8 ms·

The case for banning laptops in the classroom.

41 points by DLay 12y ago

mathattack 12y ago
I've seen issues in meetings with this too. It's great for follow-up to be typing notes in the meeting, but it takes a lot of discipline for it not to devolve, and it's tough on speakers to discuss when everyone else is heads down.
- existencebox 12y ago
  I personally would be absolutely hamstrung without a laptop in meetings. My own handwriting is notoriously messy (I am only to blame for not practicing it enough to be any good, but that's almost a tradeoff for working in front of a computer nearly 24/7) and FAR slower than typing. I'm also unable to use text editor style shortcuts,reformat after the fact for clarity, or readily keep track off/move around documents. I found the exact things they claimed happened to laptop note takers, being a 'zombie', to be what happened when I tried to take notes by hand. This also doesn't convince me when taken in concert that when aggressively pushed onto the "YOU MUST TAKE PHYSICAL NOTES WITH NO DISTRACTIONS" bandwagon for most of my primary schooling, which was, to put it lightly, less than successful. This overly rambly anecdote should serve to illustrate not that I think laptops are "the right answer", but getting rid of them unilaterally will really harm those who actually have learned to incorporate them into a useful workflow. Why not address some more root causes, e.g. why engagement is so low? Facebook doesn't "force" you to browse it, and maybe I'm acting snoody in this, but there are certainly classes that I wouldn't be caught playing my favorite video games during for the subject matter being so interesting.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    The people in the meeting should be participating in the meeting. The meeting needs a fast and accurate note taker to shorthand or type what everyone is saying and distribute those notes. That leaves you free to make the important notes and mark your action points. (This can be paper or laptop).
    - mathattack 12y ago
      Is the optimal situation where everyone can see what the note-taker is writing? Has anyone done this? To stay engaged, I've used the scrawl now and type later method, which means the notes never get out early enough. They do allow me to reflect on them though.
  - Htsthbjig 12y ago
    The problem with laptops is keyboard noise. Compare note taking with keyboard typing in a class with several dozen people and you will see noise is a big problem if you are the teacher. I personally believe the best solution is audio record anything the teacher says, automatically transcribe it and just draw diagrams and stuff. But it will take some time before people start doing it.
    - existencebox 12y ago
      I realize this is one of the "better" examples, but it's certainly close to home for HN, but would you really argue that recorded audio and drawn diagrams are more useful for CS/algorithms courses than some typed snippets and pseudocode? That was at least where having a laptop in class really paid off for me.
      - BruceIV 12y ago
        Different people process information differently; for me seeing an abstract diagram of say, a B-Tree, would be more useful than a pseudo-code overview of the structure (at least first - the code might be useful once I had an grasp of the idea from the diagram). That's just me, though, different people learn differently.
lukejduncan 12y ago
How about banning classrooms in favor of laptops? Hyperbole sure, but I was an on class student who paid for distance learning because I preferred the freedom to take the class on my time, on 2x speed, and with the ability to pause and look things up. It was never worth it to go back to class. It begs the question: maybe it's the teaching method, and not the tool.
- neltnerb 12y ago
  From the article: "These examples can be seen as the progeny of an ill-conceived union of twenty-first-century tools (computers, tablets, smartphones) with nineteenth-century modalities (lectures)."
- blueskymike 12y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Just because someone lectures about something doesn't mean it will stick in my head. Banning laptops is not he solution.
greglo 12y ago
Anecdotally fits in with my experience. I always sat at the back off the lecture theatre (but its only 20 rows deep), and the people with laptops were almost always doing something other than paying full attention to the lecturer. I used to leave my phone in my dorm lest I end up checking out a tech blog and be completely lost of the rest of the lecture
jawns 12y ago
In the lower grades, I think a case can be made that during the time they are in class, students should not have any other demands on their time. In contrast, with college students, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that -- at least occasionally -- a student may need to "check out" from a lecture momentarily to deal with some pressing business, even if it means that he has to spend time later asking a classmate to fill him in on what he missed. For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away. This is all the sort of stuff I encounter regularly in the working world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that college students encounter it, too. Being able to keep open a laptop to deal with things like this is a lot less distracting than having to step outside the lecture hall to take an urgent phone call. Yes, putting away the laptops might slightly increase students' abilities to soak up the material, but (sorry, professors) sometimes the class you're sitting in is not your top priority, and sometimes that's OK. I occasionally had to skip class to chase down a hot story for the school newspaper, and I don't regret it a bit. So long as the student is using the privilege responsibly, I say let 'em keep the laptop open!
- akuma73 12y ago
  That's what your phone is for.
  - vlunkr 12y ago
    I had a couple of professors that didn't allow cell phone use in their classes, and it was annoying, for all the reasons the original poster listed. I can understand not letting high school students use phones, but in college you are an adult with sometimes conflicting responsibilities.
    - jcromartie 12y ago
      That's a non sequitur. If an emergency comes up, and your phone rings, you leave the room and answer it.
akrolsmir 12y ago
UC Berkeley student here; laptop bannings are actually relatively common in lectures. I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away. A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002254 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...
- canthonytucci 12y ago
