Another take on the laptop debate....

 

college week
The Rules of Distraction
Hey, you-with the laptop! Ignore your professor and read this instead.
By Avi Zenilman
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 4:19 PM ET



My professor right now is talking about something important and
world-historical, but instead of listening, I am writing this article. I
just e-mailed my editor telling her I'd finish a draft by tomorrow, but
before that I was clicking through old New Yorkers and checking NBA box
scores. Normally I'd IM with a friend about how boring the lecture is,
but I can see that today she brought a pen and paper and is idly staring
into space. Lame.

There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I'm
currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists
mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I
can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking
notes. Another is looking at the registrar's Web site. The other two
keep checking their e-mail. 

In sum, a relatively well-behaved class. In my other lectures, nearly
half of the students spend time pecking away at laptops, and most of us
aren't just fact-checking the professor. This is the classroom of the
future: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail,
play Legend of Zelda, or update our profiles on Facebook.com
<http://www.thefacebook.com/> . Last year, during a guest lecture by the
estimable K. Anthony Appiah <http://www.slate.com/id/2130328/>  on
W.E.B. DuBois and cosmopolitanism, I edited three articles for a campus
magazine <http://www.theblueandwhite.org/home.php> . But the distraction
epidemic is really nothing new. Replace laptops with crumpled notes, and
the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past.

Almost 10 years ago, a couple of researchers from the University of the
Kentucky prophesied the coming of an educational utopia in which
professors would "replace conventional blackboards and chalk with a
collaborative, networked, portable computing environment." For years,
tech enthusiasts (and tech companies
<http://www.techlearning.com/content/epubs/laptops/> , natch) have been
bullish on putting all sorts of information and technology at students'
fingertips. This enthusiasm seemed to hit its irrationally exuberant
peak in 2003, when Boeing gave Washington State University $99,000 to
create something actually called "the classroom of the future
<http://www.cbe.wsu.edu/research/T105.html> "-which, it turns out,
resembles the Star Trek Enterprise done over by Ikea. 

But now that 42 percent
<http://www.campuscomputing.net/summaries/2005/index.html>  of American
college classrooms have wireless access-and more and more students are
using Wi-Fi-enabled laptops each year-administrators and professors are
having second thoughts. A recent article
<http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05287/588740.stm>  in the Wall Street
Journal noted that administrators at UVa, UCLA, Stanford, the University
of Houston, and others have considered "devices to block wireless access
in the classroom after faculty complaints of out-of-control Web
surfing." An October news feature
<http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/1005/18metlaptop.html>  in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution sympathized with college instructors across
Georgia who "are trying to figure out how to get students to log off
their computers long enough to listen."

The Internet is, of course, a distraction. There are some ground rules:
I always try to position myself so my screen isn't in the line of sight
of the professor or one of the teaching assistants. And after a bad
pop-up ad experience, I always press the mute button. Still, even when a
lecture engages me, it can be hard to pay attention when the little AIM
man <http://www.une.edu.au/itd/help/settings/images/aim-logo.gif>
starts bobbing up and down at the bottom of my screen. 

But are these distractions worse than the old-fashioned ones-doodling,
dozing, reading, playing footsie, passing notes? Those of us mucking
around on IMDB today are probably the same kids who in middle school,
before the wireless age, either skipped class or wrote painfully bad rap
lyrics on the inside of their notebooks. (Avi Zvi in the place to be/
Kick all ya'll again and you'll never pee ... .) The students in front
assiduously typing are probably the ones who spent eighth grade taking
painstaking notes by hand. 

And it's not at all clear that wireless classrooms cause any decline in
the quality of student work. One of the most telling anecdotes in the
Journal story is that of Jonathan Clarke, a finance professor at Georgia
Tech whose classrooms were outfitted with wireless in 1999. He said he
didn't realize people in his class were Webbing it up until two years
ago, "when the presence of a guest lecturer gave him a chance to sit
among the students." What's remarkable here is not Clarke's distracted
students, but the fact that for four years his students had been
ignoring him, and he found out not when test scores plunged, but when he
walked down the aisles. 

It could even be that distractions make for better students. Last year,
a high-achieving friend of mine-fellowship finalist, budding academic,
campus leader-brought the classic video game Quake to class one day, and
afterward he claimed that the distraction enhanced his educational
experience:

The part of my brain that handles spatial relationships and tactical
thinking is clearly distinct from the part that reads, writes, and
analyzes historically. I ended up both winning the game with a
well-placed rocket and learning everything [the Prof] said.

This observation may be total hooey. But when Cornell University
researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored
students' browsing habits, they concluded
<http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicles/3.8.01/wireless_eval.html> ,
"Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but
there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class
may actually lead to higher grades." It seems a bit of a stretch to
impute a causal relationship, but it's certainly possible that the kind
of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the
kind of brain that earns A's.

In any event, even when multitaskers can't keep track of the professor,
it probably doesn't matter much. In lectures at large universities,
especially in the humanities and social sciences, class time is usually
taken up by the broad outlines of the subject. The real learning occurs
when we bear down and pore over the hundreds of pages assigned every
week-the lecture I'm currently tuning out assigns about 3,000 pages of
reading over the span of the semester-and when we attend small
discussion sections with graduate students who go over what we've read.
Any good grade-grubber knows that the trick to doing well on exams is
knowing the reading, not what the professor said last week. 

Perhaps the real problem with laptops in lectures isn't the laptops, but
professors' over-reliance on the lecture as a learning tool. Earlier
this week in Slate, M. Stanley Katz contended
<http://www.slate.com/id/2130158/>  that "the most effective learning is
active learning ... teaching must involve presenting students with
problems to solve rather than merely lecturing about those problems."
Amen, professor. You try listening to rambling, jargon-filled
disquisitions for 15 hours a week without reading blogs. At least Gawker
solicits our contributions.

Judging by the Journal article, one professor at the University of
Houston seems to be cottoning on. He "now peppers his lectures with
enough questions to reduce students' Web surfing. When he is discussing
a particularly complex subject, he says, he tells students to close
their laptops." Now, this could be a problem: If I start actually
learning in class, how will I find time to do anything else? 

Avi Zenilman is a former Slate intern.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130600/