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Should Colleges Ban Classroom Laptop Use?
theodp writes "If you were a college prof, think you could successfully compete for the attention of a lecture hall of Mac-packing students? CS student Carolyn blogs that a debate has sprung up on her campus about whether it is acceptable to use a laptop in class. And her school is hardly alone when it comes to struggling with appropriate in-classroom laptop use (vendor/corporate trainers would no doubt commiserate). The problem, she says, is that the OCD Facebookers aren't just devaluing their own education — there's a certain distraction factor to worry about. 'Students,' she suggests, 'should also communicate with each other more and tell their classmates when their computer use bothers them. I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.'"
College is a choice, if students decide to squander it, banning laptops won't fix it.
;)
Besides, they'd just pull out their iPhones then.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
It all depends on what is done in the classroom if a laptop (or other device) can be used or not.
During some laborations the use of a laptop can be good since it allows the students to have a location where to make notes and share them, but in other cases it may be a distraction instead. Don't forget the information overload factor - education is often about how to come to a conclusion yourself, not to draw on other people's conclusions.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I type all my university notes. I'm able to work faster than if I was writing, can research if I didn't understand something, can format it into an understandable piece.
Yes you get distracted. But you know what I do when I have paper and I'm bored ? I doodle or daydream. You're still going to do something else to pass the time. If you can't stay attentive, stop bringing it yourself. There's no need to remove it for everyone else.
If anything, that should be a decision left up to the professors. For the college itself to ban laptop use would be a bad call on all fronts. What it boils down to is what utility a laptop provides for a specific class. If it's a literature class where most of the learning is done through presentations and textbooks, then using a laptop in that specific class wouldn't be that important. If, on the other hand, you're taking a physics course and you have supplemental programs that aid you in doing whatever you need to do, then laptop use is a must if there is no other means to proficiently complete coursework at school. If a professor notices a lot of students are just browsing the internet and not doing class relevant work, then I think the professor should have the authority to restrict use.
I do not need permission to take notes in class. My handwriting is illegible and painfully slow. If not for laptops, I would be back to middle school where I sat and listened rather that flail at note-taking, only to be criticized by my teachers for not taking notes. While schools might consider the availability of unrestricted WiFi in the classroom, I frequently learn more by being able to research a topic on the web as the teacher lectures. That said, no student has the right to disrupt others.
Yes, let's ban a useful tool because some people are too meek to ask others to stop doing distracting things with their laptops. [rolls eyes] When did people become so afraid? Is it really that hard to respectfully ask someone to change their behavior so as not to disturb others? Are we to ban a useful technology in the classroom because of a handful of bozos?
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I suffer from hyper mobility in my fingers, if I wasn't allowed to use my laptop to type my notes I would have quickly fallen far behind as my writing speed is horrendous and painful.
They shouldn't assume that laptops act as a distraction to everybody, if a computer in front of someone else is a distraction to you then you're clearly looking for a distraction and just need something to blame.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
You really should be communicating with your profs during class, not dinking around on your laptop. Unless you type quite a bit faster than most hunt and peckers, you're going to take better notes with pen and paper anyway, and there are relatively few situations where you really need a computer during class as a tool.
What really should be banned is the use of PowerPoint lectures. You know the ones..... where your prof essentially scanned all the relevant sections of the textbook and then cruises through 200 screens of unreadable shrunken slides at light speed while staring at his laptop. Most folks use it as a crutch rather than a visual aid to get a handful of important points across visually, or provide a persistent framework for discussion. It's irritating. I'd much rather see the chalk board in use, screeching and all... at least then the instructor is forced to cover the material at the speed it takes him/her to think through it, giving you enough time to grok it during the lecture.
I spent my undergraduate years at an American university and then moved to Europe for the remainder of my academic years. Imagine how happy I was to find that here lectures are not obligatory -- the exams are rigorous, the expectations clearly laid out in a syllabus, and you're welcome to study on your own and show up on the last day of the course and show your knowledge. While some fields may actually impart useful knowledge through lectures, in so many fields one can get the same information from books.
So why not just make lectures optional? The students who are likely to simply surf the net can be absent, while those who come will probably want to be there.
"[W]hen I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction."
How about having the ones with laptops sitting in the back or the ones distracted sitting in front (perhaps depending on whichever is the larger group).
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Wouldn't it make more sense to remove the class than the computer?
Put the teacher inside the screen and let the students decide where and when they want to study. Those who aren't able to manage the responsability will fail, as they should.
It's time to start treating people as adults and also to demand to be treated as such.
What kind of a retarded question is that? Banning classroom use of silly text books and writing on paper is what should be getting banned.
I'm a little mixed on the topic. I've had horrible handwriting since I was a kid. But I had an excellent memory. Something I learned in middle school and high school was I had a choice: I could either take notes, to which I could read very little of if I went back later, or I could pay attention to the lecture and retain more of it. The exceptions were math/physics. Those classes I had to take notes as I'd understand the material in class, but if I went to do homework later that night or the next night, I wouldn't remember the finer points.
I had a laptop in college, rarely used it for note taking in class. Once again, for most classes I could take notes (paper or computer) or listen and learn the lecture. Again the exception being classes that were math intensive or subjects like Econ where drawing graphs were kinda hard on a computer.
That changed, however, when I was in Law School. There having a laptop was almost a must and a useful tool. I had hard copies of the texts, but also CD-rom's of the case law and the particular program made it extremely easy to highlight text and leave margin notes on the computer. Extremely useful when you're reading 300 pages a night and then needed to make references the next day in class. I'm not sure if I would have survived 1L with out those notes on the computer.
But I wasn't using it to *take* notes in class as much as search/recall information already stored from the night/day before.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Kill the laptops!
College was fine before the laptop was invented.
Students will be a lot less likely to be using Facebook in a class if it's their second time through.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Banning laptops in class would infringe on students' rights to attempt first post on every slashdot story! We can't let the trolls win! You aren't a troll sympathiser, are you?
The only way to ensure that you aren't distracted by other students laptop use is to sit further towards the front of the lecture room. Students who waste time in lectures don't tend to sit in the front few rows.
I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.
Usually the hot girl in the short chick distracts me. Not someone's computer.
There are always those who use a notebook or netbook computer to help them learn. It can be used to take note (with a spell-check feature) or to look up additional information on the subject matter. By keeping people from using them you stop the people who will use it for a good reason.
Laptop use during lectures seems pretty essential for taking notes. Duh?
-josh
Would be to record the lecture, preferably with a small video camera, but audio in many cases is sufficient when combined with written notes. The laptop can be saved for later use, and the student can have a conversation with the Prof. to make video notes and lecture content available for the class as extra credit. Good for grades, no distraction, and you can use the laptop where it will actually do some good. The last thing we need is to make things harder for our attention deficit progeny.
I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.
Computers are boring. The hot girl in the short skirt is a major distraction.
Laptop use during lectures seems pretty essential for taking notes. Duh?
-josh
As a prof. I would certainly expect everyone to close their laptop. At least while I'm speaking. There's something rude about people looking elsewhere while you speak to them.
As a former student though, plenty profs have wasted my time - a laptop would've allowed me to do something more useful. Now I ended up writing code on paper while many fellow students made drawings, did homework for other classes, etc.
Structure the lecture such that there are no downloadable notes, and that if you're not present and madly scribbling you fall hopelessly behind. My Operating Systems Pragmatics class back in prehistory (Dr Clevenger, if you're still alive, that was the most fun I've ever paid for) would qualify. Any lecture that you can sleep through frankly is time and money wasted.
Instead, set rules within the class/system that there is an appropriate time for when students may use their portable computers. This way you can come to a compromise, as long as both sides become resolute in defending the policy.
I brought a ThinkPad with me all the time when I was in college for easy access to lecture notes, book chapters that're posted in .pdf format, and also external references, and that didn't stop me at getting straight As from Comp. Sci. classes. Same for many of my friends. I've never been fond of the old stack-of-paper approach - paper get lost easily and are hard to organize when you have a large bunch of them, why bother?
For students who can manage it, bringing a laptop to class is progress. We should never stop progress because some loser can't concentrate with a laptop in front of him - that's a nanny policy. Arguably bad for high schools, and a big-NO for universities. What do you think university students are? 3-year-olds?
Get more creative with your teaching methods and embrace the inevitable.
It's tempting to frame this as a student freedom issue only, but I certainly find myself inadvertently distracted when others around me surf during meetings. I've gone so far as to move, as discreetly as possible (like during a break), when faced with this situation. It's not like a whole class of students could do that. Perhaps they could establish a row of seats at the back for laptop users?
Imagination is more important than knowledge -Einstien
Should laptops be banned? Yes. But let's ban them because writing offers better recall and less personal distractions. Frankly the argument that someone else reading facebook is distracting is almost laughable. I fail to see how facebook or slashdot are any more distracting on someone else's laptop than for example a word document or OneNote.
But as a sidebar I just want to point out how lame "college" has become. It used to be for those serious about their education or the academic subjects, but now it is just another mandatory level of education with the same behavioural problems from those who really have no wish to be in attendance. The fact that we're talking about treating 19 to 24 year olds like small children should tell you how silly the situation is becoming.
You don't need a laptop to distract those around you; paper, conversation and actions all work. Wheras as a student I found taking notes on my laptop enormously beneficial. I would not want to be in a class that forbids them, any more than I would want to be in a class that forbids paper.
I am trolling
When I was at uni, the best note-taking solution I found was the combination of a Tablet PC, MS OneNote, and the "Print to OneNote" feature that allowed me to import lecturers' slides into OneNote before lectures started. Having the slides in OneNote meant I didn't have to waste time copy the slides during the lecture, and could concentrate on what the lecturer was actually saying. The Tablet PC pen allowed for very flexible note-taking on top of each slide. Not trying to sound like a OneNote advertisement; I just think it's quite short-sighted to suggest banning a very valuable note-taking device in lecture halls.
Block the problem, not the tool.
Laptops can be a bane or improvement on the classroom environment. I think the better question is how to most appropriately take advantage of them
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
Its a problem; laptop or no laptop.
I've sat in lectures 200+ students and there were plenty of people screwing off. I just didnt let it bother me. If you're taking a class to learn the material you need to pay attention. You want it or you don't. Its as simple as that
I never understood why students need to take notes. When I was in college I never took notes, instead I tried to listen and understand what was being said. The rest of the required information I got from the course material that was prepared by the teacher.
I certainly hate the trend of bringing laptops to meetings. The user may well claim to be saving paper by bringing the meeting documents on his laptop. But to everyone else at the meeting he might as well be checking his email, posting on FB or writing a novel.
As a university lecturer I don't see much of a trend to bring laptops to lectures: our students seem to prefer sleeping or not attending at all. But I think if I was faced with a wall of laptop backs when I looked at the audience I would suggest that their owners should close them down and pay attention to the lecture. Given that there might be some dyslexics who can take notes more easily with a keyboard, a better approach would be to walk around the theatre and publicly mock anyone who was reading email or facebook --- the radio mike and laser pointer mean that one is not stuck at the front of the room any more. Maybe mocking would be too harsh: one could just ask them a hard question about the subject of the lecture and wave the radio mike under their nose.
Why yes, since you ask, I am the BLFH.
They are not connected to the net, so the students really don't care usually. We have had very few problems in our classes.
I think it is a respect thing. It's one thing to take notes/record a lecture, but another to twitter/facebook. Ultimately I think it is plain rude.
I completely agree with the students policing themselves at College/Uni. Quite frankly, they are the ones that will pay in the end.
Carolyn sez:
Having your laptop out not only distracts other students, but is disrespectful and discouraging to professors.
As far as I understand, most lecture participation is optional anyway (or should be!). As long as I can type quietly (if I do type, that is), I can’t see it being distracting or discouraging. I have got A’s in grad school in classes where I was reading Harry Potter most of the time. Using a notebook to work on something else would have been no different.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Might be one way to prevent the Facebook and YouTube watching during lecture. But it would do nothing for DVD watching and gaming.
I absolutely agree that in many cases laptop bans can be helpful. Some people do actually use them to take notes, but the vast majority do not, and it is very distracting for the students who sit behind the laptop users. It's virtually impossible for your eyes not to be drawn to all the flashy lights and images flying by the computer screens in front of you as you try to pay attention to the lecture.
Ideally you could just ban laptop usage that was unrelated to the class, but that is very difficult to enforce and would be a strain on the professors time while they should be teaching.
It's part of an ongoing problem that schools do not yet know how to properly utilize technology in the classroom. Until they figure this out, technology can be a distraction instead of a benefit to students.
I am working as researcher/post-grad student, and computer is the number one research tool. Like is hammer for a blacksmith. No surprises there.
When in the same place I work should "forbid" the major research tool in the classrooms, this is an obvious sight that the teaching system I-speak-and-you-listen-and-take-notes is broken. Or at least obsolete.
For most of the time I have been good student, and I am writing a doctoral dissertation now. One would expect I like lectures. Still, most of them are boring as hell. I didn't have smart phone/netbook when I was in high school (and I envy the nowadays students so much for having them), and guess what - when I got bored, I always find a way to distract myself. And the others. Chatting with a schoolmate during class is less distracting that launching a paper airplane, IMHO.
1. My money, my education, my choice.
2. Distractions are everywhere in the 21st century. You probably wont get a job in a sensory-deprivation booth... more likely it will be a chaotic office/call center/lab/kitchen. Deal with it.
3. Who uses a frikkin' screen-saver on a laptop?
"I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.'"
Most laptop users (unless they are intently taking notes) don't sit in the front row.
Or since you're a CS student, if laptop user is sitting in 'n' row.
Sit in row m, such that mn.
If they're distracting the teacher, then sure remove them.
Over here its at the lecturers discretion. For some classes (mainly those related to programming or IT in general) its allowed to use a laptop during lectures. On the other hand you really don't need to pull out your laptop during something related to math (they already complain about calculators there in fact...). I think that's the best system for it. Cause in some classes you really are better of using a laptop. Listening to somebody talk about a programming language for several hours without being able to actually try it out isn't very productive. And sure you might check facebook or slashdot once in a while. But if you weren't using a laptop you'd find some other way to keep yourself occupied. Like drawing, playing games on your phone, ...
I hate this "Something is bad. Ban it" Attitude.
