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Professors debate whether laptops are a help or hindrance in the
classroom
Mini-fridge? Check.
Book bag? Check.
Spiral bound noteb … er, uh … laptop? Check.
A luxury item less than a decade ago, the laptop computer is perhaps the
most essential item a college freshman will pack-up when headed off to
school.
And for good reason: Word processors ease paper writing, access to
e-mail and instant messages connect family and friends, and the World
Wide Web is a library of unprecedented scope and size.
But when freshmen settle in for their first lecture, their professor may
demand the unimagined: leave your laptop in your bag.
Laptop computers and wireless Internet access have revolutionized
education, just not entirely as anticipated.
"Laptops are often an attractive nuisance," says David Cole, a law
professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Cole wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post this April about the
negative impact of laptops on classroom learning.
Note taking has become stenography and e-mail, IM, and the Web are
irresistible distractions, he argues.
Cole outlawed laptops from his classroom this year to positive results:
About 80 percent of his students reported in an anonymous survey that
they were more engaged when laptop-free.
"When I wrote that op-ed, I got hundreds of e-mails from people,
probably about 98 percent of which were positive from students saying
that was their experience – that laptops were very distracting in the
classroom," Cole says.
Interactive Class
But in some classes, students will miss out if they leave their laptop
in the dorm.
Christian Jernstedt, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in
Hanover, New Hampshire, relies on Internet-connected laptops to keep his
lectures hopping along.
He pioneered a system – originally with hand-held computers – that uses
the college's wireless network to pose interactive questions to the
entire class. Everyone answers on his or her laptop. The replies show up
on an overhead display and prompt class discussion.
"The goal is to engage the student," Jernstedt says.
He asks questions that force students to think – not regurgitate
memorized facts – and sometimes make a personal connection with the
course material.
For example, when Jernstedt starts a unit on what stress does to the
brain, he asks the students how frequently they feel stress in their
lives.
"Most students are surprised to see how many other people feel like they
do," he says. "And so that sort of question is, in a sense, a hook to
what's coming."
And hooked students, he adds, are not tempted to toggle over to their
Facebook profile or check e-mail.
"You don't have to think at all about what else they're doing because
they're engaged in what's going on," he says.
Stephen Acker, a communications professor at Ohio State University in
Columbus, encourages the use of laptops in his small, seminar-style
courses.
Their use, he says, allow students to perform fact checks; find
alternative points of view for discussion; and plug their machines into
a projector for class presentations.
On occasion, he admits, students give in to the temptations of the Web –
particularly if they are just using the machines to take notes. But the
behavior, he says, is nothing new.
"In some sense, that is just a tangible representation of daydreaming, a
wonderful escape from a non-engaging class session that always has been
part and parcel of the student's defense mechanisms," he commented in an
e-mail.
Laptop Education
Michael Bugeja is the director of the Greenlee School of Journalism at
Iowa State University in Ames and author of The
Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.
Students, he says, have adopted an attitude that class attendance and
participation are irrelevant with today's technology.
"This is what we're dealing with," he says, describing the attitude:
"I don't understand why I have to be here. Why don't you simply post
your lecture notes using WebCT (Course Tools), we'll access them later …
and if you're going to force me to come to class by attendance, I'm
going to do what I want."
In frustration, about half of Iowa State's journalism professors have
banned laptops, cellphones and MP3 players from their classrooms.
Though he no longer actively teaches, Bugeja would actually allow the
gadgets – it's the students' choice, he says – but laments that students
fail to understand when their use of technology is inappropriate or
squanders their tuition.
Colleges and universities have spent millions of dollars in recent years
installing wireless networks, he notes, providing Internet access in
every building and under every tree.
Many schools now require their students to tote a laptop, such as
Dartmouth.
Professors routinely hand out and collect assignments via course Web
sites. Students can e-mail a question instead of waiting for office
hours. In class, access to an online database can help solve a problem.
"These tools are more powerful than we've ever had in the course of
human history," Bugeja says. "They deserve respect and when used
properly they're entirely empowering."
"But when used frivolously, they're disempowering."
Instead of using their laptops to engage in class, students often get
sucked into blogs, e-mail, news headlines and virtual shopping malls,
for example.
"Increasingly, the devices are being programmed to sell and entertain …
Students need to be aware of what the interface is going to have them do
so they can use it appropriately," Bugeja says.
Even when students simply take notes with their laptops, they are likely
to miss much of the class discussion, according to Georgetown's Cole.
He explains that since most students type much faster than they write
with a pen, laptops induce passive transcription.
Pen and paper note takers, by contrast, are forced to pay attention,
select the most important points, and summarize.
"If you're just being a stenographer, you're not really engaged in the
discussion," Cole says.
"You wouldn't want the court reporter, for example, to decide a case.
You want the jury to decide the case."
According to Dartmouth's Jernstedt, professors need to stop quibbling
about laptops and embrace them like the telephone, which is so much a
part of life that the technology is transparent.
"If you look at the really successful technologies, it's not that you're
focused on the technology, you're focused on what it lets you do," he
says.
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