  > A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material. If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office. Full disclosure, I only skimmed this paper, but I'd say this study has very little in common with the actual scenario of a good professor giving a stimulating lecture. People learn and take notes differently, students should be granted the respect to do whatever works best for them, professors' egos be damned. EDIT: Not to mention these students are paying customers....if they choose to waste their time in class, that's up to them.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office. Yes, open offices are a terrible idea because many people lose a lot of their productivity in those distracting environments.
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  > I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away. I had a professor that would make the student using the laptop come up to the front of the room and finish giving the lecture. He said he picked it up from Nabokov.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
Not that laptops in the classroom are the solution, but in general we need to change the teaching strategy in lower and higher education any way. We need high-tech, 2014+ ready educational facilities, curricula and teaching strategies. Laptops can certainly be distracting but trying to maintain the status quo isn't going to benefit anyone.
- BruceIV 12y ago
  Do you have some concrete suggestions? I personally think that the place for high-tech solutions is for homework and maybe lab sections, not disrupting lectures.
slightlycuban 12y ago
So, I could get on my soapbox of "your students are adults, let them make their own decisions on note taking" or go on about how useful I found a calendar for remembering class schedules, but: > We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low. Really? I found it fairly easy to type out full equations in LaTeX using LyX. Maybe the laptop isn't the problem, but that you only introduce your students to the most basic of word processors.
dangoldin 12y ago
My mom's a music teacher and this reminded me of a letter she wrote to the local newspaper after discovering they want to buy more computers for the classroom. Here goes: I'm not denying that I am hopelessly old and outdated, but reading the article on Technology Needs for School District (May 15, 2014) literally made me cry; for two reasons. First, because the people who are in charge of education are actually going to do it, and second, that the Livingston parent community is so enthusiastic about it. There is no doubt that computers are useful and that the Internet gives access to such a scope of information so quickly that is not available nor accessible through any other means. But how do they impact children's overall DEVELOPMENT? How do they impact their attention? With the pandemic of Attention Deficit Disorder, how can we be so blind not to notice the connection between children's attention span and the time they spend on the computer? I started teaching piano more than 30 years ago. EVERY child was capable to remember which note he had to play, with which finger, how to hold the finger and whether he had to play long or short, loud or soft - simultaneously. Now it is typical that when a child pays attention to what note it is, he does not notice which finger; if he remembers the finger – does not notice how loud, etc. I rarely see children that can actually focus on the task for longer than 20 seconds. I often ask parents, “How much time does your child spend on the computer?” The connection is direct: the less time on computer – the better the student's focus, the longer she can concentrate on the assignment. I happened to teach an elderly lady who brought a music book with her teacher's remarks dated 1958. She was nervous, “Will you quit on me? I forgot everything.” I answered (only half-jokingly), “Of course not, you are my only student with a normal attention span!” Even though I observe 400+ students in my music school, can it be just coincidence? What does the beloved Internet tell us about the impact of computer use has on the brain? Nothing encouraging. As an example, there is a student work in biology (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336 http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336, 2007) that summarizes finding on the topic. It states what I suspected: computers often conflict with the activities that are needed for one to develop the ability to pay attention; the list of scientific works is attached there. And if you still like long books, N. Carr addresses the issue in his “The Shallows: What Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” What are we doing? Are we trying to compensate for having poor teachers with technology? Why do we adhere to such a naive belief that computers are the solution to problems in schools, thinking that “the more of them - the better” automatically? Maybe it's better to invest in teachers' training? Maybe we need to raise the prestige of the teaching profession? I participated in a “professional orientation” day in LHS several years ago. Seniors had an opportunity to meet with representatives of their prospective field. I saw crowds of seniors following “Lawyers” and “Accountants”. In the “Teachers” room, a retired Harrison school teacher and myself, who were assigned to lead the meeting, found 4 or 5 girls. Only one of them really wanted to be a teacher, knew what is involved and why she wanted it. Everyone else said, “I do not know”, “I am not sure”.. . Why do we expect our children will be enthusiastic about learning if teachers themselves “do not know”?.. And how computers can help? The more that children use computers, the less opportunities they have for human interaction.  By increasing the role of computers in children's lives we bend human nature, we consciously under-develop the younger generation; we deprive our children of full development of their communication skills, ability to build relationships, and their creativity. We are raising USERS, not CREATORS. We are increasing the distance between those who are capable to make discoveries and those who can chose from pre-made options; between people who can see the beauty of the world and those for whom the world is limited by the rectangle of the screen.
BruceIV 12y ago
One of the side points the author raised was interesting: namely, that there's a lack of good tooling for taking mathematical-notation heavy notes efficiently on laptop ... maybe some sort of Markdown with inline LaTeX (plain LaTeX is too much of a hassle to do paragraph/list formatting in). It shouldn't be technically difficult to build, it just oddly doesn't seem to exist yet.
- lartoa 12y ago