Of all those Facebookers there are probably good students who use their laptops for something other than trivial comments. And, I don't know if I have some kind of jammer brain or something, but noise made in class never bothered me. If I wanted to concentrate with the lecture, I just had to. If you get distracted by someone's screensaver, crying and asking for every computer to be banned out of the college is as irresponsible as distracting others.
It might be more reasonable to allow the students to bring their laptops, and then let them know when it's okay to have them out and when it's not. Y'know, like when you have them put their textbooks away during tests or have them put their pencils down when they're supposed to be watching something.
Seriously? What would you do if someone was doodling on their notebook in front of you? I'm not claiming to be the best artist in the world, but I've drawn countless scenes in my notebooks when I couldn't bring a laptop to school that would be infinitely more distracting than any screen-saver, baring the use of nudity. If people want to squander their money while in class, that's their fault.
Any more than they should ban pen and paper and require students to chisel notes on stone slabs. Next stupid question?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
With only the visual distraction to worry about, it would be enough to limit laptop use to the rear half (or third) of the auditorium. As long as the front rows are kept free of them, nobody has to sit behind a distracting screen.
It might be more reasonable to let them know when they can open them up, and when they should be closed/put away. Y'know, like when you have the students put their textbooks in their bag during a test, or have them put their pencils down when they're supposed to be focusing their attention at the front of the class.
Different people have different styles of note taking that works best for them. I use an HP tablet to take notes for grad school - people like me would be out several hundred dollars if the school decided to ban laptops because some people can't stop staring at another person's screen.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Profs shouldn't care if they're getting enough attention in class. That's the student's responsibility. They should grade the students appropriately and flunk them if they don't meet the expectations during evaluations/exams.
I tend to get bored during trainings, because most of them are too slow-paced for my learning rhythm. So I check e-mails and even do a bit of work while the trainer whizzes in the background. It would seem stupid t punish me for that.
But educators' thinking patterns are so 80's...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Maybe tablets such as the ipad would be some kind of compromise, for students who genuinely need their machines for note taking but dont want to distract the people behind them. But then again, your average college student may not have a tablet...
At the beginning of each lecture, the instructor will issue a control statement detailing the acceptable behavior in the class.
Most instructors ask the students to close their laptops. Notes are generally provided on the topics covered.
The Laptops are not connected to an outside network, however it has been noticed that cell phones are becoming very popular, esp with the younger folks. After no small discussion, it was decided to ban the phones, and leave the laptop issue up to each instructor.
I think at the end of the day, it is a respect issue, and that is student to student and student to instructor. With small classes it is easy to see who is getting distracted. I remember when I was in first year lectures with a class size of 200+. It was impossible for the professor to monitor everybody. Those that were interested in learning migrated to the front of the room. Those of us who weren't, stuck near the back where we could act as we wanted without disturbing those who were there to learn.
I agree that communications is the key, I don't think a school has to step in unless the students can't police themselves.
Tablet PCs such as the ipad could be compromise...for genuine students who want to use their machines for note-taking, but don't want to distract anyone behind them. But then again, your average college student wouldn't be having a tablet...
What some professors do now at the University of Saarland (Germany) is to define three zones.
If you want to use the laptop for taking notes in class, you sit in the first rows, and if you want to do whatever else you sit in the last rows way back.
In the middle there is a DMZ without laptops at all.
The idea is to avoid getting distracted by flashy graphic stuff happening before you when you want to pay attention.
Based on my own experience, I don't think laptops in classrooms should be banned. I've had several profs state that laptops are only for class-related use and will be allowed only as long as that is all they're used for. That tends to work pretty well as students who use laptops for quick note-taking and don't want to lose that luxury, like myself, are eager to let the professor know which students are problematic and the issues with those particular students can then be addressed.
Granted, I do attend a small private school where the largest GenEd classes are usually no more than 50 students, so I don't know what problems are faced by profs with large class sizes. Still, I think banning laptops hurts a lot of good students more than it helps the lazy ones.
to
a) Not use the Internet while in class
b) Not play any animation while in class
c) Select Notebook Models with a decent low noise of the keyboard
d) Strictly use their notebooks for note taking, and possibly looking up old lectures.
People doing something else would be welcome to watch the powerpoint presentation whenever and wherever they want.
As someone who has experienced this first hand I say let people use laptops. I've used them for learning as well as getting distracted. Sometimes lectures are boring, if not using your laptop you'll be texting. If you get rid of the phones people read books/magazines. People should just police themselves on this type of thing.
of course they should, and mobile phones as well.
It's difficult for me to fairly comment on this subject, because like a lot of others, I am at least a generation of students behind when laptops in classrooms even became an actual thing. When I was last in school, our computer labs were still nothing more than a few dozen C64s used for nothing more than teaching typing and a handful of Apple IIs for playing Oregon Trail and that one game where a dolphin becomes the president (this was all in the 90s).
However, my concern is that I suspect students don't use these tools for meaningful purposes. It's like how kids use computers today, versus how I used them when I was growing up. I was grateful to get my hands on my own computers through my own means and when I did, I was given to pursue a great deal of self-education. I learned how to setup various BBS systems. How to customize them. How to setup FIDONET and door games and how to deal with phone companies and telecommunication trunks. I learned how to code and how things worked, so that I could wield more power and be capable of *creation* rather than merely *consumption*.
The way I saw people my siblings' age and younger over the past decade approach computers has largely been as a utility for playing flash games and chatting. It never occurs to them to learn about how things work or even care. It never occurs to them to create things (and writing inane blog posts or chatting with people or hooking up is not "creating" anything). They approach computers the way people approached television.
So, that given, I suspect that while a few geeks will make serious use of their laptops in classrooms, the majority will just find it as a facilitator of chatting with their friends and watching youtube clips with the sound off.
Of course, if these are college students, I don't give a fuck. You're an adult and you're the one paying for your education and its your future and career on the table. I couldn't care less how serious you do or don't take things or if you dick around during class.
If it was me, I would put up a special access point in all lecture halls. Then I would make it so that when (according to the schedules) a lecture is ongoing - any clients from these access points would get redirected to a landing page: "You are browsing during a lecture, we would appreciate if you would wait until after the lecture.". Then optionally offer grace periods or ignore options.
they add no value to the learning experience
I fully sympathise with this viewpoint. Occasionally there will be someone playing a game on their laptop during lectures on my course (physics), and it is incredibly distracting. It's a challenge to concentrate on the quantum mechanics lecture being delivered when you have someone playing GTA in your eyeline, and these people should be shot. However, the number of people using their laptops for this is statistically insignificant when compared to the number of people using their computers for note taking or supplementary reading. Most of the computers I see turned on in lectures are either on a word processor or the relevant Wikipedia page. The lecturers know this, and will occasionally even ask for clarification of some insignificant yet interesting point (the date of an experiment or something along those lines). I see laptops, generally, as a positive addition to lecture halls.
Complete and total bullshit, I'm currently a CS student, and I use my netbook to take notes and work on in-class assignments. I simply would not be able to perform at the academic level I do without it. There are always going to be distractions in a classroom setting, no matter what you do, banning laptops is not the solution. It would even be illegal for my college to ban me from the use of my computer; my penmanship skills are horrible and I write at a painstakingly slow speed, and for this reason I have been labelled as having a learning disability. I can however, type almost as fast as I can speak, and am permitted to use a computer for any situation where writing is required. I don't always make use of this special allowance, but it gives me comfort knowing that the option is there.
When the facebook addicts see a failing grade or get kicked out because their GPA is too low, they'll get the message. Forbidding student use of laptops would be a crime against academia.
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
People used to goof off by doodling on a piece of paper, or play poker in the back of the lecture hall. Or fall asleep.
Laptops can be simply another way to do something other than pay attention to the prof, or people can use them to take notes. Why not just let young adults decide for themselves?
So, the article is addressing the possibility of a certain laptop distracting other students, but I do have to say: if you are a student and are distracted by the mere presence of a laptop, you have much more serious issues! Perhaps you should be checked out for ADD?
Using the same argument, clocks, windows, and other students taking notes on pen and paper may also be distracting.
I personally don't see this as a valid argument to ban laptops in a college classroom.
SpeaCLICK persITTYCLICK I don't fiCLACKETY-CLACK much of a disCLACKtion.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Tablet PCs like the ipad could be a compromise...for genuine students who want to use their machines for note-taking, but don't want to distract anyone behind them. But then again, your average college student wouldn't be having a tablet..
Ultimately the students (or their parents) are paying insanely high amounts money for that education. At some point, the student needs to take an interest in receiving an education. I do not feel that the school has the responsibility to make them learn.
The fact is, the world has changed. Computers will always be with us, we will always be connected to internet and have access to the information we need. Assuming of course something catastrophic doesnt happen, in which case, it wont really matter.
I think that students should be encouraged to use their computers in the classroom, but not willy-nilly. They should be shown how to use the machine to quickly locate relevant data for a given problem or subject.
Perhaps the teacher should change their approach to teaching if all the student prefer facebook to listening to something they say.
Laptops are the new notebook - some students even film lectures for future reference. Just turn off WiFi/web access!
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
The problem isn't the laptop, it's the Facebook and chat. Shut down the WiFi for the duration of the class and the problem goes away.
No sig today...
Laptops are the new notebook - and some students even film lectures for future reference. Just turn off Wifi and/or Web access - problem solved.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Because I was too distracted by my roommate's laptop, I wasn't able to focus fast enough for first post.
Colleges should make it so that a student who wants to learn can do so without undue distraction by other students, using whatever tools help him. They should not waste time trying to get students who don't want to learn to learn; as long as they are not distracting those who do want to learn, they should be ignored. This applies to people goofing off in class, or cheating, or whatever; no disruption, don't waste resources on them.
Maybe we should spend some time teaching students how to filter? Sure students should be able to say when a peer's computer use is distracting them, but a screen saver is distracting you? Let's not get rid of laptops because some students are easily distracted.
An important change for education.
Laptops are the new spiral notebook - and some students even use laptops to film lectures for future reference. Just turn off WiFi and problem solved.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Why not just put the laptop users in the back so they don't distract anyone with their screens? Seems like a simple solution.
Wy not just put the laptop users in the back so no one (but other laptop users) has to see their screens? Seems like a simple solution for the distraction issue. I wonder if posting works (second try).
by making the course sufficiently hard that people who chose to spend lectures on facebook end up stuck in first year.
Or they could block outside traffic on the lecture theater wireless but still allow students to access uni/college email and relevant lecture material. This should solve the problem without banning computers.
People goofing off with laptops never sit in the front few rows of a lecture. Sit up the front and you won't be distracted. You'll probably also pay better attention because it will be more obvious to the lecturer when you are disinterested in whatever they are trying to teach you.
I study engineering in the UK, and at my University there is no culture of bringing laptops into lectures. There are no rules against it, but it would probably be frowned upon if someone did it. Everyone handwrites their notes on paper. Many people will afterwards scan their notes into a computer, type them up, or rewrite them on paper more neatly as I like to do (bad handwriting when writing quickly in lectures). I do not think that there would be any benefit to adding a laptop to the lecture stage, as I know that it would be a huge distraction. It would probably mean that I had neater notes, but who are we kidding? I would inevitably get distracted and start doing other things in the background which would hamper my learning. Just like answering a text in class, it distracts from the lecture. Anyway, the process of typing up the notes afterwards (or whatever other variation you do) will help reinforce the learning.
A couple points.
1. The students pay a lot of money for their education. They must, on their own, take an active part in the learning process. The school needn't force them to learn.
2. Times, they are a-changing. Like it or not, we will always be with our computers in the very near future. We will always be connected to the web. The information will always be available to us. It's not going away. I see this as an opportunity.
Rather that forbid computers, the school should encourage this! They should rather teach the student how to effectively integrate computers into the given subject. To get the most out of the tools they have. I think it is far better to expand the knowledge of concepts rather than to bog the students down with memorizing trivia. The web has sufficient memory to store these types of data sets, there is no need for us to commit it to memory.
3. If the teachers are having a hard time to get the student to listen to them, perhaps they should change their teaching style. Additionally, if there is a disruptive student, kick him out, not the computer.
what is wrong with pen and paper? (old school :)
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
one use for computers is to read e-books. One instructor of mine made her book available to her students in pdf format. I wish I had a tablet.
These are consumers, not just students, they have purchased a product which is the education being provided by the school. If they want to fuck off and not pay attention let them, it's their wasted money. As long as they aren't bothering other people, there's no problem. You can ban everything and they will still fall asleep if they are bored. Stop treating them like children. If the info in the lecture is so important that they have to pay attention they will catch on quickly, if it isn't then the teacher sucks.
Slashdot ran a similar story back in March, so much that needs to be said probably already has been.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of disussion about laptops being tools - being useful in some instances, harmful in others - so I'm going to avoid that point and instead raise the issue of accessability. As it is, educational attainment is scewed by socio-economic status - be it grades, prestige of the institution attended, networks formed, or whatever other measure desired. I'm not sure I want laptops in class if they're providing yet another unfair advantage to the economically priviledged kids, if indeed laptop use could be construed as such. Poorer kids already face significant hurdles in the classroom, are laptops going to prove to be yet another?
Complete bullshit, I'm currently a CS student, and my netbook is absolutely invaluable to me, I use it to take notes and complete in class assignments. There are always going to be in class distractions, and a better rule to implement would be requiring student to mute cell phone ringers. More importantly, in special cases such as my own, it'd be illegal for me school to deny me the use of my computer or at least a computer when writing is required. I write incredibly slow, and as such have been labelled as having a learning disability since I was in high school. I can however type almost as fast as I can speak, and as such am granted a special allowance to use a computer in any situation where writing is required. I don't always take advantage of this, but it makes me comfortable knowing that I can call upon it if I feel I need to do so.
When the facebook addicts see a failing grade, or get kicked out for their low GPA, they'll get the message. Depriving students of these indispensable learning tools would be a crime against academia.
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
Ban everything and let the Dean sort it out!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I see no problem in using a laptop as long as its being used for education related activities. If they dont want everyone browsing pr0n, chatting or facebooking they only need block those sites and services from the campus wifi. But I think the ability to google something when your learning is a must. I find it a big help to be able to research things I am learning about on the fly.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
The students that find lectures uninteresting are. But this is a problem that is a rather large problem, one that you can't solve easily. Depriving people of their distractions doesn't always work -- chances are they will find a new one. Conversely, it's just as likely they will focus better, but it's not automatic -- you can't just shackle a person down and have him or her register every single word you say.
