The Columnist Manifesto

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.

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