  In my experience, LaTeX is not really a worthy alternative to writing formulas by hand. Sure, you should absolutely use LaTeX for typesetting mathematical reports and the like, but LaTeX does not stand a chance against pen and paper when it comes to taking notes or doing calculations. The world needs tooling that is much more similar to writing formulas on a paper in its interface. At the moment, I also fail to see any benefit at all in using laptops in mathematics education.
nlawalker 12y ago
If instructors really wanted to raise the quality of their classroom environments, instead of banning laptops, they'd commit to posting all their lectures, slides and announcements online and tell students that if they don't want to be there in person that they don't need to be. Many people don't see the point in being physically present to hear someone talk and point at slides. Those that do, and aren't just attending because you might spring a surprise announcement or pop quiz on them, will be there to pay attention.
- BruceIV 12y ago
  Because a good lecturer will do more than just read off his or her slides, and if they tell students the slides will be available than many of them won't show up, and will miss out good material. Video-recording the lectures is another thing entirely, but if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises. (I do realize that there are lots of horrible lecturers out there who do nothing more than read off the PowerPoint that comes with the textbook, but I think the correct approach to that is to re-work the tenure system to promote good lecturers as well as good researchers, not abolish lectures.)
  - watwut 12y ago
    On the other hand, video can be stopped, rewinded and you have more time to think about the question and find the answer by yourself.
    - ghkbrew 12y ago
      Or played at 1.5x speed. One of the problems with lectures is that they tend to be geared towards the lowest common denominator. The great thing about the few of my college courses that provided online lectures was that I could go through them at my own pace and not be bored out of my mind for 90min of a 2hr lecture.
  - nlawalker 12y ago
    >> if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises. I strongly disagree. Many lectures aren't structured to include or allow these activities, and many students don't need or want to participate in them. Those students are the ones who sit behind their laptops the whole period, and everyone would be better served if they didn't have to come to lecture in person.
juliendorra 12y ago
Socrates would have us ban note taking completely, because writing is a distraction and limit our ability to use our memory.
- arjie 12y ago
  This is so true for me though. I've discovered that I learn more when I'm not taking notes. Especially in Maths or CS where classrooms are great for building intuition or easing into a subject but textbooks are ubiquitous and easy to read. Copying down a proof doesn't help me at all but doing it along with a professor (each mental step is easy to hold on to) gives me so much better results. I imagine that I'm not the only such one.
vlunkr 12y ago
College students are adults, why don't we let them decide how they use their class time. If someone wants to pay to go to a university just to waste class time on a computer, that's their loss. For others, note taking on a laptop might be more efficient. Personally, I have terrible handwriting and would prefer to take notes digitally. If someone is seriously distracting people around them, then it makes sense to tell them to put their laptop away
specialk 12y ago
Personally from my college experience I know that I have used my laptop in lectures for both good and evil. I have legitimately used it to google work, ideas and to open tabs on papers/etc. to read later. I also used to write code in all my programming lectures because programming lectures were dull otherwise, might as well make use of the time. However, there are many times I have opened up reddit or HN during lectures and 'checked-out' as the article suggested. Sometimes I have paid for not listening to the lecture but the majority of the time it doesn't matter. The idea that I learned my college curriculum in lectures would be a joke. As a computer science student I learnt my trade in the labs and tutorials and interactive courses rarely from listening to a lecturer explain X, Y or Z. The better the lecturer or the harder the module the more laptops that were closed in my lectures. My compiler design course for example, infamous for being the most difficult module no one dared open the laptop as there was too much knowledge to consume. Lecturers can easily do a self-assessment survey of how engaged their class is and how interestingly they are presenting their material but how many heads are hidden behind laptop screens. For the one lecturer who did ban laptops I have to say I went to absolutely none of his lectures unless I had coursework to submit. I found it a bit presumptuous that he could demand I close my laptop, I was not distracting him or disturbing the class. You don't learn in lectures where lecturers read their slides to you laptop open or not. If the lecturers are going to waste my time with pointless reading of slides then I might as well do something useful on my laptop like my coursework or just read hacker news.
spodek 12y ago
> "A wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed." The problem is the lecture! Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing rarely engages anyone -- push students away from material they don't care about. If students are engaged and laptops impede them, they'll put them away themselves. If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than being lectured at will make them care. If you have to ban something, ban the lecture and teachers who rely on lecturing at the expense of empathy and compassion for students. Students are people like you and me. We use laptops in our work when they help and put them away when they don't. If we want students to learn about the world and how to succeed in it, let them work like we work, solving problems like we solve. Experiential, project-based learning does this automatically, at least with effective teachers. Lecturing doesn't. If you had a job you couldn't quit where your manager lectured at you all the time you'd get out your computer too. HN just had a thread -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 -- on the problems with lectures based on a Science Magazine article, "Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds.” Here is my blog post with related notes from that thread -- "Why I avoid lecturing when I lead and teach" http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach
- iak8god 12y ago
  > Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing will rarely engage anyone -- are the problem ... If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than you droning on in front of them will make them care. University students who have no interest in a course's material have no business being enrolled in that course. These are adults who are there voluntarily, and should be expected to participate in their own education without instructors jumping through hoops to engage them. A lecture is an opportunity for students to hear from an expert about a topic that should be of interest to them. Of course teachers should strive to present information in a way that's accessible and captivating, but even the driest lecture is no excuse to space out. It is not really feasible to compete for students' attention with the information equivalent of junk food while presenting and explaining serious, in-depth material.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
How about teaching students not to distract themselves? I am serious about it. Students are going to live and work with Internet and all distractions. They need this ability that like others it is learned and nurtured. I mean, something like this: http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Things-Done/170776-2.html http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Gett... There are lots of good programs out there. Today this knowledge is as important as Mathematics. Probably more important for some people. I have studied a lot in order to be able to work productively from home. It is very easy once you know lots of little things. I could scientifically proof to any person how much she destroys her productivity just multitasking, using very simple things, like video cameras(which everybody has in her phone) and paper, because I have studied the psychology that fools ourselves into believing we could watch facebook and a lecture at the same time. In my experience teaching people this works wonders. Without it, they are lost. They want something(get good grades, work with less effort), but they don't know how to do it. About a programming class without computers, I will fire the teacher whose idea is banning laptops instantly. I am engineer and program computers for a living, with experience teaching people. They are incompetent if they can't control students with computers. If they are so boring the students prefer to browse Internet in class, then the problem is the teacher, not the student.
- BruceIV 12y ago
  Programming lectures without laptops work great (though it may help for the lecturer has a laptop and can show examples). If you want the students to follow along, that's what lab section is for (at least where I did undergrad, most of the programming classes had one). I've TA'd some of those lab sections, and there are a shocking number of ways the students can fail to manage to follow along with the examples without extensive hand-holding. Which they absolutely should get, and which they absolutely need a computer for, but a lecture with dozens of students and a unit of theory to get through is not the time for it.
jseliger 12y ago
I banned laptops ages ago: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di... , and for reasons further described here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-brains-nicholar-carr/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-t... . I agree with the comments about lectures being bad (usually) and teachers needing to engage with students, but electronic distractions also make it harder for teachers to effectively engage. This is not meant to denigrate the posters in this thread, but I get the sense that most a) are different than the average student and b) have not been teachers. The second point in particular is important because people who have faced the challenges teachers face may have domain knowledge that non-teachers lack.
booruguru 12y ago
This kind of bullshit drives me crazy. If I chose to spend thousands of dollars so I can goof off during a lecture, that's my prerogative. I don't need some to dictate what's in my best interest. My PowerBook was a huge boon for me in college. I write far better notes with a laptop than with pen and paper. What's more, I was able to multitask in ways that are simply impossible without a computer. If I were to encounter a teacher arrogant enough to ban laptops from his presence, I would simply refuse to take any of his classes, even if they were mandatory. I would literally chose another school before leaving my laptop at home.
- adwf 12y ago
  It's not just about you though. In a lecture of 100+ people on laptops, you're bound to have plenty of distracting people browsing youtube, watching flashy videos or somesuch. That sort of thing can affect the people around you negatively. In that regard, it's hardly any different than asking the hall to be silent while the lecture is on, rather than everyone chatting out loud.
  - serge2k 12y ago
    I had a professor who just had a rule that people with laptops had to sit at the back. Worked fine.
    - adwf 12y ago
      That's not a bad idea. As long as you don't have the entire room filled with laptop users ;)
dredmorbius 12y ago
An aspect of this not covered: being present in the moment. The context is squatting (and physical training), but the lesson is the same: http://squatrx.blogspot.com/2008/12/being-present.html http://squatrx.blogspot.com/2008/12/being-present.html Multi-tasking seems to be the way most people nowadays operate, but it doesn't mean people are doing a better job at more things. It means they are addicted to multi-tasking and they are incapable of actually being present for longer than a few moments. Perhaps these people are better at transitioning from one thing to the next, but I wonder if that applies to disparate tasks - my guess is that it doesn't transfer itself particularly well to new, complex skills. Being able to say "no" to distraction is crucial to the ability to be "in the present". This isn't license to be an a-hole of course, just permission to say to yourself "I have many things I need to do, but I'm going to focus on this ONE THING right now".
stefan_kendall3 12y ago
I used class time mostly as a chance to VPN and work, for the scant amount of time I was actually in class. I did not give two shits about the lectures; the material is presented better in the book. Professors, from my perspective, were paid to administer tests.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Then you'd have no trouble skipping lectures altogether, and spending the time with your laptop in the library etc.

