In the Law School in Trinity, the proportion of my students using laptops in class has increased year by year, though they have not yet reached the levels attained in US law schools, where the vast majority of students have laptops in class. Whether this is too much of a good thing, however, is now a serious matter for debate: are benefits of the technology outweighed by the capacity for distraction (taking notes vs updating facebook)? The University of Chicago School of Law has turned off wireless internet access in class, Harvard Law School has considered banning laptops in class, various individual law professors have actually done so or negotiated them away, and there is even a law review article on the issue. Now, Law School Innovation reports on an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined “Survey Gets Law-School Students’ Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics” (sub req’d). Some extracts:
Law-school professors are fed up with students using laptop computers in class to surf to Facebook, eBay, everything but LexisNexis. And some have even banned the distracting machines. But results from a new survey show that an outright ban might not be such a good idea.
The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, suggests that, when used wisely, laptops can actually enhance student engagement. The survey found that class-related laptop use correlates highly with reported gains in several areas, including critical and analytical thinking.
Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found …
I broadly agree with these findings. I’ve been on both sides of these laptops, and I’m going to break ranks and admit something to those students reading this blog: from the front of the class, I can often tell when someone is concentrating on the screen for reasons other than the class. For example, it’s pretty obvious if you’re furiously typing away while everyone else is doing nothing at all, studiously failing to answer a question I’ve just posed – gotcha! you’re drafting an email or updating a profile, aren’t you? Now, this is an extreme example, but there are lots of obvious examples short of that, and even if I don’t notice every non-classroom related usage, I do notice a lot of them. And in my class, you run the risk of having a few questions directed specifically to you just when you’re deepest into your online distraction. But I don’t see myself going any further and seeking to turn off the wifi or even ban the laptops. I think that the benefits of technology far, far outweigh the detriments. And, in any event, people who are bored in class will daydream even if they don’t surf.
I’ve been thinking about that myself, although the QUB laptop population is low (relative to an hour’s teaching I did last year in Trinity anyway).
I agree that it’s possible to tell note-takers from facebookers, just as it’s possible to tell listeners from non-listeners in general. But I wonder if, in small classes, there might be some way of harnessing the laptops without being gimmicky? Perhaps students ought to be given a wiki or Twitter feed to update and should be tasked with building notes on each lecture as it happens? The prize would be an on-the-spot record of the lecture that’s better than something an individual could create. And free-riders would be exposed.
Thanks guys for your comments.
I like Ciaran’s idea of an instantaneous class wiki – I’ve been trying to work out how to integrate wikis into class, and the best I’ve come up with so far is to set the equivalent of an essay topic and require the class to collaborate on a wiki to generate the answer. But an instantaneous wiki of a given lecture/seminar is a much better idea, so I might very well try to do something with it, as soon as the laptop population in any given class gets high enough.
As for Cian’s argument that multi-taksing is possible, I entirely agree (though I’m not very good at it myself). But the problem (if it is a problem) arises where the surfer is not multitasking and/or is distracting surrounding students.
Eoin.
I feel very strongly against banning laptops in the classroom. If they were introduced in the first place for a good reason then continue with it. There will always be those students who are off in another world with or without a laptop in front of them. It is the teachers job to keep the students engaged but students who are not taking their education seriously will not pay much attention anyway.