The underlying problem here and is that laptops are capable of being a distraction -- and a tremendous one at that, granted -- but they can also be a tremendous utility. During my student experiences I would often have the lecture slides open on my laptop in order to read them 'offline' from the lecturer. Yet, on other lectures, I would just as often have IRC open. How that undermined my potential performances as a student I don't know - I found out that on most lectures I could read and recap the material, wherever present, offline without problems. If I found myself doing nothing but IRC and browsing the web during the lectures of the same course, I stopped attending those and opted for reading the material on my own.
Personally, I was never distracted by what others did on their laptops -- granted, I wasn't studying during the Facebook era. Others doing whatever on their computers provided momentary distractions ("Oh, that guy is playin WoW now? And he clicks his spells? *sigh*"), unless the lecture wasn't interesting, upon which I would probably have been surfing the web.
But I digress. If I was sitting at a really boring lecture right now, I would probably be thinking about a bunch of rocks.
I prefer to take notes with my laptop but totally agree that too many students lack the self-control not to check email, Facebook or IM their friends while in class. If you allow the professors the ability to kill the room's WiFi the educational experience will be enhanced (lining the rooms with lead to block cell phones would also be heaven).
If we're talking about lectures, most certainly so. I would dismiss any student trying to hide behind a screen of digital hogwash, if you're not interested in what someone is lecturing, why even bother showing up? If you want to make notes, bring a non-intrusive pen and paper. Beats the hell out of any tablet/laptop loaded with whatever note-taking utility.
"I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction."
Err okay, so what are you going to do when college is over and you go to work in an office environment?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Learning to cope with this and being productive is therefore an important life skill. Yes, it might suck. Suck a lot. But many things you have to put up with in life do...
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.'"
Err okay, what are you going to do when college is over and you go to work in an office environment?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
When students try to hide themselves behind a screen of digital hogwash I would instantly dismiss them. If you aren't interested in what the lecturer has to say, why even bother showing up? If you want to take notes, utilize far more superior tools: pen and paper. Beats the hell out of any not-taking utility on any laptop/tablet.
Students should be actively engaged with lecturers, and not be dividing their time between them and their computer.
Way back when I was in University and long before using a laptop in class became popular I was doing it on an Apple Duo 230.
It worked well for me then but it had only a single purpose during the lecture and that was for note taking. There was no wireless Internet, no peer to peer networking, and very few distractions loaded on that machine.
I would advocate that professors and students start the year off with a few minutes discussion this. Perhaps the best advice would be to institute a rule of airplane mode on, silent mode on and only accepted activity is note taking during lecture time. If the are doing a study session or discussion where Internet access actually becomes a benefit (lookup information that adds to the discussion) then perhaps the instructor would then explicitly announce to students they can go an lookup the information and turn on the wireless at those time. But the default behavior should be wireless off, class notes and materials loaded only in class.
Just because most people abuse the computer use in class, don't ruin it for those of us whose grades went from C (undergrad) to A (grad) just from typing notes instead of not taking notes. Personally, I leave my laptop in Vim and "write down" nearly everything the professor says. I'm sure I could get an exemption, since I can show that I have disgraphia... but still. Would you want to be the one guy allowed to use a laptop in class?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
During an English lecture or a biology presentation, I believe laptops serve little purpose. To me, a pencil and paper will provide a faster means of recording abstract ideas which can be re-documented later. Indeed, on more than one occasion, I've had to "pipe up" and tell a fellow student to STFU with the WoW garbage as it's a major distraction.
In an IOS, Java or electronics class however, I'll be far more productive with my own terminal emulator in my own environment, set up the way I want, and my own note taking software.
Even for note taking laptop is a bad idea. You end up loading your brain in parallel via visual with exactly what the prof is saying at the desk. That has long been proven by various cognition studies to be a bad idea. It is similar to what is known amidst presenters as death by powerpoint (putting on slides exactly what you are going to say).
That is besides the point. Only 5% end up using the laptop for notes. Rest will be chatting over IM, updating their facebook pages and so on. As a result the prof ends up teaching to an audience of 90%+ who does not pay attention to what he says. Teaching anything in an environment like this borders on the impossible.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If there is sufficient idle time during a lecture that a screen saver will turn on, then how imperative is it that the person have the laptop on during that lecture in the first place?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You know, I don't really care if my classmates are checking their friends' status updates, playing Tetris, or chatting on AIM. I usually sit near the middle or back of the class, though, and someone's ZSNES can become a bit distracting at times. I stopped bringing my laptop to class precisely for the reason that Minesweeper was too easy of a distraction. I don't really understand the point of going to class if you're not going to be focused on the lecture, but to each his own. I don't think laptops should be banned---occasionally someone will actually use one for a real academic purpose, and I've known people with disabilities who can only take proper notes with their MacBook---but I do think, as a common courtesy, that if you do bring a laptop, you should try to sit as near to the back of the classroom as possible, just so that you're not distracting the people behind you.
If I were teaching a college class, that would certainly be my policy: "I don't care if you play Farmville during the lecture, it's your education, but please, if you have a laptop, try to sit in the back row."
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
As a univ prof, I leave students free to use laptops. It is of course annoying, to me and to some other students, when somethings funny comes up (which is bound to happen given time), or simply when something offtopic deserves more attention than the class (in the student's perspective). On the other hand, many students use laptops very well, mixing their own notes with stuff from wikipedia and with my own slides, so I feel very ambivalent about this issue. If I were a student, I would like to be able to use them, so my take is that people should not be banned, or at least not with a clear history of bad behavior.
Best thing to take to a lecture is your brain. Leave everything else behind, even paper. What's the point in taking notes, unless you're one of those strange people who only remember stuff they write down. Use the lecture period to actually try and understand wtf it is you are supposed to know rather than as an exercise in transcription then you can use the time you would have spent reading the damn notes doing something more important (like going to the pub).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
If one gets to the lecture earlier then can't one just sit at the front, and therefore not be too distracted by those behind.
threadeds blog
Teacher/student thinks using a laptop in class for note taking is a logical evolution of how things should come to be. However paper and pen/pencil have worked fine for the countless people who were educated before them. Using laptops for class notes is more likely to cause or be a distraction then to be an improvement (no citation needed for common sense). To those that will argue that "we are the customer" and we pay to be here so we should pretty much do whatever we want. Get a grip. Students are not customers like in the true business sense. Yes you are paying to be taught, not only subject material but also that you don't know how to learn, how to organize, how to work in groups, how to work solo, etc etc.
Of course I am speaking in generalities. Those of you that feel the need to counter my post are the exceptions to the general rules, truly special, and should be allowed to do whatever they want. ;-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Here's a thought, how about making passing subjects hard? As a TA I noted quite easily in the statistics that there was a strong correlation between the people who turned up to class and the people who did well. Unfortunately that class had 95% of students pass. I guarantee 95% didn't put in any effort. The problem was the exam was too easy, students were spoon fed assignment answers, and in general the labs were a complete waste of time and in the student's defense I wouldn't have gone either.
I too am guilty of watching a movie on a laptop during a spectacularly boring lecture, on a subject I cared nothing about and was happy just to get my 50% and move onto something better. Unfortunately it was compulsory and the lecture would have been more exciting if it were given by a corpse.
You bring me interest, something worth exercising my brain cells, and an exam which I can't guess my way through to a high distinction and you'll likely find I'll give you my full attention; with laptop taking notes, not on facebook.
I appreciate both sides of the argument, but I think the debate should centre around the core problem - which is that of courtesy and consideration - and thereby evince some genuine and wide-ranging solutions rather than result in litigious patches to this specific problem. It should cover other such evils as mobile phones, noisy or obnoxious foods and late arrivals/early departures. In fact most educational institutions do have rules and guidelines regarding such behaviour that include suitable sanctions and instructions for reasonable care, but they are seldom enforced with any consistency or authority.
Frankly, it shouldn't matter to anyone else what a student does in-class (subject to the tutor's whims, of course) as long as they don't cause an unreasonable detriment to anybody else's education. Facebooking or idling online where others can see you and claiming that you're not bothering anyone else is an ignorant and pig-headedly poor appreciation of human nature. I would suggest that lecture halls should be another location added to the list of proposed sites for controlled access to mobile signals (including hospitals, cinemas, concert halls/theatres and any bus seat within 3 metres of me, thank you very much, get-off-my-lawn.)
On that note, when I bought a netbook specifically for use in class (my notes in East Asian History have been significantly more valuable and comprehensive since) I made damned sure to check the noise the keys make before choosing one. Even the most conscientious student can be an insufferable distraction in class if they're banging away like a typing-pool percussionist, and if someone can't appreciate and mitigate the negative effects of their actions on their classmates then some policing is reasonable and, I would argue, necessary.
If you want to pay for a class and then piss half of your fees away then that's your own prerogative, but don't expect anybody else to suffer the same losses for your life-choices. There, wrap that up in statute and stick a ribbon on it.
Meta will eat itself
Imagine...how did students ever *possibly* manage to actually learn anything before laptops were invented? Oh yeah, that's right, they used pen and paper and did this revolutionary thing called "taking notes." It's a disgrace how spoiled today's students are, that they somehow feel *entitled* to laptop access in the classroom, or that they think it's somehow necessary for their studies. I think that is indicative of the lack of writing skills, penmanship, critical thinking, and attention span that plagues younger generations raised on the conveniences of computer technology.
That's not to say computers aren't useful or necessary in certain applications. I used computers all the time in college, but honestly, is it really THAT HARD to sit in a classroom for three hours and pay attention? That should be as much an essential part of your educational training as learning the subject material itself.
If I were a professor, I would ban mobile phones, laptops, and recording devices. ("What?! No phone? How can you restrict that--what if I get an emergency call/text?" Um. Believe it or not, there once was a time when not everyone had a phone surgically grafted to their hand.) My students would have a scientific calculator, pen/pencil and a notepad, and they would be expected to sit, listen, and for once, use their brains. We're talking about college here--if you want to be treated as an adult, it might be a good idea to actually demonstrate that you can act like one. Yes, there's something to be said for giving you the responsibility of being the judge of your own actions, but that leeway stops when your incessant texting, twitter, and facebook updates start affecting others who do actually want to learn.
Look, I don't care if you're playing Minesweeper during the lecture. If I were a professor, I wouldn't care either. It's your education. I don't understand why you bothered showing up---personally, if I'm really interested in writing comments on Slashdot, I just skip class, and I stopped bringing my laptop to class a long time ago because of the easy distraction it provides. So bring one, don't bring one, whatever. Some people actually do use them to take notes or do academically relevant things. (Not very many, but some.) All I ask is that if you do bring a laptop, try to sit in one of the back rows so that the people behind you aren't tempted to go, "Oooh, shiny!" every time you knock a few rows off in Tetris.
Banning the use of laptops is draconian. Having a class policy of sending the laptop-users to the back row is a courtesy for the rest of the class. I think that's the rule of thumb instructors should adopt.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Is Slashdot eating comments, or am I banned in some way, or what? Did I just double-post? WTH?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Of course any slashdotter would be distracted by a laptop, because you use computers so often. However your distractions are your own, you just need to deal with it and concentrate more. It's only when the distraction becomes obnoxious (forcibly impairing your ability to pay attention to the class) that something should be done about it. Laptops are an excellent learning tool in the classroom/lecture hall. I myself find it much faster to type notes than to write them. The only person thing that will be affected by off-task students are that students grades.
If it rhymes it must be true.
It is the student's responsibility to learn, and he can make use of whatever tools he has at his disposal to achieve that aim.
On the other hand , and in the real world, a majority (citation needed? I can give you anecdotal evidence from each of my 18 years of classroom education) of the students would be distracted by laptops. Forget laptops, I bite my hand regularly in classes just to keep awake and concentrate on what the soporific prof was talking about. Even a scribbling sound would distract me in his lectures, and I would end up dreaming from scratching to itching to that advert about itches to that model in the ad to that film about a struggling actor to latest movie to upcoming movies to next week plans to booze and sports. In an economics class. This actually happened.
I felt it was the professors reponsibility to stop me from dreaming by atleast pretending to not mumble. But I would be pissed if some other tech, which enables me to take notes, is banned.
All said and done, I wouldn't be too sad to see laptops banned.
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
It's insane to suggest that it is some inherent property of laptops that makes an otherwise perfect student waste time in class.
For many tasks, laptops are an ideal way to take notes for anybody, and they can be vital for people with bad handwriting or dyslexia. Banning laptops would be catastrophic for the above, and would serve only to make time-wasters go back to passing notes or something.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Well, I typed an intelligent first post in this thread. And it never appeared when I pressed submit. Given the complete lack of other posts, I have a suspicion that something is broken here.
Separate the people using laptops from those who aren't then. And put them in the back, so nobody else has to watch their screen savers/World of Warcraft/Facebook.
no laptops / mobile phones in the classroom. I teach biochem and if someone could suggest why they should be allowed, I'd love to hear it.
I never had to face this issue myself. When I ended my teaching career in 1974, laptops had not quite yet been invented. We were debating more the merits of allowing portable tape recorders to be used to record lectures. I recorded a few my own lectures, just so I would know in detail what I actually said. Intent and reality did not always match 100%, of course.
At that time handheld calculators were already a fact, but there was no debate about their use yet because they were so expensive that only the more affluent students had them. Certainly lowly assistant professors could not afford them. I still used my trusty slide rule to compute grade averages.
Going back to school for the first time in ten years, I just purchased a small little netbook specifically for classroom use. I don't know how effective it will be in my math classes since drawing graphs and jotting down formulas is impossible to do quickly with a keyboard and mouse, but I expect to get a lot of use out of it for my writing classes. I also hope to record class lectures to it if the professors are ok with it. I think it really depends on the class and the subject matter. I can think of a ton of responsible ways to use my laptop while in most classes, but I can also see how horribly distracting even legitimate use could be to someone who's not accustomed to it. The article definitely raises some valid concerns, but ultimately, I think it's up to the student to take responsibility for their own learning. Environmental factors can certainly be an influence in how easy it is to learn in a given environment, but it really is up to the student to make the best of it regardless of what else may be going on around them. I wouldn't be against cutting off internet access while in class though... Of course, that is my current opinion, which is subject to change if I find that it just doesn't work for me...