41 points by DLay 12y ago

I've seen issues in meetings with this too. It's great for follow-up to be typing notes in the meeting, but it takes a lot of discipline for it not to devolve, and it's tough on speakers to discuss when everyone else is heads down.

existencebox 12y ago
I personally would be absolutely hamstrung without a laptop in meetings. My own handwriting is notoriously messy (I am only to blame for not practicing it enough to be any good, but that's almost a tradeoff for working in front of a computer nearly 24/7) and FAR slower than typing. I'm also unable to use text editor style shortcuts,reformat after the fact for clarity, or readily keep track off/move around documents. I found the exact things they claimed happened to laptop note takers, being a 'zombie', to be what happened when I tried to take notes by hand. This also doesn't convince me when taken in concert that when aggressively pushed onto the "YOU MUST TAKE PHYSICAL NOTES WITH NO DISTRACTIONS" bandwagon for most of my primary schooling, which was, to put it lightly, less than successful. This overly rambly anecdote should serve to illustrate not that I think laptops are "the right answer", but getting rid of them unilaterally will really harm those who actually have learned to incorporate them into a useful workflow. Why not address some more root causes, e.g. why engagement is so low? Facebook doesn't "force" you to browse it, and maybe I'm acting snoody in this, but there are certainly classes that I wouldn't be caught playing my favorite video games during for the subject matter being so interesting.
- DanBC 12y ago
  The people in the meeting should be participating in the meeting. The meeting needs a fast and accurate note taker to shorthand or type what everyone is saying and distribute those notes. That leaves you free to make the important notes and mark your action points. (This can be paper or laptop).
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Is the optimal situation where everyone can see what the note-taker is writing? Has anyone done this? To stay engaged, I've used the scrawl now and type later method, which means the notes never get out early enough. They do allow me to reflect on them though.
- Htsthbjig 12y ago
  The problem with laptops is keyboard noise. Compare note taking with keyboard typing in a class with several dozen people and you will see noise is a big problem if you are the teacher. I personally believe the best solution is audio record anything the teacher says, automatically transcribe it and just draw diagrams and stuff. But it will take some time before people start doing it.
  - existencebox 12y ago
    I realize this is one of the "better" examples, but it's certainly close to home for HN, but would you really argue that recorded audio and drawn diagrams are more useful for CS/algorithms courses than some typed snippets and pseudocode? That was at least where having a laptop in class really paid off for me.
    - BruceIV 12y ago
      Different people process information differently; for me seeing an abstract diagram of say, a B-Tree, would be more useful than a pseudo-code overview of the structure (at least first - the code might be useful once I had an grasp of the idea from the diagram). That's just me, though, different people learn differently.

lukejduncan 12y ago

How about banning classrooms in favor of laptops? Hyperbole sure, but I was an on class student who paid for distance learning because I preferred the freedom to take the class on my time, on 2x speed, and with the ability to pause and look things up. It was never worth it to go back to class. It begs the question: maybe it's the teaching method, and not the tool.

neltnerb 12y ago
From the article: "These examples can be seen as the progeny of an ill-conceived union of twenty-first-century tools (computers, tablets, smartphones) with nineteenth-century modalities (lectures)."
blueskymike 12y ago
Couldn't agree more. Just because someone lectures about something doesn't mean it will stick in my head. Banning laptops is not he solution.

greglo 12y ago

Anecdotally fits in with my experience. I always sat at the back off the lecture theatre (but its only 20 rows deep), and the people with laptops were almost always doing something other than paying full attention to the lecturer. I used to leave my phone in my dorm lest I end up checking out a tech blog and be completely lost of the rest of the lecture

jawns 12y ago

In the lower grades, I think a case can be made that during the time they are in class, students should not have any other demands on their time. In contrast, with college students, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that -- at least occasionally -- a student may need to "check out" from a lecture momentarily to deal with some pressing business, even if it means that he has to spend time later asking a classmate to fill him in on what he missed. For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away. This is all the sort of stuff I encounter regularly in the working world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that college students encounter it, too. Being able to keep open a laptop to deal with things like this is a lot less distracting than having to step outside the lecture hall to take an urgent phone call. Yes, putting away the laptops might slightly increase students' abilities to soak up the material, but (sorry, professors) sometimes the class you're sitting in is not your top priority, and sometimes that's OK. I occasionally had to skip class to chase down a hot story for the school newspaper, and I don't regret it a bit. So long as the student is using the privilege responsibly, I say let 'em keep the laptop open!

akuma73 12y ago
That's what your phone is for.
- vlunkr 12y ago
  I had a couple of professors that didn't allow cell phone use in their classes, and it was annoying, for all the reasons the original poster listed. I can understand not letting high school students use phones, but in college you are an adult with sometimes conflicting responsibilities.
  - jcromartie 12y ago
    That's a non sequitur. If an emergency comes up, and your phone rings, you leave the room and answer it.

