In my April 17, 2009, post, I examined the use of laptops in classrooms and noted that the research is clear that they can be very problematic. Indeed, schools at all levels that once embraced laptops—even supplied them to students—have been dropping them over the past few years. At the university level, professors have been banning them from their classrooms because they are distractions to other students, to teachers, and to the students using them, who can’t resist checking their e-mail, Facebook, etc. Those with a laptop in front of them spend on average 25% of the class playing with it, and on average get lower grades than those without them.[1]
The local press in London, Ontario, got fired up over this tired story this past week, spurred by a local student journalist who wrote a story favouring them … that’s right, he wrote the article on his laptop `in class, while bored with his lecture. This student stated on CBC Radio that he doesn’t ‘buy’ that it is a distraction to students and professors. Well, he is dead wrong, as is exhibiting the ego-centrism typical of that portion of today’s student body that feels entitled as customers, and to hell with everyone else.
Various opinions have been offered, including from the (in)famous ‘edutainer’ at Western, ‘Dr. Mike,’ who teaches mega intro psych classes, armed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hi-tech equipment, tech support personnel, and an army of TAs, who IM with students during his classes. He is dismissive of those of us who find laptops distracting, arrogantly telling us to ‘get with it.’
I, for one, take my classes very seriously and am sensitive to student needs in class, and my ability to keep their attention. I do not condone texting, using cell phones, and other forms of play in class, which he claims are inevitable—nonsense, any more than reading newspapers in class used to be ‘inevitable.’ Professors simply had to tell offending students to put the newspaper away. Most of my students do not use laptops, and do not want to, even in my largest class of 120 students. It is in part in response to student complaints about the distractions of laptops that I have set out rules for their use. Part of a professor’s job is to maintain order and decorum in the classroom, and professors who fail to do so do not serve their students well. Entitled students, who will see them as pushovers, will certainly not respect these professors.
What I now do in my (lower-level) large classes of 120 students, is to have students sign a contract at the beginning of the course, giving their word that they will not abuse this privilege (thanks to Professor Kim Luton for suggesting this). If they do abuse it, I will revoke their permission to use the laptop in my class. I understand that some students think it helps them, but this appears to be only about 10% of students. In my open discussions of this issue in many classes, I’ve had students offer up that they are now ‘reformed,’ and no longer use laptops in class. This is part of their effort to engage themselves more in their classes and improve their grades. They readily admit that they used them to goof off.
In my upper year courses (capped at 40), I find I do not have to police laptops because they tend not to be abused there by the more mature students. Still, I have no qualms about calling a student to the carpet if he or she is sitting grinning at a laptop screen while I am lecturing on a serious topic, about which nothing is remotely funny (e.g., discrimination, exploitation, etc.). This is the type of distraction that interrupts my train of thought and thus the flow of the lecture. Because I have to ‘re-set’ my concentration, anyway, I take the opportunity to remove the distraction. Not asserting my authority will simply result in future distractions from these offending students.
As I concluded in my last post on this topic, this debate may have already been resolved in terms of end-user demand. A recent report notes that ‘many students who own laptops do not carry them to class because they are bulky, heavy, and “uncool”’ (The New Media Consortium, The Horizon Report 2006 Edition. Stanford, CA: The New Media Consortium). The first-year students Dr. Mike teaches may think he is cool and doing them a favour, but as they mature, they will learn otherwise. My best students engage themselves in class, providing me with verbal and non-verbal feedback about the material I am presenting; a laptop simply gets their way.
[1] There are some success stories of schools using laptops with smart-boards, but this requires that all students have them, which can be a very expensive proposition that many schools cannot afford (including having classrooms electrically wired to support all of those computers). Besides, this type of hi-tech environment is unnecessary in supporting a liberal pedagogy, and is more suited to the types of programmes where students are being trained’ for something (see my previous posts on mission drift).