I got my degree years ago and laptop use was common then; almost all of us had laptops in front of us most of the time. Of course, I studied information technology, but still. I thought it was a great tool; a search engine can be a highly valuable complement to slides. Of course we also read our e-mail during boring lectures, or played GTA, but I don't really see that as the laptop's fault. Back in school I had no laptop, but still found something to do when a class was boring. As for distractions from other students, there were plenty but those were mostly the chatty ones making actual noise, as opposed to people playing games with headphones plugged in, who didn't bother me one bit.
No comment!
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
My experience during undergrad was that at least half of the people with laptops were just using them to watch youtube or do something unrelated to class. Another ~10% or so were doing their homework/projects (possibly from other classes) during lectures. The rest were actively taking notes.
The students who were watching youtube/facebook, etc were indeed distracting. I usually tried to avoid sitting behind laptops to avoid this problem, but banning laptops just isn't fair to the students who want to use them legitimately. There have been times where laptops have really added to classes (looking up facts mainly).
Therefore I propose a solution: All laptop users should sit in the back rows of the class, unless there is a legitimate reason for someone to not sit back there (eyesight or hearing difficulties). This makes it less likely for the people who are just screwing around to distract other students.
When I was in grad school, I noticed one guy playing FPS while in the lecture, and wondered why the guy bothered showing up to the lecture in the first place. Turns out it was for the free Wi-Fi (it was down in the lounge). He was in front of me, it was distracting, and I moved.
IMHO I can see a certain utility to laptop/tablet/etc use in the classroom. For example, downloading the professor's slides to help take notes while the lecture is being presented.
Putting a slightly different spin on it: what about the noise factor? Some laptops have quieter keys, but in a large lecture hall, if everyone were typing simultaneously, would the noise generated by 1,000 students typing become more of a distraction than a help? If you can't clearly hear the professor, it's hard to get what they are trying to say...
Just my two bits.
"Hey, I know what we're gonna do today." -- Phineas Flynn
The problem is, it's not always the student himself who is paying.
There's the federal and state governments, and also parents. I was going to say banks, who want a good return on their investment (a student who learns so he'll earn and pay off his debts), but I think the Feds took over student loans.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
And was always sitting off to the side where nobody could be bothered by my screen, and always taking notes/being active in class, I'd have to say no, don't punish everyone for the sake of those who can't control themselves.
No, they shouldn't.
The problem is, it's not always the student himself who is paying.
There are the federal and state governments, and also parents. I was going to say banks, who want a good return on their investment (a student who learns so he'll earn and pay off his debts), but I think the Feds took over student loans.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
If the students are going to slack off, they were never interested in what was going on. Simply ask that those not interested may not intermingle in anyway with others to disturb the others' concentration. Or better yet, leave the class.
Those who are interested would use laptops to their advantage, be it for reference, quick search, etc.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Those damn sexy girls are distracting too. Ban them, ban them all!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
At least in the group where I am studying at local University of Applied sciences for my BEng in computer electronics (read embedded systems) Haven't seen a single Mac in the classroom, some other laptops have been seen, but they are quite useless tools as they are not allowed to be used in exams.
On some exams we can use books and own handwritten notes from lectures, but use of laptop or mobile phone is strictly forbidden. And so it should stay, if we are testing what you have learned.
So personally I think that laptops should be banned because of the distraction factor and good ol' pencil and paper should be used instead.
Facebook and IM etc should be banned from any lecture hall. On the other hand I've seen lectures that were recorded on a laptop and later distributed in eletronic format with syncornized slides, and I have to admit it was almost as good and in some ways better (play pause etc) than being at the actual lecture. This wouldn't apply for people who just have to interrupt every few minutes with silly questions though. I'm sure there are other more relevant and common uses that would also be acceptable to most as well, so a blanket ban on laptops would seem heavy handed.
The lecture is essentially a medieval mode of tuition, and it is struggling to still be relevant. It is grounded in the philosophical model of education that says that students are empty vessels that a wise teacher can fill by imparting knowledge in an oral mode of presentation. Knowledge shifts from the teacher to the students by their lecture, supported by written notes. However, the models of education have moved on since the middle ages so it is no longer as valid.
One of its continuing attractions is that it is cheap - one teacher to many students. No technology required. Can be done in a high tech lab with students on laptops or under a tree with students just listening or using cheap notepads and pencils to write down the key messages. In an ideal world there would be many more opportunities for one to one teacher-student tuition but for most people this just is not affordable. Plus of course there are advantages in group work.
So a question here I'd like to ask is: what would be a better replacement for lecture style presentations? What would be cost effective yet give students the opportunity to interact with their teacher? Also, I suppose, why do we keep the lecture? is it just cost? why does your university ask students to turn up to lectures?
I wouldn't be able to take notes with a pencil and paper anywhere near fast enough, my shorthand is crap. This would effectively ban all taking of notes in class for me.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Going back to school for the first time in 10 years on the 3rd, I just bought a small netbook specifically for classroom use. I don't expect to get a lot of use out of it for my math classes since it's rather difficult to jot down free-form math formulas and quickly draw angles and such, but I do expect to get a lot of use out of it for my writing class. Honestly I think it really depends on the class. I can think of a ton of legitimate uses of my computer in most classes such as recording the class lecture; however I can see how it could be horribly distracting to other students who aren't accustomed to it. I personally think it's up to each individual student to make the best of the classroom experience though regardless of whatever environmental distractions there may be. I know I wasn't ready to go to school 10 years ago which is why I've waited until now; I had a few life lessons I needed to learn first. Frankly I wouldn't be opposed to cutting of internet access while in class though... Of course, this is all just my opinion which is subject to change if I find it doesn't suite me after I've actually started school...
I'm a customer of the college. As long as I'm not bothering the other students and passing the course, leave me the fuck alone.
Don't ban tools because some tools can't learn to use them appropriately.
One of my classmates writes his notes into a tablet - why should he lose the ability to do that because someone can't take their eyes off of Farmville? The right course of action is in the summary - if someone's laptop is a distraction, ask them to stop the distracting program. If they refuse, bring it up with the professor either then or after class. Eventually, those who aren't completely socially maladjusted will get the picture, either by learning after being politely asked or from social pressure to not be a douche.
Preparation for a future in boring business meetings run by blowhards who like to hear themselves talk.
My classroom usually only has 10 students and all of them have their laptop always on and the teacher is talking alone. No one even looks at the teacher or talks during the wole "class". You can't build a learning environment like this.
Although a lot of UNI/higher ED can be insanely boring, I kinda tend to think that at a minimum there should be a list of run of the mill social networking sites, among othes, that shouldn't be able to be accessed from wi-fi during lectures/classes. ACL's should be able to be implimented quite easily based on registered MAC's and class schedules. Although the MAC's being registered presents ethical and legal problems itself. Don't really know what the answer is here, but I know myself when I was at UNI the dopes that were there only to avoid having to work for the dole were very distracting and annoying. If they had also had laptops in class it would have been murder listening to "check this out maaaate" constantly during lectures.
There is more to college than just learning what your professors are teaching. One should be learning to be effective in the real world. If a screen saver, shiny objects, or loud noises, become a "major distraction" then there is much learning yet to be done indeed.
I finished my degree in 2002 before laptops were regularly used in lectures, although a few people with alleged learning difficulties were quite happy to sit there and waste time on them. Since then though I've been to a lot of academic conferences and the laptops being used during seminar sessions are seriously irritating. Not just the glowing screens of people sitting on Facebook or Gmail or a news website (showing an utter contempt not just for the speaker but also the taxpayer who paid for them to attend the conference in the first place with the intention of taking part), but the endless clattering of the keys. It's surprisingly a bit less annoying (for me, at least) to *present* talks to a room of people on laptops, probably because I'm not distracted by the screens, but it still irritates me.
God knows what it'll be like when I start lecturing. I might set up an open "UNI WIRELESS" network and harvest everyone's Facebook emails and deface their profiles in protest, the rude cunts. Granted, I'll be sacked, but at least I can sell my story to the papers and get a couple of days' worth of irate howling from the red-tops.
Focus on the instructor and what they are teaching. Facebook and Ebay can wait. First post.
There is more to college than learning what the professor is teaching; like learning to be effective in the real world. If screen savers, loud noises, or shiny objects are causing "major distraction" than there is much learning yet to be done indeed.
Haven't we discussed this topic extensively before?
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As a PhD student, I've asked myself what I'd do in the situation. It depends on the course material. Note that this is relevant for sciences.
If you're gonna talk about mathematics, you don't really need computers. It's even easy to see that it's much more convenient to use pencils and paper than a computer, when you have many equations with a lot of different symbols, no matter how fast your LaTeX is. In different instances it makes sense to have a computer presentation by the teacher, when it comes to certain graphs and pictures. But the students? they only need to type in their homework, so that it's readable and easy to send through e-mail.
If you're gonna talk about computer simulations, than it makes sense that everyone has a computer. you give everyone a similar environment, and you start programming, they see your code, they do postprocessing together with you... the point is that they follow every step you make. from writing the code, to running it, handling results, making figures, stuff like that. It's a lot of different elements that are coming together, and it doesn't make sense to separate them. Because if you do separate numerical methods from actual simulations, it's not as fun.
as to the facebookers, I'd kick them out of class in any situation. assuming I'd never teach a class about facebook.
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Definitely not, otherwise how are they supposed to get First Post?
Laptop use can be tremendously annoying at lectures. But it doesn't stop there - hearing about the girl sitting in fronts weekend plans or how wasted the group beside you got last night is equally distracting. Laptops can be just one more outlet for something irrelevant to the situation (when used for anything but taking notes obviously).
I think a better effect could be achieved by abolishing the mandatory attendance system. Let people bugger off if they dont want to pay attention anyway. It'll only come back to bite them in the ass come exam time. The way it is now they end up ruining lectures for both themselves and everyone around them.
I remember when MP3 players showed up in lecture halls, and a posse' of students had to coerce a loud-listener to shut it off or leave. Cell phones and laptops were quick to follow... Regrettably, the public abuse of technology is epidemic, and the kids are a reflection of their doltish parents. So, yes, exile the toys and distractions to the dorms, and preserve the lecture halls for learning.
Somebody's screen saver bothers you? Get a life! You're not going to graduate anyway if you're so easily distracted.
And I wish I had a laptop back in the early 80's when I went to college! Take notes and save them to disk! Outstanding. Not have to carry a notebook with 5 separate sections for the 5 different classes I was taking, be able to search the text for a particular word or phrase, etc., would be outstanding. Download PDFs having to do with the subject, and have them on hand it class? Great. Maybe even scan the texbook and have it on-line, rather than lugging 30 lbs of textbooks around campus in a backpack. I just don't see much of a valid downside to having laptop / notebook computer in class.
And disrupt wireless. And phones. And regulate the height of screens. Miss something ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The problem, she says, is that the OCD Facebookers aren't just devaluing their own education — there's a certain distraction factor to worry about.
On the one hand, college is "grown up" time. You shouldn't have someone telling you that you need to go to class or that you should concentrate or when you should study. You are now an adult and it's time to figure that out for yourself.
OTOH, I have to agree that there is some level of distraction factor especially when you have the tiered-type auditorium classroom and 4 idiots in front of you watching lolcats youtube videos. The subject of electromagnetics and electromechanical energy conversion is hard enough to concentrate on without having to deal with that kind of tasty eye-candy. In the end, I would have to agree to ban them from classrooms because they are completely unnecessary and I know that someone will reply to this with "BUT I TAKE FABULOUS NOTES WITH MY LAPTOP, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD" but, honestly, the number of people that do that is "statistically insignificant" compared to the idiots. Car analogy: It would be like raising the speed limit of the local roads to 100MPH because 0.5% of the population can drive safely at those speeds and on those roads.
Why doesn't my post show up ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I use my laptop in lectures simply to take notes, banning laptops would be somewhat of an inconvenience for me. I will admit to doing other things on my laptop during lectures, but not to the detriment of my notes or others. I am aware of how distracting laptops can be for people behind which is why I tend to sit up the back of the lecture theatre, which is normally where the power sockets are anyway. Most other laptop users in my lectures do this too.
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Maybe students should learn when to speak up and ask someone to stop doing something that distracts them, instead of employing a total ban?
I understand that screens with moving pictures (games, screensavers, etc) can be distracting, but a laptop with a still picture and low light shouldn't be distracting, and it can be an invaluable tool for note taking. Personally, not only I type much faster than I write, as I can structure them better, and most importantly, I save time by digitalizing them right away, which I would do anyway since it's much better for searching and linking afterwords.
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What about smart phones, iPads, iPod Touches, Android tablets, Crackberries, Game Boys, etc etc? Or, maybe, the professor could try be more engaging and not speak in a monotonous voice.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
In an ideal world, yes. Also in an ideal (educational) world, all the students would dress in the same uniform, which would be quite modest. And there would be no windows, and cellphones would be banned, and room temperature would be set at a permanent level, say a bracing 45-50 degrees F. Or a comfortable 72, I dunno, do some research, figure out which is most conducive to an educational environment...
Of course, the kind of classical education process to which these conditions are conducive runs 180 degrees counter to the popular perspective that "college is supposed to prepare me to get a job / help me find a spouse."
If someone's flying toasters are too much for you to handle, then them doodling or passing notes or whatever low-tech way of ignoring the prof would blow your mind just as much.
This is new bitching about an old problem.
I don't have a problem with students using laptops in my classes, as a laptop is obvious and I can easily check that it is being used for legitimate purposes (creating notes, logging data from experiments) and not social netshirking. What causes more problems is students surreptitiously using smart phones to SMS each other or browse facebook. This usually goes on with them holding the phone below a desk out of sight so that it looks like they are fiddling with themselves when they should be working on Physics problems. Also, getting people to shut down a laptop is easy while ensuring that a phone is actually switched off is difficult. If it was up to me I'd deploy some technique to block the GSM frequencies while teaching, but that's probably against the law.
If its a comp sci class banning computers might be problematic!
Seriously , when people use computers they tend to be distracted. Children especially so. Which means they don't learn so much. So IMO they should be used sparingly and not just be an easy crutch for teacher who can read the paper while the kids "work" on the PCs.
And they have a right to, as adults paying for a service they can skip class, stay up all night drinking, or not pay attention.