akrolsmir 12y ago

UC Berkeley student here; laptop bannings are actually relatively common in lectures. I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away. A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002254 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...

canthonytucci 12y ago
> A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material. If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office. Full disclosure, I only skimmed this paper, but I'd say this study has very little in common with the actual scenario of a good professor giving a stimulating lecture. People learn and take notes differently, students should be granted the respect to do whatever works best for them, professors' egos be damned. EDIT: Not to mention these students are paying customers....if they choose to waste their time in class, that's up to them.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office. Yes, open offices are a terrible idea because many people lose a lot of their productivity in those distracting environments.
bsilvereagle 12y ago
> I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away. I had a professor that would make the student using the laptop come up to the front of the room and finish giving the lecture. He said he picked it up from Nabokov.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

Not that laptops in the classroom are the solution, but in general we need to change the teaching strategy in lower and higher education any way. We need high-tech, 2014+ ready educational facilities, curricula and teaching strategies. Laptops can certainly be distracting but trying to maintain the status quo isn't going to benefit anyone.

BruceIV 12y ago
Do you have some concrete suggestions? I personally think that the place for high-tech solutions is for homework and maybe lab sections, not disrupting lectures.

slightlycuban 12y ago

So, I could get on my soapbox of "your students are adults, let them make their own decisions on note taking" or go on about how useful I found a calendar for remembering class schedules, but: > We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low. Really? I found it fairly easy to type out full equations in LaTeX using LyX. Maybe the laptop isn't the problem, but that you only introduce your students to the most basic of word processors.

dangoldin 12y ago

My mom's a music teacher and this reminded me of a letter she wrote to the local newspaper after discovering they want to buy more computers for the classroom. Here goes: I'm not denying that I am hopelessly old and outdated, but reading the article on Technology Needs for School District (May 15, 2014) literally made me cry; for two reasons. First, because the people who are in charge of education are actually going to do it, and second, that the Livingston parent community is so enthusiastic about it. There is no doubt that computers are useful and that the Internet gives access to such a scope of information so quickly that is not available nor accessible through any other means. But how do they impact children's overall DEVELOPMENT? How do they impact their attention? With the pandemic of Attention Deficit Disorder, how can we be so blind not to notice the connection between children's attention span and the time they spend on the computer? I started teaching piano more than 30 years ago. EVERY child was capable to remember which note he had to play, with which finger, how to hold the finger and whether he had to play long or short, loud or soft - simultaneously. Now it is typical that when a child pays attention to what note it is, he does not notice which finger; if he remembers the finger – does not notice how loud, etc. I rarely see children that can actually focus on the task for longer than 20 seconds. I often ask parents, “How much time does your child spend on the computer?” The connection is direct: the less time on computer – the better the student's focus, the longer she can concentrate on the assignment. I happened to teach an elderly lady who brought a music book with her teacher's remarks dated 1958. She was nervous, “Will you quit on me? I forgot everything.” I answered (only half-jokingly), “Of course not, you are my only student with a normal attention span!” Even though I observe 400+ students in my music school, can it be just coincidence? What does the beloved Internet tell us about the impact of computer use has on the brain? Nothing encouraging. As an example, there is a student work in biology (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336 http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336, 2007) that summarizes finding on the topic. It states what I suspected: computers often conflict with the activities that are needed for one to develop the ability to pay attention; the list of scientific works is attached there. And if you still like long books, N. Carr addresses the issue in his “The Shallows: What Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” What are we doing? Are we trying to compensate for having poor teachers with technology? Why do we adhere to such a naive belief that computers are the solution to problems in schools, thinking that “the more of them - the better” automatically? Maybe it's better to invest in teachers' training? Maybe we need to raise the prestige of the teaching profession? I participated in a “professional orientation” day in LHS several years ago. Seniors had an opportunity to meet with representatives of their prospective field. I saw crowds of seniors following “Lawyers” and “Accountants”. In the “Teachers” room, a retired Harrison school teacher and myself, who were assigned to lead the meeting, found 4 or 5 girls. Only one of them really wanted to be a teacher, knew what is involved and why she wanted it. Everyone else said, “I do not know”, “I am not sure”.. . Why do we expect our children will be enthusiastic about learning if teachers themselves “do not know”?.. And how computers can help? The more that children use computers, the less opportunities they have for human interaction.  By increasing the role of computers in children's lives we bend human nature, we consciously under-develop the younger generation; we deprive our children of full development of their communication skills, ability to build relationships, and their creativity. We are raising USERS, not CREATORS. We are increasing the distance between those who are capable to make discoveries and those who can chose from pre-made options; between people who can see the beauty of the world and those for whom the world is limited by the rectangle of the screen.

