Laptops Evicted from Lecture Halls

An article by Darin Wagner    No Comments

A March 9, 2010, article in the Washington Post was titled, “Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls.” I found the article very interesting and have selected some passages:

A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction. Wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming — all the diversions of a home computer beamed into the classroom to compete with the professor for the student’s attention.

Diane E. Sieber, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has debated her students on the collegiate conceit of multitasking, the notion that today’s youths can fully attend to a lecture while intermittently toggling over to e-mail, ESPN and Facebook.

One recent semester, Siebert tracked the grades of 17 student laptop addicts. At the end of the term, their average grade was 71 percent, “almost the same as the average for the students who didn’t come at all.”

Plenty of professors still allow laptops. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at U-Va., generally permits them in his classes. He remembers his own college diversion: reading newspapers surreptitiously on the floor beneath his desk. He believes that, ultimately, it is a professor’s job to hold the class’s attention.

“If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems,” he said.

After posting the video of Doug Johnson at TEDxASB, I again am reminded of his question – are students being entertained or engaged? I remember my college classes BL (before laptops – or smart phones, etc.). If I wasn’t engaged in the typical an all to common lecture, I was daydreaming or doodling or doing something else to pass the time. I am sure that if I had had a laptop, I would have been surfing the web and catching up on last nights NHL sores and highlights.

I don’t think laptops are a disruptive technology but they can become a distractive technology, so the onus is on me to structure an engaging learning strategy and environment when I am teaching.