Many people use laptops in class to take notes and their is no reason that this should not be allowed. Now I admit that someone playing a game in front of me in class is really distracting but that is my problem, because theoretically the game might even help them concentrate on a lecture they would otherwise be sleeping through or skipping.
And I could be distracted by any number of things others do, so as long as they are not being loud or taking up a huge part of my vision I do not care what they do with their laptop or notepad.
But it is nice for game players to move to the back row, their are a few classes the only reason I attended was because I could play games in the last row, not bother anyone, and at least be in class if the teacher managed to sneak something new into the lecture for once.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
When I was taking classes on system and network administration, with students who mostly were or had recently been working in IT, I rarely saw more than one or two laptops on desktops in the room. Part of it must be relative wealth -- this was a community college, not an elite university. But if the IT people don't really need laptops in the classroom, I have to suspect that very few students do need them.
My handwriting has become so bad I'd hate to have to take notes by hand. I'd never be able to read them after-wards.
The information wants to be free, I just give it somewhere to go.
Colleges should ban class lectures. They are one of the less efficient way of conveying information and knowledge. The fact that these survived the invention of the printing press amazes me but I am confident it won't survive the internet era.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I can tell you exactly what I would have told someone if they told me my computer use bothered them. And it wouldn't have been nice.
I know I surfed through a lot of boring lectures. Probably shouldn't have done it, but it was mostly either filler classes, or classes I cared nothing about. Do wish I would have paid a bit more attention on the class on regexs.
If your students prefer playing Farmville to listening to your lecture, perhaps you should rethink your teaching methods. Talk to anyone in the education industry who doesn't make their living actually giving lectures, and you'll find that they'll pretty much all agree that traditional classroom based training sucks. There's ways to do it better, but they haven't yet found something that is both practical, with easily repeatable success.
I tend to agree with those education guys and the Farmville playing students: lectures are boring. I managed to get a Master in EE without attending lectures except during the final year when there where some interesting ones on the roster.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
No. How else do you take notes in 2010?
Computers and mobile phones belong in lectures about as much as they do at the opera or the ballet - that is, not at all. But that assumes that the lecture is actually about genuine education - i.e. providing leadership in learning (the "duc" bit in education).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm a regular classroom laptop user. Since I'm studying software development, I think its a bit more acceptable than if I were studying, say, physics.
"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." Douglas Adams
If students prefer playing Farmville to listening to your lecture, perhaps you should rethink your lecture. Talk to anyone in the education industry who is not making a living giving lectures, and you'll find that pretty much all of them agree that classroom-based training sucks. There are better alternatives, but so far these methods are often highly tailored to the subject being taught, which makes it expensive. What they haven't come up with yet is something that is practical, universally applicable, with repeatable success.
I tend to agree with the Farmville-playing students and those educators: lectures are boring. I got a Master's in EE without attending most of the lectures, except during the final year, when a few interesting ones appeared on the roster.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
When I was taking courses on system administration, network administration, and programming, I'd rarely see more than one or two laptops in use. On the one hand, relative income may have been a factor, but on the other, most of the students were current or former IT workers. If most IT students don't need laptops in class, I suspect most students in general don't.
The main question in the original blog post seems to be why instructors don't make their policies on laptop use more explicit. There's some discussion of making exemptions for students with learning disabilities, and a couple of comments that college-level students are adults, and should be free to make their own decisions on whether to ignore lectures and browse the web if they want. It's striking that there's no real defense of using laptops in class for students in general.
If students are routinely ignoring lectures completely, and yet passing their classes, it does raise the question of whether students passively listening to a lecture is a pointless ritual.
Professors on the individual level should have a right to set the decorum in their classrooms, if laptop use gets completely out of hand. This should be a classroom policy dictated by the professor, rather than a generic school-wide ban. It would be unfair to hold responsible the ~5% of students who are actually taking notes and/or being productive on their laptops for the sins of the other 95%, especially because there are many classes where access to wikipedia and/or wolframalpha can be extremely useful during lectures.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
When I went through university 1987 to 1992 we did not have laptops in the class. But what we did have were people who slept through the entire class. During those days you hoped that nobody started snoring! I kid you not here! Only once did somebody end up snoring. The point is that people will goof off and these days instead of catching sleeping you surf the web. So get used to it! For one year the sleeping got so bad for our engineering class that they stopped giving lectures before 9:30. We literally had about 2/3 of the class sleeping during 8:30 lectures.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I pay for my college education. If I squander it surfing Facebook during your lecture, it's my perogative. However, I don't use my laptop for surfing Facebook (or porn) when in class. I use it for taking notes, researching topics as the professor talks about them, and even voice recording the lectures when I care to. Banning a tool because it could be disruptive? Remove paper. Planes, spitwads, and crumpling and ripping noises all cut more into someone's focus than the glow of a front-row laptop.
If that bothers you, just make a laptop section in the back. Problem solved.
If laptop use during a particular class gets out of hand, the professor should have a right to enforce a certain level of decorum. To have a school-policy banning them would be a terrible idea; instant access to wikipedia and/or wolframalpha is useful in pretty much any class.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
Why would someone even ask this question, let alone get it headlined on Slashdot?
Like it or not, computers are an integral part of higher education in the U.S. and can't be removed. Lecture notes and other materials are routinely provided online, most communications are via email or via campus-wide chatboards, and grades are supplied via online systems.
To cut off students from all these resources during lecture may have certain merit from the point of view of a vain or self-important professor who believes all eyes should be on him, but for maximizing efficiency of learning, students today have to have their laptops.
For one thing, most young people can barely write without a keyboard. I do like to take notes on paper, but typing is so much faster that there's no comparison. For a fast typist, it's the difference between getting almost all of the information down and getting maybe 60% or 70% of the information down. There are certain advantages to writing, like drawing arrows, figures, etc. Heck, you really need both. But the keyboard rules.
There are students who learn better at their own pace, who get little out of the lectures, but who need to be in the lecture hall in case sneaky professors provide information verbally that is not written down in the lecture notes. Such students can read, study other material, and half-listen. I've done it myself. It's perhaps not ideal, but it's a way to get through a course.
Another point to consider is that even if they managed to ban laptop use in lecture halls on some luddite campus, the students will still have smartphones which are functionally similar. Do we also ban use of iPhones and Android phones? Force the students to keep them out of sight? What about students with iPad and Kindle type computers which literally slide into a notebook and are barely visible?
What about students with hearing impediments or other physical problems that rely on computers to get them through a lecture?
Thanks for playing. Next.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Would you find it distracting if you went to the movies, and half the people around you were using laptops throughout the movie?
If it's distracting in the movies, surely it's distracting in a learning environment like a lecture hall.
This really should be at the discretion of the Professors at the University/College.
1. If students are screwing around in class instead of paying attention, that's their prerogative. I see it little different from simply not paying attention (sleeping, doing homework for other classes, writing notes, etc etc) or even playing on their phones.
2. Distracting other students is nothing new, either, in regards to talking/snickering with nearby students.... hell, even someone with an obnoxious hat or hairdo that's hard to see over is enough to get on my nerves.
3. From an "honest" student's point of view, I find handwriting to be somewhat painful depending on the class/situation. I had one class (Statistical Thermodynamics) where I would *easily* fill 3 pages of notebook paper, front and back, with writing, sometimes spilling onto a 4th page or rarely a 5th. This was all in one hour-long (well, 50 minutes to be exact) class, and that was the 2nd class of 3 in a row. Needless to say, my hand HURT after that one. Then my 3rd class was programming, where the professor would typically type some sample code (with easy-to-make errors) and run them to show us where our bugs came from and how to spot them.
I found that approach very useful, but it was very tough to keep up with myself writing vs. him typing, and a lot of times, if I didn't get some exact pieces of code down, it'd be difficult for me to reproduce later, as it was never fresh in my head by the time I got to try it.
4. My father is a professor, and is no stranger to the laptops-in-class concept. Believe me, your professor can tell when you're not paying attention, laptop or not.
Basically, laptops can be a distraction or a big help, but for that matter, so can other students. Rather than call to spoil laptops in class for everyone, 'good' students can move away from the students that are a bother to themselves and others. I'm not exactly a "front row" kinda guy, but you shouldn't have to worry about someone's screen saver bothering you there. I typically only used my laptop for one or two classes per semester, but I found it to help out a lot in those.
One of my best professors held a little discussion/forum on the last day of class every semester, evaluating students' opinions on the usefulness or lack thereof in the class, and he used that to help his decision. That's a good enough system, so why would the decision need to come from four levels up at the Dean/Provost level of the College/University?
Honestly - who cares?
As an undergrad there were a few classes that I skipped the entire semester, only showing up to take (and ace) the exams. Showed up for the final exam and the prof didn't even recognize me, I had to prove I was in his class. Made the highest grade in his class, blew the curve for the rest of the kids.
When you hit college as a young adult, you aren't there because you have to be there (the gvmt isn't making you attend.) You are paying to addend classes to further your education, because you want to be there. If a kid wants to actually show up and not pay attention in class, that is his money going down the tubes and guess what - that's a lesson in and of itself. If a kid actually wants to learn and succeed, he will apply himself in class (or just cram for the exams the night before and walk in overcaffeinated and ace the exam anyways, as I recall.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Notebooks at least always face away from the lecturing professor. People with tablets are always hovering at weird angles which can be quite destracting. They need to be banned if anything.
In my view College == Personal responsibility.
If young adults value farmville over the education their parents are spending a fortune on..so be it. I wish them luck in their future employment prospects as in-game gold farmers.
Let the professor decide what is and is not appropriate. That's their job. We don't need more blanket rules.
Personally, I use mine in class for note taking and various other on-topic tasks. I find that I can keep up with the professor when I type than when I write by hand. It is also useful for when the teacher has an example of something posted to the college's course management site; on my laptop I can look at it closely rather than look at an image projected on a screen. What bothers me are the people who used them for something other than school-related tasks while in their classroom. Same with texting and the like. Laptops, used properly can enhance the classroom experience and discussion.
Yes please! And while we are at it, also in conferences during talks. In every CS conference I attend, there's more people chatting than paying attention to the talks. If you don't want to listen, just don't go. This will also make people realize the awful quality of scientific presenters in general, since they will be forced to pay attention to them.
Laptops are sometimes vital to the mental health of students!
We had one CS professor where attendance was mandatory even though you only needed to read his book to pass the class.
Actually listening to him was even counter-productive at times. Thanks to his teaching methods you sometimes left a lecture with less understanding of the topic of the day than you had at the beginning of the hour. That's why a bunch of us sometimes spent the lessons working on stuff like stuff like filters for virtualdub or to simply read up on the topic of the next class.
I doubt we were the only university with a professor like that.
For the sake of such students' sanity let them keep using their laptops!
If students are using laptops in my classes then it's easy to see if they are creating notes or recording data in some way. What's more of a problem is the use of smartphones for social netshirking and SMS communication. Phones are small and the students usually hold them under their desks so that it looks like they are fiddling with themselves. Also, it's easy to check that a laptop has been turned off but with a phone this is much more difficult. If it was up to me then I'd just jam the GSM spectrum when class is in session, but I suspect that this would be illegal.
I went to one of the most 'wired' schools in the U.S. for undergraduate school. Strong wireless internet signal across the entire campus, a desktop computer and projector in every classroom, and lots of 'tech' classrooms where every desk was fully equipped with a desktop PC and LCD monitor. Not to mention multiple broadcast facilities, television studios, recording studios, and other professional grade media centers. Basically there were no shortages of distractions.
The 'tech' classrooms look like a modern LAN center and I took many courses in those rooms. If the course material and lectures were interesting enough then every single student paid attention. If we were having an open debate about a major political or social issue then everyone was paying attention and taking notes or waiting to make a comment. If the teacher was dropping important knowledge, immediately relevant to our lives then as students, or knowledge that would have an impact on us in the future all the way until our deaths, we would make sure to listen. We listened because those professors knew how to engage every single student, from the jocks and stoners to the academics to the kids who just coast from class to class, everyone paid attention to the best professors and everyone knew to take course from those professors.
There was one professor who had a reputation for teaching students everything that they wanted out of college, out of life. No matter what course you took from him he would give it his all and change how you saw the world. Critical skills necessary to succeed going forward in not just academics but socially, financially, things that last a lifetime, he would gift to students. Every type of student wanted this professor to teach them. No one text messaged in those classes, no one spent time on Facebook, no one was checking NFL scores, everyone was listening, absorbing, learning.
In the classes where the teacher wasn't engaging or interacting with the students, then students felt discouraged with college, and instead became easily distracted. They weren't learning anyways so they might as well have fun with their time. Though it was mostly the courses that I took that were 100 level where everyone would play internet games or peruse Facebook.
The point is that I had a professor who was able to engage all types of students at all levels of courses. It didn't matter if it was an elementary 100 level introductory course or a grueling 500 level graduate level course. He gave every course his best effort. And he made every student interested in the material. Of course that was one professor out of dozens that I had. The rest of the professors barely seemed interested in teaching. Many seemed disinterested in even being present in a room with other people.
The only 'ban' should be ensuring that laptops and cell phones don't make a lot of noise. If you type loudly, your phone keeps ringing, or you're listening to music, then you are creating noise pollution that directly interferes with the learning abilities of those around you. But banning laptops because the professors can't engage their students does nothing to address the fact that the students don't respect the professors enough to not stare at a screen rather than listen and learn.
if you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, sure, prevent computers in classrooms.
if you want people to do actual work and be able to email it back instead of everything on paper, it probably helps to either have computers available in class or allow laptops.
No.
If they want to get on facebook, they can do it with their phones or other devices. This would fix nothing. The problem isn't the device, it is the student.
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I used my Tablet PC to take copious notes with OneNote while recording the lecture at the same time. I loved it. OneNote is an awesome app for taking notes in, really well thought out, and my Tablet PC with its long battery life (for the time, ~2004) was awesome.
On any given day about half the class would be playing World of Warcraft in the back though. I can understand how that would be annoying when trying to teach.
Another down side to having a laptop was trying to stay off of the Internet if the lecture got too boring. (Of course trying to stay awake was also an issue...)
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First post on a 40 minute old topic, on /. must be a record.
Yes ban'em
Its about what you know.
Not how well you can get your math machine to minimize your effort.
Have a bad memory, use a dictation device.
Save the computer use for the library or outside the classroom.
Unless the coarse of study resides in the digital realm, keep it out of the classroom.