BruceIV 12y ago

One of the side points the author raised was interesting: namely, that there's a lack of good tooling for taking mathematical-notation heavy notes efficiently on laptop ... maybe some sort of Markdown with inline LaTeX (plain LaTeX is too much of a hassle to do paragraph/list formatting in). It shouldn't be technically difficult to build, it just oddly doesn't seem to exist yet.

lartoa 12y ago
In my experience, LaTeX is not really a worthy alternative to writing formulas by hand. Sure, you should absolutely use LaTeX for typesetting mathematical reports and the like, but LaTeX does not stand a chance against pen and paper when it comes to taking notes or doing calculations. The world needs tooling that is much more similar to writing formulas on a paper in its interface. At the moment, I also fail to see any benefit at all in using laptops in mathematics education.

nlawalker 12y ago

If instructors really wanted to raise the quality of their classroom environments, instead of banning laptops, they'd commit to posting all their lectures, slides and announcements online and tell students that if they don't want to be there in person that they don't need to be. Many people don't see the point in being physically present to hear someone talk and point at slides. Those that do, and aren't just attending because you might spring a surprise announcement or pop quiz on them, will be there to pay attention.

BruceIV 12y ago
Because a good lecturer will do more than just read off his or her slides, and if they tell students the slides will be available than many of them won't show up, and will miss out good material. Video-recording the lectures is another thing entirely, but if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises. (I do realize that there are lots of horrible lecturers out there who do nothing more than read off the PowerPoint that comes with the textbook, but I think the correct approach to that is to re-work the tenure system to promote good lecturers as well as good researchers, not abolish lectures.)
- watwut 12y ago
  On the other hand, video can be stopped, rewinded and you have more time to think about the question and find the answer by yourself.
  - ghkbrew 12y ago
    Or played at 1.5x speed. One of the problems with lectures is that they tend to be geared towards the lowest common denominator. The great thing about the few of my college courses that provided online lectures was that I could go through them at my own pace and not be bored out of my mind for 90min of a 2hr lecture.
- nlawalker 12y ago
  >> if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises. I strongly disagree. Many lectures aren't structured to include or allow these activities, and many students don't need or want to participate in them. Those students are the ones who sit behind their laptops the whole period, and everyone would be better served if they didn't have to come to lecture in person.

juliendorra 12y ago

Socrates would have us ban note taking completely, because writing is a distraction and limit our ability to use our memory.

arjie 12y ago
This is so true for me though. I've discovered that I learn more when I'm not taking notes. Especially in Maths or CS where classrooms are great for building intuition or easing into a subject but textbooks are ubiquitous and easy to read. Copying down a proof doesn't help me at all but doing it along with a professor (each mental step is easy to hold on to) gives me so much better results. I imagine that I'm not the only such one.

vlunkr 12y ago

College students are adults, why don't we let them decide how they use their class time. If someone wants to pay to go to a university just to waste class time on a computer, that's their loss. For others, note taking on a laptop might be more efficient. Personally, I have terrible handwriting and would prefer to take notes digitally. If someone is seriously distracting people around them, then it makes sense to tell them to put their laptop away

specialk 12y ago

Personally from my college experience I know that I have used my laptop in lectures for both good and evil. I have legitimately used it to google work, ideas and to open tabs on papers/etc. to read later. I also used to write code in all my programming lectures because programming lectures were dull otherwise, might as well make use of the time. However, there are many times I have opened up reddit or HN during lectures and 'checked-out' as the article suggested. Sometimes I have paid for not listening to the lecture but the majority of the time it doesn't matter. The idea that I learned my college curriculum in lectures would be a joke. As a computer science student I learnt my trade in the labs and tutorials and interactive courses rarely from listening to a lecturer explain X, Y or Z. The better the lecturer or the harder the module the more laptops that were closed in my lectures. My compiler design course for example, infamous for being the most difficult module no one dared open the laptop as there was too much knowledge to consume. Lecturers can easily do a self-assessment survey of how engaged their class is and how interestingly they are presenting their material but how many heads are hidden behind laptop screens. For the one lecturer who did ban laptops I have to say I went to absolutely none of his lectures unless I had coursework to submit. I found it a bit presumptuous that he could demand I close my laptop, I was not distracting him or disturbing the class. You don't learn in lectures where lecturers read their slides to you laptop open or not. If the lecturers are going to waste my time with pointless reading of slides then I might as well do something useful on my laptop like my coursework or just read hacker news.

