets me know they’re on my radar and that I’m going to blame that laptop for bad performance the first chance I get. And at least maybe it will get some of the slacker types to show up on time to grab one of the 12 or so seats in the back row.
Final note: I am not anti tech in the classroom. I consider computers vital to the experience in my Multimeda Reporting class, and other courses I might teach here would be the same. This is for the context of a large course that is heavy on lecture, discussion, and big concepts.
Like I said, I love technology. And students who have had my courses know I encourage them to integrate technology as much as possible into learning and growing. But understanding where technology helps us also means trying to figure out contexts where it might hurt us as well.
I don’t hate this policy, and it makes some sense, particularly for intro classes, large lecture classes, those sorts of things.
That said, I think you’re on the wrong side of history here. Do you think that 10 years from now, professors will be able to keep laptops (or whatever comes after laptops — Super iPads, maybe) out of the classroom?
Rather than a ban except for certain people, we should be thinking of ways to incorporate the technology in ways that enhance the learning experience. As you probably remember from our grad school days, I was one of those people with the laptop open in every class. And while, yes, sometimes I used it to check on baseball games in progress, I more often used it to look up references the professor made, to recheck articles (which I refused to print out, being green and all) I had read, and generally to make me get things better,
Was it distracting to others? Probably. But students are growing up in a distracting world now. Should we ignore that or channel that?
My laptop policy is this: Anything goes. Granted, this is for seniors in a law & ethics class, which means they can have cases, notes, or anything on there. They can also have facebook or whatever. They can be tearing me to shreds via text message on their phones. That’s their business. But students also must know that I will call on them to look things up — What year was that case? Was that the KKK or the Nazis who were pushing the bounds of the First Amendment that time? What was the exact language in that dissent? — and hopefully make the learning environment richer.
You might be right about this side of history. Maybe we haven’t evolved curriculum enough to handle the era of laptops. I certainly would rather they stay open if it could be done right.
But here’s where I’ll push back. The classroom is more about attention than other parts of the learning experience. It’s a compressed time and the information is being delivered in a way that doesn’t leave much for reflection, so focus is a big deal. And we’ve seen a lot of research in the past couple years that show us that multitasking divides attention; the articles this year about laptop bans are a possible remedy, not the symptom here.
I love computers, and what they do for us. In particular the web and interactive media are letting us solve problems in new and creative ways. But I am starting to wonder whether solutions and learning are different phases, and that maybe I was too much a technological optimist to think students could work through it. The lack of focus is the #1 complaint I hear about the digital natives in the work environment; yes, they grow up around distraction, but the question is whether we should model that.
And I still think courtesy is an issue. If I was screwing around on my laptop during presentations, I would get reamed for it in my evaluations, and rightfully so.
Interesting post. My Instapaper is, um, so full that I’m reading posts from August now. Great.
Personally I wish I had this problem – I see far too few students carrying around laptops at my school, often because a)our student body is relatively poor compared to many schools and b)technology is not as much a part of a culture here as it is in some places. I think it’s vital that they be as immersed in information and technology as possible to train as competent journalists.
But I think you make an excellent point about the “halo effect” and that’s far and away the best argument against allowing them. It does change the whole dynamic of the classroom, and if a few students are screwing around, it’s amazing how much that spreads even amongst the more well-intentioned folks. I think Chip is right that students have to learn to deal with distractions in the real world, but at the same time…for 18 and 19 year-olds, they, um, may need some help and direction building that skill rather than just being thrown into the water. If your teacher really emphasizes that it’s important to use tech in a smart way and a respectful way, maybe that’s the way you are gonna learn it.
I don’t teach a lecture class here, though, otherwise I’d think about it. Heh, our department only really has one.