I'm not gonna lie. Watching my friend in front of me play RPGs on his laptop was the only thing keeping me awake some days...
I remember taking a vendor training class about 12 years ago. The topic was arcane, and it was very technical, and a lot of the people who were there obviously had signed up for it because it was Southern California in the winter, not because they were interested.
Early on in day 2, I noticed that a few people were playing solitaire instead of listening to the lecture. The instructors were great, but their topic was really, really dry. By the end of day 5, I think half the class had "checked out" or "gone on vacation".
Would bannination of the computers have helped those people? I doubt they were going to get it regardless of what they were doing. Did they drag a few people down who might otherwise have paid attention? Can't say.
John
... don't require attendance as part of the grade. Hence you should encourage the kids who are goofing off on their laptops all period in class to stay home and goof off on their laptops there instead. They aren't taking notes while playing farmville anyways....
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
College classes don't really teach you much; you have to read by yourself and do the homework to benefit. This isn't high school. Also if a fucking screensaver distracts you, you have ADHD. Get some Adderall for yourself.
There were classes I took in college in which the only way for me to take notes fast enough was to type them. Even if that wasn't the case, it was much easier to organize and share notes that are in electronic form. Sure, it may be distracting if someone in front of you is browsing on Facebook, and sure, that may be an abuse of their use of a laptop in class. However, this is a fairly minor distraction for those around. Just wait until you get a job where your cube mates are all arguing about and sending you constant email updates while you are just trying to finish your bread-winning work for the day.
When I taught college classes, on the first day I told students they were not children, and they were not in high school. They could do ANYTHING in class they wanted- compute, doodle, read, sleep, as long as it did not distract me or the other students in any way. I was not going to waste time or effort or disturb the class trying to "fix" anyone's inattentiveness.
I then told them they were paying a lot of money to have me to stand up there and give them lots of information on topics, in ways not available in the books or handouts, and answer questions. And warned them if they did not pay attention, they are almost certain to have poor grades or fail.
Guess what? About 20% of the class distracted themselves horribly, and almost all of those students ended up failing or with "D"'s. My class was *required* (it was Unix/Linux 101) so those people had to all see me again next semester. Welcome to the real world.
If they weren't using their notebooks they'd just be using their iPhones.
Having gone back to college for a few brush up classes in 2008 after being out for 10 yers, it was a bit of culture shock to me. The computers are way too much of a distraction and they should be banned for most of the class, and at least during the lecture session. I was one of the laptop users and I wouldn't have been angry if the teacher told me to stop, and I know a lot of people like that.
Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of teaching is geared toward a traditional lecturing style that is primarily focused on distributing information, not instilling knowledge and skills. For example, in programming lectures, there would be a lot of potential for students to get a much more concrete grip on what the lecturer is talking about if they could easily try things out as the lecturer proceeds. However, this would require a lot of changes to how the lectures are organised to avoid students being distracted from the content by what they are doing with their laptops.
If all someone is doing is browsing Facebook, why even bother going to class? They might as well have just stayed in their dorm room.
Palm trees and 8
Let the students devalue their own education. When they enter the real world and realize they wasted their time in college, they'll realize their mistake. If what goes on in rows ahead of you distracts you, then move to the front row. Problem solved.
Focus.
"Colleges" are (unless we are talking about somewhere from which you should urgently switch) collections of professors given considerable autonomy in their teaching and/or(emphasis on the or in a few cases) research, and students given considerable autonomy in choosing which classes to take, and from which professors(even core curriculum/distribution requirements, while fundamentally premised on the "we do actually know better than you do, at present, what you should have a taste of" notion, generally give you pretty broad latitude in which section of Phil101 to enroll in...).
A "College" should have an opinion on the issue measurable only statistically. Individual professors, on the other hand, should do as they see pedagogically best, and students should seek out professors whose styles suit them and whose pedagogical records are worth the $/minute they are paying...
(of course, in the small but nonzero number of cases where some neurological or musculoskeletal quirk makes typing rather than writing an ADA requirement, people should deal with the exception with good grace, and the exception should avoid abusing their good grace with distracting Farmville sessions...)
College students are ostensibly adults. If they don't want to pay attention in class and want to look like an idiot while they do FarmVille offers in the lecture hall, that's their problem. It's also their right if they want to use it to look up something they didn't understand or to take notes. There's no reason to meddle with this if it's not actively disrupting class. If the bare fact that they have one out is bothering you, get over yourself. If they're being disruptive, sit somewhere else or talk to someone about it. You're in college, it's time to grow up now.
It's up to the students to manage their own priorities, not the profs. IMO laptop lids should be closed while not using, but that's just me.
I truly can't imagine it today, people wanting to use their device (laptop/tablet/etc) to take notes rather than pen/paper. If I was teaching at the college level(my dream job), I would ask the students to turn them off, put them away when starting a lecture. Then I would have to learn to not blow my stack when a large percentage ignored the request.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
There are real arguments to be made here, but the "distracting other students" one is, in a word, ludicrous. Even from the article summary - "...when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction,' - plays to it.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
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Personally, my program wouldn't work nearly as well without the use of laptops. I'm currently taking Software Development at the South Alberta Institute of Technology, and we make regularly use of laptops in almost every single class. Of course, only "e-learning" courses are supplied with school laptops, but we were told at the beginning of the course that we were expected to us the laptops professionally. This way, we have all of our code handy all of the time, so we don't have to worry about making copies and carrying all of our school work around with us on a flash drive. Some people do abuse their laptops, with gaming an internet browsing happening almost everyday, but when something is important, most people in my program actually respect the work, since they are paying to attend the class.
You'd be surprised how many laptops would go away if students couldn't access the Internet. Sure, this may hinder some students who legitimately use it to research relevant topics / look up more information during the lecture, but the majority who now cannot browse Facebook during class now have no reason to use their laptops. There are several classes that were so dull that I myself spent time doing various other things on my laptop while passively keeping notes (granted, most tasks were programming-centric and didn't even need Internet access to do). With the exception of diagrams and math notes, I can type notes far faster than write them.
Of course, this doesn't stop offline games and so forth from being used. If a professor is this paranoid about students not paying attention, s/he could simply walk around the classroom while lecturing. This would be hard for some of my professors who didn't like being more than a foot away from their laptops and Powerpoint slides, but wouldn't be difficult for those who actually cared to keep their students' attention.
With all of that said, no one class is going to interest absolutely everyone. Someway, a student is going to find a way to entertain him/herself if s/he's bored. At this point in a student's education, the responsibility really falls on him/her to pay attention and learn -- the professor need only provide the material. If students slack off, well, it's their money wasted.
I recently graduated from an Information Systems masters program. For the IS program, it was a requirement that we have a recent (i.e. Core 2 or better, wireless N, large HDDs, etc.). Digital note taking was encouraged, at least it felt like it was. Still, every class had some sort of laptop and attendance policy. Usually it was something along the lines of "every student will attend every lecture or face a letter grade deduction" and "laptop use is restricted to note taking only" or "laptops are not to be used in class".
Did people completely ignore the laptop rules? Absolutely. However, the program also mandated that every student be accessible to the program's administrative staff from 9-5 Monday through Friday and either Saturday or Sunday (mostly for interview scheduling). Since it is easier to track down someone by cell phone or instant messenger, everyone needed their laptops and cell phones on at all times.
Yet these same administrative staff were also professors. Most of whom prohibited laptop use in class! Combine all of this with the fact that lectures were posted online after class, and the only real incentive to show up is for participation. Sometimes this was important because the lecture material didn't adequately prepare for exams. Other times, not so much.
To the article's point about "it's my education and I can do with it what I want", there's plenty of truth in that. After all, you don't have to be in college. Still, the retort that it devalues the education of everyone else is also slightly off the mark. It should be obvious to an interviewer or anyone else you come in contact with whether you know what you're talking about or not, regardless of where you went to school. That comes from actually learning the material and not from sitting in a lecture that you're forced to attend. This is why a lot of times I felt that professors who simply taught straight from the book or put all the information in the slides were simply wasting my time by forcing me to attend. If you're prepared for class and the professor doesn't add any real value, then laptop laziness will continue to be a problem. I think we're mistaking the symptom for the disease: namely being prepared for class and having a value-added lecturer.
Colleges and universities(unless they have reached some degenerate end state) are supposed to be collections of substantially independent faculty, chosen for their excellence in teaching and/or research in their field, and then not micro-managed thereafter. College students, similarly, are supposed to be reasonably competent young adults, capable of doing such crazy things as "choosing a major" and "signing up for classes to suit their major and schedule".
For an entire college to have some fiat position on laptops (unless it is simply a statistical product of the fact that the entire faculty feel the same way about them...) would be uneccessary and pernicious interference into the classroom.
Now, if Professor X thinks that laptops are of Satan, and ruin all learning, the college should back him/her/hypocritical positronic brain up on the matter(unless somebody has a suitably compelling ADA style case to make). Students who don't like it can choose Professor Y, who thinks that 'engaging 21st century media integration is the future of collaborative learning'(and, similarly, deserves the college's support, within their financial means, in making sure that IT in their room doesn't suck).
If you have no wireless access in the classroom...problem solved.
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
It depends on the school and the program. I attend the SAIT up in Calgary, and we use laptops every single day in class. I'm taking Software Development, and it's invaluable for us to have access to personal computers at any time of the day. The school also made it clear to us at the beginning of the course that since we were paying for the program, we should use the laptops to stay on task, and most of us do. We usually talk to the couple of people who end up being distracting to the rest of the class, and this system tends to work more often than not. I'm fairly positive the course could not work the way it does now without letting us have access to our own laptops. This course has a 98% employment rate, and a 95% pass rate as of last year, so it seems to be working for them too.
I can tell you, it's not just distracting to the students. Of course I don't interrupt my lecture because I see a pretty screen saver but it is very frustrating to have to compete for the students' attention. I ask the class a question about what the next step in solving the problem is, or even just whether everyone is following me, and find that half the students were busy with something else. This lowers the quality of the lecture for everyone. Plus, in math at least, there is no advantage to the student to have a laptop out (have you ever tried taking notes in TeX?). I understand that it's the student's money and they should be allowed to squander it if they wish, but that only works with a completely detached lecturer. Many of us actually try to keep the class with us, and provide an engaging learning environment. Even if it is only the students with laptops being distracted, and not their neighbors, their lack of participation hinders the progression of the class.
As an engineering professor, let me just say that if you bring a laptop to class, you might as well be wearing a dunce cap. It makes you look stupid, as in "I'll take the time to come to class but not pay attention." Most of my colleagues feel this way too.
It's simple. If you're in College, you should know how to manage your time and activities, and shouldn't need to be policed.
Also ban powerpoint and canned lectures by the profs and we have a deal.
That's been far more detrimental to the classroom experience than students on laptops... At least in the opinion of someone returning to school 10 years later.
I find pretty girls sitting in the front row even more distracting. But even worse is a boring lecture.
First off, I think as a student your own level of focus ought to lead you to not be distracted by someones screensaver (I mean, unless of course the screensaver belongs to an adolescent male with a fixation on boobs). Second, why the hell would you waste battery life on a laptop with a screensaver, just shut the damn screen off. That is all.
I'm like a superhero, but with no powers or motivation.
If Facebook is more important to them than learning, let them flounder if they're not keeping up. They're adults and don't need any "sympathy" or "understanding" on this subject. If they cannot look at the unemployment rates for their demographic and then treat college like it's their last make-it-or-break-it chance at success short of them working 100 hours a week on their own business in their parents' garage, then I say screw them.
I'm tired of the hand-wringing about my generation. Stop coddling us. We are not entitled to the American Dream just because we showed up.
Subject says it all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of my professors, who happens to be among the top engineering faculty we have said something interesting when I was talking with him in office hours... He used to measure his performance by the grades his students got, then realized that if the student is motivated, they'll learn and come to class and pay attention. If they don't want to pay attention, then they're not self-motivated enough to make it anyway. If they fail, that's because they didn't take full advantage of the class. Let it be said he teaches upper-division courses, and really, if you make it that far you should be motivated enough to pay attention in class instead of facebooking anyway.
Maybe if you stopped thinking of them as students (children who need to be controlled) and start thinking of them as ADULT, PAYING CUSTOMERS, then the answer will be clear. These customers are paying you to teach them. Why is it any of your business if they want to use a laptop in the class? Let them listen to an iPod if they want and tune you out completely. As long as they're not disrupting anyone else in the class, why do you care? College instructors are awfully full of themselves anymore. It was bad when I was in school, but it seems like it's getting progressively worse. Costs are skyrocketing and If I'm paying $20,000 per year (or more) to get an education, then I'm going to use whatever tools are at my disposal to aid my studies.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Being bothered by others laptops seems like a rather small problem really. People concentrating on other stuff than the lecture are supposed to be able to make their own decisions, and it's on their responsibility that they pick up enough information. Besides, laptops are really useful.
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There have always been distractions at lectures (the girl in the next row, for example). The best one can do is make it easier for those who want to learn, to do so. Jamming wifi in the lecture hall will remove one major distraction; requiring attractive men and women to wear monks' robes to class will remove another.
Seriously, people who want to do the work will find a way to do so. It's called self-discipline.
They should just tell the students who don't pay attention not to even bother showing up, and save the students a walk or a drive and save the teacher a half classroom full of teaching-energy suckers.
I ban laptops in the college classes I teach, in physics.
For me the turning point was sitting in the back row of a large lecture taught by a colleague and seeing dozens of laptops open, and students reading CNN, Facebook, Travelocity, Gmail but none actually taking notes. Even if it was not distracting for the students themselves, it has to be distracting those around and behind them.
I offer an exemption for anyone who uses a laptop for notetaking. And in this case the student was kind enough to give me a copy at the end of the semester. So far I guess I have had around 500 student-classes, and precisely one exemption has been requested (and granted) -- and that was in a small class with a dozen students where cyberloafing is typically much less of a problem.
The policy is in my syllabus, and announced on Day One.
I think having laptops in class should be assumed these days. I bring mine with me every day; I use it to do assignments, take lecture notes, look up stuff the teacher is talking about for more details and so on. Yes, I do occasionally peruse Facebook and /., however, I don't allow it to distract me. The OP saying that someone's screensaver is enough of a distraction should probably get some ritalin or find a more interesting subject to study. People who want to be distracted, will be. whether it's a laptop or just doodling shit in their books, it's gonna happen.
