Thursday, March 03, 2005

 

Am I a Screen Saver?

Laptops in the classroom has become a hot topic in some law school quarters. Both Conglomerate and Althouse have blogged on it recently, and my own colleagues have been airing their views around the law building. It’s a sensitive subject with great potential for making both faculty and students feel personally attacked, and if it is really a problem, it’s one with no easy solution. Gordon, for instance, after turning over the problem at length, concludes:
I am not convinced that banning laptops or banning certain types of laptop use in the classroom are good solutions. This is, at root, the sort of regulatory issue that lawyers find endlessly fascinating. How should laptop use be regulated, if at all? Despite my strident views on pedagogy, I find myself still waffling on this ultimate question.
As am I. To begin with:

1. What's the problem here? I see three different versions of an answer.
(a) Learning -- surfing or other computer use may be unduly distracting to other students.
(b) Etiquette -- it's just rude, esp. surfing porn sites (!)
(c) Hurt feelings -- ouch! it just feels bad to be teaching our hearts out up there and students are busily engaged in new ways to ignore us.
My own view is that (a) is the most important, we should just suck it up and get over (c), and I'm not sure how I feel about (b). But I do believe strongly that it's important to be empirically rigorous before jumping to conclusion (a) and that we professors should carefully avoid saying (a) as a rhetorical cover for (b) or (c).

2. We should think outside the box. Other than a flat out ban on porn surfing -- which is arguably required under Title IX and university sexual harassment policies -- it seems to me that any bright line rules on computer use in the classroom may be trying to close a Pandora's Box that we opened ourselves. Law schools generally require their students to have computers, and laptops are a sensible choice for students. And law schools have wired their classrooms with great fanfare about the pedagogical virtues of classroom internet access. Are law schools now going to say, “Ooops, we were wrong?”

Further, I wonder whether this problem presents some good pedagogical opportunities.

-- Tell your students they can surf if the provide a written set of guidelines (regs, statute, or constitutional provision) justifying their surfing while adequately addressing the countervailing policy concerns. (One of my colleagues has already tried this idea.)

-- Get the class to discuss and then draft a permissible computer use statute that bans internet surfing for "non-pedagogical purposes" had have them discuss the parameters of that definition. Real lawyering skills are needed there.

--If laptops really interfere with learning, let's present our students with convincing research supporting that contention. Many students say that multitasking helps their concentration, though I understand that there is some empirical data suggesting that the modern multitasking windows-based brain actually takes in less information and concentrates inefficiently.

-- Ask ourselves, as teachers, why should we have so many classes physically set up in ways that contribute to different aspects of the problem -- the professor tethered to the front of a room like a dog chained to a clothesline, students sitting like a theatre audience several rows deep. Why not walk around the classroom and get a view of those screens? If you find a student surfing, ask them to look something up on Google or Lexis. And why not give the students things to do in class other than listen and take notes?

Yale Law Prof Ian Ayres has been questioning the use of laptops in the classroom for a couple of years. In a New York Times editorial he wrote some time ago, Ayres argued that today it’s law school classrooms. Tomorrow, it will be “the opera hall, the jury box or the church pew. Will the lure of technological stimulation someday overwhelm current mores about paying attention in those places, too?”

But we should ask ourselves how our classrooms differ from “the opera hall, the jury box and the church pew.” Maybe Ayres is a virtuoso performer like Pavarotti, but I'm not. Jurors sit under legal compulsion; they don't surf because the judge won't let them, and can back that up with scary powers, like jailing someone for contempt. (Though jurors still find all sorts of ways to tune out, and their passive listening is not the most efficient way to learn.) Would we want to exercise such compulsion over our students even if we could?

And the church pew? The day I start preaching from the pulpit with my students politely pretending to listen quietly, is the day I change careers.

Maybe we professors need to take the “problem” of laptop computers in the classroom entirely personally. And maybe the answer is to get over our hurt feelings and start to think whether we need to be teaching better.

***

Comments:
Okay, et me get this straight. One person, once, has some pornography on his laptop screen in a class. Someone rightly complains...and now faculty are seriously considering banning laptops?

Faculty should realize that there are already functioning norms of laptop behavior. This is the first time that I've heard of someone in a UW class looking at porn on a laptop. Everyone knows who everyone else is!

This fellow most likely either (a) accidentally opened a pornographic spam email or (b) accidentally visited a pornographic website while doing a google search. Either that, or he's a sicko, and his behavior has little to do with whatever enabling technology he used.

It is very easy, in the echo chamber of a faculty email list, to blow a problem way out of proportion. I would suggest that the faculty wait until there is more than a single isolated incident, before crippling the effectiveness of many students and reducing the attractiveness of the school to prospective students.
 
I seem to represent the minority faculty position, but I'll just put it up on your blog because you, Oscar, come closest to saying something comparable: the argument that has consistently appeared on factalk is that we, the faculty cannot teach effectively so long as students are multi-tasking by surfing, emailing, etc. AS IF we even knew anything about effective learning styles! AS IF we cared to question our own efficacy before, having unitl now felt entirely comfortable with letting students evaluate it and then be done with the whole thing.
I have to say that it feels to me like a smokescreen for the troubling idea that at some moment a screen may be more informative than what the prof is saying.
I am all for guidelines about rude inappropriate use of the Internet, in the same way that I am for guidelines limiting disrespectful behaviors of any type within the class. But to say that we are concerned for reasons of pedagogy is, to me, a little bit of a cover up.
 
As a student, I am relieved to see Althouse, Conglomerate, Nina and Oscar inject some sense into this completely overblown mess. This seems to be either about egos and/or generational stubbornness. Dynamic and engaging teaching styles grab students’ attention lowering the appeal of in-class surfing. This teaching style is more common among young faculty, who from what I have been observing, enjoy as a group a lower-than-average rate of in-class wireless activity. Those who don’t, let’s be honest, feel disrespected. A clear choice: either make an effort to get in tune with your students or get over it, or more appropriately, get over yourself.
Generational stubbornness? Maybe. The sentiment implicit in ‘pissed-off’ faculty complaining about wireless activity tastes just like the out-of-touch excuses we get from the administration when addressing laptop usage in final exams and faulty wireless in the law school building… again, get over thyself for the good of all of us.
So what about wireless sinners “distracting other students.” Let’s be clear, there is nothing viable/enforceable that can be done. Let’s say the class agrees on some in-class standard or kind of wireless activity. Now let’s assume I break it, will I get kicked out, docked a point or two off my final grade? Nothing, that’s what will happen to me; nothing outside of the disapproval of my fellow students and professors. Unless of course some professors have their way and take us back to the days when spanking a student in front of the class was okay. Etiquette and decorum already determine the norm of in-class wireless behavior! Let’s all move on.
 
I posted my thoughts on the laptops in class issue over in the comments at conglomerate. But I would like to add here that boredom no doubt plays a part in student internet use during class. It's a good thing that Prof Althouse has written a post supporting lap top (and internet) use in class--otherwise this post would probably come back to haunt her.
 
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