If you are actually distracted from study by someone else using a computer silently in your field of view, you will have a difficult time with most corporate environments. Ignoring unimportant screens and filtering out irrelevant information are basic abilities of modern people.
There is plenty to debate on the issue of laptops in general. I doubt many students use them to take any manner of notes, and the one's I've seen earnestly trying fall hopelessly behind someone with a pen and paper (as notes tend not to follow a format the way an office document does). But, it's basically a problem of individual students in the end. If someone chooses to distract themselves from a lecture they're paying for, it's their own business by and large.
Debate all you want, but claiming that laptops distract the whole room is laughable.
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No. Long answer nooooooooooooooooo. Just because some misuse a tool doesn't make the tool bad, I mean in grade school you used to have idiots that flung pencils, should we ban those too? There are many who can take notes a hell of a lot faster and more accurately with a netbook/notebook than we can scribble onto a piece of paper, and that doesn't even count guys like me who thanks to a couple of cracked knuckles from a motorcycle wreck in HS simply can't write with pen and paper for long periods, whereas I can type all day without trouble.
Instead of banning a tool which can be used for good or ill, why not simply ban its use by those that misuse it? It really isn't hard to spot someone web surfing, even from the opposite side. They are the ones with the eyes locked on the screen that are using the mouse/touchpad constantly instead of typing. Those actually using it for class will be typing away. See? really not hard folks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Profs:
If you want to ban laptops, then you need to go after cell phones, pagers, and everything else a student can bring in. I don't care about the result, as long as its uniform.
You may be required to change your teaching methods, to engage more students.
Students:
If you can't pay attention in class, it could be that's your problem. You may need to focus on the class and not care what screensavers are running on laptops, since you'll have to do the same thing when you are done with school.
Or gang up on the Facebook students and ask them to be more polite.
“If I’m distracting myself, I’m devaluing my education. It’s my problem.” Fact. "I completely disagree. Having your laptop out not only distracts other students, but is disrespectful and discouraging to professors." Distracting, yes. Disrespectful, no doubt, but get used to it. It is no less distracting then when you are trying to write something at work and the sales team is pushing product on the other side of the cubicle.
So blame people with no manners which play distracting games on class, not all laptop owners. The problem is that people are afraid of saying anything to someone who is bothering them, but the solution isn't a total and unfair ban.
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I don't want it, but I'm considering a ban in my classes. Here's the thing: laptop computers are useful in the classroom. If I've provided Powerpoint slides, it's a way for the students to follow along and even annotate. If they want to take notes, it works almost as well as paper (hard to draw sketches, but if you're a good typist you can usually keep up as well as writing). If students want to look something up that is relevant to what is being discussed, it can help. If you have an electronic copy of the textbook, same deal.
Then there's the abuse: e-mail, on-line chat, Flash games, other games, even porn -- you name it! All of this occurs despite the fact that at the start of a class I make it very clear what is an acceptable and not acceptable use of a laptop or any other electronic device in class, and, yes, it is on the syllabus. There's a whole paragraph on the subject. The fundamental thing is whether using the device is distracting to the other students who have also paid good money to be there, and I'm glad there is a debate about it, because it's a serious issue. If we were talking about the same use in a movie theater there would be no question: people in the theater would get angry, turn on the people being distracting, and those people would get booted. But for whatever reason that normal social rejection process doesn't work effectively in the classroom. Students are too passive.
In my experience, I'd say roughly half the students, maybe less, manage to follow those rules all term. It's easy to spot the ones that aren't, but extraordinarily difficult to call them out on it because all the evidence is facing away from the instructor and can be flitted away with a few keys or clicks. For that reason I'm seriously considering banning the damn things from the room. It would be a shame to banish a useful tool like that, but I've become very tired of dealing with the large fraction of students who don't give a !#%!%^! about their classmates, and laptop use is just the latest addition to the collection of distractions (cellphones are worse). I'm attempting one more thing before I give up on it: laptop users will be required to sit in the very back row of the room where distracting their classmates will be more difficult. I don't like that option either, but I have to try something because it has gotten out of hand. I'm open to other ideas that could help students remember their responsibilities to others in the classroom or mitigate the impact of their computer activities if they don't care.
If students want to waste their money and their education updating their facebook status, let them. For those of you that think what's going on in rows ahead of you is distracting: START SITTING IN THE FRONT ROW. Problem solved.
I would find it not only ironic but infuriating if my daughter's college would ban laptop use, since the purchase of a Mac was mandatory given her chosen major. The real question here is when is laptop use appropriate? Certain classes dictate the use of a laptop. If it's internet use that's detracting from the classroom experience, then as some folks mentioned, simply turn off the wireless for that area.
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
Then enforce it. Make some examples. I know it sucks but lay down the law once or twice and it'll make a difference.
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
Maybe they could just not have WiFi in the classrooms. If they don't have MSN facebook tweets popping up the whole time then the laptops would be much less of a distraction.
No sig today...
Knowing how to deal with distraction and the ability to focus on the task is a valuable skill set employers want and need in the work place. Perhaps that should be something she learns to deal with. Being OCD can be overcome but not by catering to their need to eliminate all minor distractions.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Get rid of some of boring lectures where is just form the book or just some slides if something like 100+ people out of a class of 200 are just killing time on a laptop then you NEED to look at the lectures and make them better.
My experience in college has been that I don't learn anything in class. It has been the most expensive msitake of my life. Don't learn a darn thing and they charge you enough to buy a McMansion by the time the screw you over with money grab after money grab. Then you have all the minorities who are heavily subsidized (maybe 10%-15% of classes) and are wasting my money by being there and getting nothing from it. The class is always brought down to the dumbest common denominator, which means the rest of us can't learn. Every now and again you find a person with a mental disability in the class, they're probably heavily subsidized as well and they are nothing but a disruption and distraction, not to mention they davalue my degree. Then there's all the rich kids whose parents pay for their $40k+/yr tuition and just make a big party out of it, not even trying to learn anything. If I either got fired or quit from my current job, went job hunting and one of these idiots or mentally handicapped folks interviewed before me, I guarantee they wouldn't take me seriously since the retard they just interviewed has the same degree from the same school.
All that aside, I always have my laptop with me in every class. In most classes it's required for various shenanigans. Labs or codesod that needs writing, essentially mindless busy work. It's also useful to have slides or notes open to page forward or back for reference. I admit I rarely pay attention since the professors don't teach much I don't already know, but I always follow along with slides and material on my notebook. Usually while getting real work done, for work. In the rare event a professor is talking about something I don't know much about, I can quickly scan over the relevant slides, compare to previous slides as needed, aand google for a proper and more detailed explanation to learn what I really need to know about the topic. The small amount htat I have learned could have been done far cheaper, more effectively, and more thoroughly in my own time.
College amounts to a cruel joke. It's just a big scam to make some people rich. The joke is on all the fools like me who were told all through childhood "Go to school and get a degree, it's worth any cost". So that's what I did, and it was not worth any cost. It really wasn't worth a damn at all. I expected to learn a lot of useful things to use at work. I haven't learned anything relevant to my career, and not have been scammed out of a small fortune and left with nothing. College is the biggest scam there is and it has nothing to do with using laptops in class.
Seems to me that this should be a choice. The student (or their family) are paying for the college in the first place, should it not be their choice whether or not they pay attention? I realize that in theory the idea of distraction might be valid (distracting other kids with screensavers and games), it also seems to me that a little self control would go a long way there for the kids who are being distracted. Alternatively, as another poster mentioned have a brief at the start of the session about laptop etiquette.
Of course, I think that the social network problem and games could both be battled with a relatively simple fix; turn off the wireless! Last I checked, laptops still come with onboard storage for documents... hell even that Google thing has storage for offline edits. Most game players are playing online games anyway these days, so turning off the wifi makes it less interesting... though yes, the hardcore gamers might still fire up a game in class. Having said all this, the same students who are playing games and their social networks during a class are probably the same students who doodle in their notebooks and distract those around them during class... should we also ban pen and paper?
It seems to me that the technology progresses, but people remain fundamentally the same. You're not going to fix that by striking out at the new technology. I am not currently in college, but my girlfriend is and they've had exactly this discussion in the last 12 months because she likes to take notes using her cellphone (an old HTC Touch Pro), which she can then save, email or print. Me, I go to meeting with my iPhone and use Evernote to take notes during the meeting... that way I have a copy of it waiting on my desktop computer when I get out of the meeting. And yes, I've seen people at meetings sitting there with their cellphones playing games or on Facebook... hell, I've done it once or twice. Still, that's my choice; if I miss something fundamental in the meeting because I'm distracted then I will pay the price... no-one else.
They are teenagers just out of high school and often need the time to properly adjust to the method of study required for college. And people bother with writing notes because it has been shown to increase retention of the subject matter. Perhaps it works the same way for those who type, but I don't know what the data is for that group. While I agree with an earlier post that preferred the matter be left to the discretion of the professor, the fact remains that most students do not use their laptops in class, and may find people who use laptops distracting. Just because someone is able to use a laptop in class, that doesn't make it progress. And in a group, we should accommodate to everyone's needs, but one student should not override the study of others. To suggest that such a situation creates a "nanny policy" is hyperbole.
That doesn't work at most colleges because so much of the lecture material is available online at the university's web site. A lot of professors direct people to certain web pages to get information rather than draw diagrams on the chalkboards. This is the Internet age, get with it. Universities sure have.
My school uses e-textbooks that can only be accessed from computers, not e-readers. Without my laptop, I cannot access my textbook in class..
How the hell do you take notes on a laptop in dynamics, linear algebra, thermodynamics, chemistry, or physics. WTF! can all of you so called geeks use LaTeX in real time? I saw one post above where the person wrote, "in math intensive courses like econ it might be hard to use a laptop..." Econ might seem "math intensive if you are a history major but on the scale of real geek classes econ is about as math intensive as 4th grade social studies is reading intensive. Give me a break and go haunt digg or something with your laptops.
bracing for troll mod, and karma hit
-- QED
What's stopping the student copying down the URL and looking at it outside of class time, or actually being prepared and downloading the required task material (and reading the slides posted up on the Blackboard site by the lecturer) prior to the lecture?
There are effective and natural ways for mitigating laptop use in classrooms ... the most obvious of
which is better, interactive classroom management. Of course, this is impossible in a 300 person class ... but
maybe that says as much as about the colleges' priorities as the students'.
This drives me absolutely insane. I am well past my college years, but still attend/teach the occasional course/seminar. Use what ever you want, but if I hear the clicky click click click of your keyboard and trackpad. I WILL ask you to stop (both as lecturer, or student). With the tablets and handwriting recognition available now this issue will quickly disappear.
I had that same idea when I was an undergrad (in the USA). The course outcome should be important, and if I can gain the skills/knowledge without attending, then why require me to attend? When I started teaching underclassmen as a grad student, I even instituted an attendance-optional policy.
But then I became a professor and had the luxury of teaching small upper-level and graduate courses. My belief that the instructor was not the source of all knowledge was reinforced, but so was the understanding that *real* learning happened between students. When a student did not attend our discussions, they deprived us all of their point of view.
So, for large lectures, I agree with you. Use the Western Governors University model (sell assessment and certification/accreditation, not instruction). But for small, meaningful classes, I still require attendance.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
For a while in college I was unable to use my right hand. I brought a laptop to take notes but found I got more out of the classes by paying attention and not taking any notes in the lectures and being an active participant in seminars. Of course everyone's learning style is different so YMMV. Also, the freebee laptop I was using was so old that there was limited opportunity for distraction (I took notes in DOS EDIT as win 3.11 ran too slow on it).
When I'm teaching, I don't care if students are using laptops. I don't care if students are paying attention at all. It's my job to teach the material. Learning is their job.
When I'm taking a class, laptops have never bothered me. I've taken notes on one a handful of times. I still prefer paper, but to each his or her own.
and have the students put their screens down? Easy peasy.
What does the "article" (read: blog) have to do with Macs? There isn't a single reference in TFA about Macs, other than the other "news" sites posting links to their articles. Did I miss a summary somewhere where the author referenced Macs? It doesn't appear to be on the blog's index either... Or is it just a combined effort to mock Apple users, once again?
I have taught at the elementary, middle, high school levels, as well as adult and technical training.
In the technical training I've done, it's on them to pay attention. For the kids, it's on me to make them pay attention (and by kids, I mean K-12, not college students).
The only ban I would consider would be if their behavior is distracting the OTHER students, like using their cell phone in class. Other than that, if Mommy and Daddy keep wanting to pay for little Sally to get Cs and Ds in college, then so be it.
If it's 300 students in a big lecture hall it just doesn't matter if there are laptops. The point when a laptop does matter is when the classroom is around a size that the professor only needs to take a few paces and ask the student to put it away at a normal voice level. And really how hard is it for the teacher to clearly state their preferred classroom policy on the first day? What need is there of debate, or a uniform policy?
Go to a private unsubsidized school? Go ahead and squander it.
Go to a public school where the tax payers are offsetting your costs, you better learn something.
I went to a private tech college. I don't think the quality of the education differed in any significant way from the local public tech colleges. The services were an order of magnitude better, but the education was virtually identical.
But most of the guys who had laptops in my classes, especially the lectures and non-computer related classes, sat in the back row and played unreal tournament. Laptops were providing nothing of value to those classes.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I type my notes into my personal Wiki (so they are available to me everywhere and can easily be organized). Take my wifi from my cold dead hands!
Seriously, why should I be punished to force the facebookers/warcrafters to pay attention? What's next, banning pencils because people like to doodle?
I don't really care how many people are wasting their education (I dislike it but we all make mistakes), but some of us need to get work done and/or take notes and it's hard to write by hand as fast as you can tex. I don't think I'd have gotten through undergrad without my laptop.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Had a guy in a class I took who was a speed typist or something - you could barely hear the lecture over the machine-gun sound of his typing. To me, the distraction factor was in the noise created by the tool. If it had been done quietly, I would not have known or cared.
We have to look ahead to the days, not long hence, when computers will be ubiquitous and either implants or part of the students' clothing. At such a time, banning computers in the classroom will be unenforceable, so we should work not on whether or not they should be banned, but on how they can best be used.
Don't know how I would have made it through my Philosophy class' moronic debates without my laptop to play World of Warcraft. For the classes that were worthwhile how can you beat searching through your notes on a digital copy? Hand writing notes should have been so 1980s. Plus you save some trees along the way.
When I go to a technical conference, I expect the lecture hall to have tables, power strips and wifi. And the gentle patter of folks tapping laptop keyboards sounds little different than rain.
Now, I pay a lot of money to attend these conferences, but the simple truth is that a portion of the information is rubbish, a portion of it I can collect half-listening and only a portion of it requires my full attention. I'm not trying to diss the lecturers; it's just that I'm there to fill in gaps in my knowledge, not learn the entire subject fresh off the boat.
We didn't have notebooks when I was in college. But if we had, I fail to see how someone gently typing on a keyboard is any worse than the guy snoozing or the gal reading a novel. Handle it the same way: if the reader is chuckling, the snoozer snoring or the gamer grunting and bashing the keyboard, send them away. Otherwise leave them alone and assume that they're gathering the pieces of your lecture that they're here to learn.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If someone using a laptop or a screensaver kicking in a few rows away distracts you that much, then you are *fucked* in real life.
"You disturb me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now." - The Sprockets
Its those people I laugh at. How can you sleep through a class that you've paid for?
I know good professors cost money and in many cases having a lecture hall of 300 students for a 100 level class just makes sense. But I have been involved in classes (in fact I think they involved professors who also had a hand in founding slashdot...) where through the use of online forms group participation becomes manageable and can happen remotely or in the class room. So that would be one for not banning computers in the classroom
After my 4 years in college I think that a lot of classes are just too easy. You require students to listen and learn they will. This also requires being unforgiving in failing those who ask for extra credit when they have demonstrated that lectures are not worth their time or because facebook is too important.
Keep the computers, because the problem most likely exists between computer and chair.
Keep the laptops, keep the wifi.
Explain to students that there aren't many professional work environments that ban either, so they need to get used to managing their own usage, and get used to people around them doing things on their laptops. It's an opportunity for people who have problems with either or both to learn that if they can't rein in their attention, they're going to fail at class, at work and at life.
For those that say that it's not the job of the class to teach these lessons, I agree - it's simply the students' job to take control of their own life. It's no different than someone tailgating you on the freeway or cutting in front of you in line. University classrooms are learning environments and professors and TAs should help enforce that, but they aren't surrounded by some magical force field that entitles you to a guardian angel when you walk in.
If Joe Laptop won't turn off Netflix or Quake Live, grow a pair and ask them to turn it off, or just get up and move. Don't sit next to him next time. If your classroom has become a LAN party with every student except for you participating, talk to the TA or professor after class and ask them to help. It is their responsibility to help ensure that you have an opportunity to learn; it's not their job to guarantee that you'll have a private fort wherever you decide to sit.
I went to college in the mid-90s when laptop use was nearly unheard of. I used a Powerbook Duo to take notes in most of my classes. I was often able to type as fast as the speaker was able to talk. I took particularly good notes for an entire semester of European history 1700-1850. At the end of the semester, I handed the professor a floppy disk and a print copy of my notes. He was so delighted by this unexpected "gift", and he was able to critically review his teaching.
I went back and worked at my alma mater as an education technologist after a few years in industry. I supported BlackBoard, deployed Moodle and Wordpress, and encouraged faculty to explore collaborative research and writing wikis. I can only imagine how engaged in the topic a class could become using a tool like iEtherpad.com to modify wikispace.
I remember getting distracted by a neighbors doodles in some classes. Should we ban the spiral-bound notebook?
Maybe some people can multi-task, and others cant so well. Well-designed clicker tests can tell you if you have been paying attention enough. I dont mean like every 5 minutes, but 3-4 times a lecture on material presented twice in the lecture.
...my classroom rules are simple: Keep the cellphones put up, and the laptops quiet. If you feel compelled to use the cellphone, excuse yourself from class. I have no qualms about embarrassing a student in class if they are behaving in a manner that is distracting to others (and refuse to take subtle hints to correct their behavior). If they refuse to modify their behavior, I ask them to leave.
It's really quite simple: Profs have a duty to maintain a classroom environment that is conducive to learning. Banning laptops isn't the answer. We are obligated to help students who are still maturing in the social skills and who, for the most part, have been raised thinking that the world revolves around them. And if that takes telling a student to put up the laptop, then so be it.
Make lectures optional and have kids pay for their own education.
That would require quite a lot of permits.
It would also block a myriad of other functions, like access to the school resources like Its-learning/Fronter etc.
Trying to come up with a technical solution for people being irresponsible with their time is pointless. Use the energy on something productive :p
But some teachers do require attendance and usually those are the ones where missing a class or two would not be a problem. I used my laptop to take all of my notes in college and when the subject was not relevant to me or did not hold my attention I directed my attention elsewhere with my laptop so as not to distract other with my boredom. My son uses an Alpha type in his classes to help him take notes because he has issues with his handwriting and I think a laptop would be a fine replacement for that.
I got here through a series of tubes
The solution is (somehow) to bring back the $20/hr w/benefits living-wage blue collar jobs wage to these American shores so all the kids whose only purposing in sitting in college classroom is to avoid flipping burgers for the rest of their life won't get in the way of the kids going to college to actually learn stuff.
Until you spend some time on the lonely side of the podium, it's hard to comment with a full scope of knowledge on this question.
Classes where laptops are left closed result in much more engaged and dynamic classes. Those where they are open result in the "room full of zombies" effect. There's a reason it's so annoying to talk with somebody who looks away and digs in a purse or engages elsewhere when it's your turn to speak. The bio-feedback loop collapses and the teacher might as well post lectures on YouTube and students post questions in an on-line forum somewhere. Heck; on YouTube you can pause and re-play stuff. And it's cheaper!
Universities were built and people attend them at great cost in order to assemble like-minds in one place so that everybody can benefit from those aspects of humanity which thrive on face to face communication, (also earned at great cost through the trials of evolution). There are many layers of communication taking place, both subtle and extreme, which bring a room alive when people engage in each other in meat-space, but which are stripped away when it's done through a computer screen. This doesn't mean that the virtual world is without benefit. It's not; computers are a boon. But the virtual world can be attended any time, any place you can flip open a laptop. It was built to simulate the grand effect of a campus assembly. But if you are actually attending a college assembly. . ?
Laptops need to be used responsibly. Turn off animations and distracting screen savers in respect of the people sitting near you. If you're going to take notes, then sure, do so, but have the courtesy to limit it to notes and stay engaged in discussions. If you need to look something up to aid the discussion, then sure, do that, but in general things work best when all eyes and ears are on whoever is speaking. If you want to play on Facebook or dip into a game, then that's fine by me, but please physically leave class first because you're literally sucking the life out of the room by removing your mind and leaving a vacant corpse in your chair. It's creepy.
Ideally, I like to have wifi and fluorescent lights killed and windows open for fresh air. I also like to rearrange the chairs so that we can all see each other to better engage. Do that, and everybody wakes up, but these days it's very hard to scrub an environment of all the fuzz designed to keep us zoned out.
-FL
At which point people will tether to their phones. Spending effort trying to get people to do what YOU want rather than what THEY want is a losing battle. Laptops are common in classrooms now. They had become quite common when I left college 7 years ago. They're not going away - just learn to live with it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
wall paper with a sheet of aluminum in it would probably do the trick.
A nice Faraday cage with no cell phones or wifi, and as long as the wall paper meets building codes this should be a lot less problematic on the legal front than jamming devices.
Work bio at MMWD
University lectures are outdated anyway: http://www.wimp.com/studentstoday/ Need to change with the times.
I once had a stodgy old management lecturer tell me to close my laptop in class. I told him, in front of everybody, that regardless of what he might suspect me of doing with it, I was using it to take notes, to make an audio recording his lecture, and to look things up in a scanned PDF of the current textbook chapter and that I would not close it. He said something about respecting his authority. I reminded him that I was paying him, thereby making him my employee for the hour, and demanded that he stop wasting my time and money and continue the lecture. He did just that and never gave me another problem. And I aced the class. And I had sex with his granddaughter - but that's another story altogether.
If the class isn't important enough for the professor to be there teaching it (read teachers assistant and gigantic lecture hall) it isn't important enough for me to not be distracted by facebook. And if it is that lame you might as well post the lecture notes on the web and I'll sleep in thank you very much.
The single most useful thing a lecturer can do to improve lectures and outcomes for all students is to strongly suggest (i.e., "insist") students make an effort tofamiliarize themselves with the relevant material in the textbook before a lecture on any given subject, and to lecture under the assumption that the "good students" are doing so.
Among other things, this means "good students" will be less likely to waste "mental energy" transcribing facts (formulas, definitions, etc.) that appear in the textbook, and "bad students" will be compelled to at least open it up once in awhile (since the material in the lecture won't "make any sense" without reference tocited definitions from the text).
If any of this is "asking too much," a student(or lecturer) truly doesn't belong in college. Note in particular that I said "make an effort" above — not understanding everything "the first time through" is the rule rather than the exception, even for exceptional students, in most if not all subjects.
The worst thing a lecturer can do is to assign "brownie points" to reward students for "paying attention" —I've seen this — by including "easter eggs" in lectures.
"As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping," William James once wrote, "so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
This "certain stage" is different for each student, and something "students" in all walks of life must ultimately figure out for themselves.
Cheers,
Jason
I went to college from 2003-2007. Laptop use was just starting to take hold. Probably 1 in 10 kids brought a laptop to class sometimes, and 1 in 20 did so all the time. Maybe half of them were just wasting time, maybe a little more. The ones who were taking notes were probably getting no value out of it over paper.
I can see electronic tablets, but not laptops, for two reasons:
1. They're actually useful for the kind of different every day writing you do when taking notes. Keyboards aren't, no matter how much of latex you have memorized.
2. The screens are visible primarily vertically, which is what the classroom is already designed around. Other students have to really look to see what you're actually doing, and in a really flat classroom your screen isn't right below the professors head in their field of view.
I never used a laptop for class. And if I were going back I'd value a college more highly if they banned laptops from classes, except where the professor requests they be allowed (some classes probably benefit, and the professor will know when).
I've been using laptops in classes since the early 1990s, back when I was taking coursework for my PhD. It doesn't bother me to lecture to a classroom of students using them.
Yeah, right. Sure they should ban laptops. And cell phones, calculators, Ipads, mp3 players, watches, GPS units...
I have Dysgraphia. I'm glad none of my professors were this authoritarian.
Not letting me use a laptop could be considered a violation of the Americans with Disabilities act. (Thank god the GRE was computer based - scored in the top 10%)
Issues like this stem from professors who refuse to control their classroom. If someone is disruptive, remove them. But that is hard, so instead they make blanket rules.
I haven't been in school since 1990, but sometimes at work, someone will insist that people close laptops during a meting.
Its usually either a self-important, ignorant project manager or a director.
Because they take notes in their stupid leather bound book, they assume the rest of us should too.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I like to take notes on my laptop, particularly in maths classes. Then again, I take notes in vim to be typeset later in LaTeX, so I am of an extremely small minority. I find internet access a moot point in most of the classrooms I have ever been in, as (at least in most engineering and science buildings) wifi connectivity in the lecture rooms is poor at best.
The true problem comes from the fact that a bachelors degree has become less of an option and more of a mandatory requirement. In a world where entry level positions in most fields require both a Baccalaureate of some form and several years of experience, the only way to obtain both is to have had some form of internship or co-op experience while still in university. For many students, a good GPA (hence paying attention and taking notes) is less of a concern that passing their course of study, no matter the grade. It is often the case that it is merely having the degree is what counts, not what your GPA is/was. A ban of laptops in classrooms only serves to hide the problems with higher education, not solves them.
They shouldn't be staring at my Goatse background.
It's not the laptop which is disruptive, it's the student who thinks he has to accumulate seat time to get a good grade.
If you do not show up to the lectures you will get dropped from the class.
This is a legitimate question. While in grad (yes engineering grad school in '04-'06, the classroom was full of laptops being used primarily for IM'ing and surreptitiously poking fun at the instructor and other student during presentations to the class and for checking sports scores. Oh yeah, and the occasional web search for something relevant to the class. Note taking, scoff! scoff! The notes are usually already available in the form of hand-outs, and/or powerpoint presentations which are readily downloadable. I would have much preferred a more thoughtful dialog from these distracted students. The act of listening and actively summarizing the information on paper is an extremely effective, time-proven method of assimilating the material.
Whether laptops should be in class completely depends on the subject matter. For example, I never used a laptop in undergraduate class. In law school, I always used a laptop for taking notes as did every student save maybe one out of a hundred.
But I can't even imagine using a laptop for math or science courses. Then again, I didn't really take notes in most of my undegrad classes. I definitely found it useful in law school and probably even essential. I can also see using one is undergrad liberal arts courses (e.g., English, History, etc), although I didn't.
Some people have brought up that lectures shouldn't be mandatory. I definitely agree with that. Throughout most of my education, they weren't and I loved that. For Calculus, before class, I'd review the syllabus to see what was going to be lectured on that day. I'd then review those pages and do a few problems. If I understood it, I'd skip class. If I didn't, then I'd go to class. I'd usually attend lecture 1/4 times. Then again, in certain undegrad courses (e.g., history, some computer science courses) and most law school classes, I almost never missed a lecture.
So basically my point is, you really can't generalize. There is no correct answer to whether a laptop should be allowed. It all depends on the major and the individual course. More so, it really depends on the student (and maybe even the lecturer).
So just make the classroom unable to recieve wireless signals, and if you can't get a room that is thusly configured, don't allow laptops. There are a clear division between classes which need laptops and classes that don't.
Commenters who posted about writing offering better recall have it exactly right, however laptops, (or any electronic notetaking aid) can be incredibly helpful in a lecture which delivers a great deal of content as its primary purpose. Literature courses, whose lectures often deal with conceptual ideas which are elucidated by the professor, have no need of laptops, since I would challenge anyone who claims OneNote-style note organization offers a serious aid to literary pedagogy
However, science courses are often simply professors rattling off facts, and being able to organize those facts according to concept can make all the difference. Math courses are of course, the exception, at least until methods of digitally rendering formulas are radically advanced.
This all wide of the mark in that a professor should get final say what is or is not allowed in the classroom, within reason. It might be unreasonable for a professor to demand their students take notes on wax tablets (depending on the subject) but until pen and paper become so inconvenient to obtain and use, sit down and shut up.