spodek 12y ago

> "A wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed." The problem is the lecture! Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing rarely engages anyone -- push students away from material they don't care about. If students are engaged and laptops impede them, they'll put them away themselves. If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than being lectured at will make them care. If you have to ban something, ban the lecture and teachers who rely on lecturing at the expense of empathy and compassion for students. Students are people like you and me. We use laptops in our work when they help and put them away when they don't. If we want students to learn about the world and how to succeed in it, let them work like we work, solving problems like we solve. Experiential, project-based learning does this automatically, at least with effective teachers. Lecturing doesn't. If you had a job you couldn't quit where your manager lectured at you all the time you'd get out your computer too. HN just had a thread -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 -- on the problems with lectures based on a Science Magazine article, "Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds.” Here is my blog post with related notes from that thread -- "Why I avoid lecturing when I lead and teach" http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach

iak8god 12y ago
> Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing will rarely engage anyone -- are the problem ... If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than you droning on in front of them will make them care. University students who have no interest in a course's material have no business being enrolled in that course. These are adults who are there voluntarily, and should be expected to participate in their own education without instructors jumping through hoops to engage them. A lecture is an opportunity for students to hear from an expert about a topic that should be of interest to them. Of course teachers should strive to present information in a way that's accessible and captivating, but even the driest lecture is no excuse to space out. It is not really feasible to compete for students' attention with the information equivalent of junk food while presenting and explaining serious, in-depth material.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

How about teaching students not to distract themselves? I am serious about it. Students are going to live and work with Internet and all distractions. They need this ability that like others it is learned and nurtured. I mean, something like this: http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Things-Done/170776-2.html http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Gett... There are lots of good programs out there. Today this knowledge is as important as Mathematics. Probably more important for some people. I have studied a lot in order to be able to work productively from home. It is very easy once you know lots of little things. I could scientifically proof to any person how much she destroys her productivity just multitasking, using very simple things, like video cameras(which everybody has in her phone) and paper, because I have studied the psychology that fools ourselves into believing we could watch facebook and a lecture at the same time. In my experience teaching people this works wonders. Without it, they are lost. They want something(get good grades, work with less effort), but they don't know how to do it. About a programming class without computers, I will fire the teacher whose idea is banning laptops instantly. I am engineer and program computers for a living, with experience teaching people. They are incompetent if they can't control students with computers. If they are so boring the students prefer to browse Internet in class, then the problem is the teacher, not the student.

BruceIV 12y ago
Programming lectures without laptops work great (though it may help for the lecturer has a laptop and can show examples). If you want the students to follow along, that's what lab section is for (at least where I did undergrad, most of the programming classes had one). I've TA'd some of those lab sections, and there are a shocking number of ways the students can fail to manage to follow along with the examples without extensive hand-holding. Which they absolutely should get, and which they absolutely need a computer for, but a lecture with dozens of students and a unit of theory to get through is not the time for it.

jseliger 12y ago

I banned laptops ages ago: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di... , and for reasons further described here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-brains-nicholar-carr/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-t... . I agree with the comments about lectures being bad (usually) and teachers needing to engage with students, but electronic distractions also make it harder for teachers to effectively engage. This is not meant to denigrate the posters in this thread, but I get the sense that most a) are different than the average student and b) have not been teachers. The second point in particular is important because people who have faced the challenges teachers face may have domain knowledge that non-teachers lack.

booruguru 12y ago

This kind of bullshit drives me crazy. If I chose to spend thousands of dollars so I can goof off during a lecture, that's my prerogative. I don't need some to dictate what's in my best interest. My PowerBook was a huge boon for me in college. I write far better notes with a laptop than with pen and paper. What's more, I was able to multitask in ways that are simply impossible without a computer. If I were to encounter a teacher arrogant enough to ban laptops from his presence, I would simply refuse to take any of his classes, even if they were mandatory. I would literally chose another school before leaving my laptop at home.

adwf 12y ago
It's not just about you though. In a lecture of 100+ people on laptops, you're bound to have plenty of distracting people browsing youtube, watching flashy videos or somesuch. That sort of thing can affect the people around you negatively. In that regard, it's hardly any different than asking the hall to be silent while the lecture is on, rather than everyone chatting out loud.
- serge2k 12y ago
  I had a professor who just had a rule that people with laptops had to sit at the back. Worked fine.
  - adwf 12y ago
    That's not a bad idea. As long as you don't have the entire room filled with laptop users ;)

dredmorbius 12y ago

An aspect of this not covered: being present in the moment. The context is squatting (and physical training), but the lesson is the same: http://squatrx.blogspot.com/2008/12/being-present.html http://squatrx.blogspot.com/2008/12/being-present.html Multi-tasking seems to be the way most people nowadays operate, but it doesn't mean people are doing a better job at more things. It means they are addicted to multi-tasking and they are incapable of actually being present for longer than a few moments. Perhaps these people are better at transitioning from one thing to the next, but I wonder if that applies to disparate tasks - my guess is that it doesn't transfer itself particularly well to new, complex skills. Being able to say "no" to distraction is crucial to the ability to be "in the present". This isn't license to be an a-hole of course, just permission to say to yourself "I have many things I need to do, but I'm going to focus on this ONE THING right now".

stefan_kendall3 12y ago

I used class time mostly as a chance to VPN and work, for the scant amount of time I was actually in class. I did not give two shits about the lectures; the material is presented better in the book. Professors, from my perspective, were paid to administer tests.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Then you'd have no trouble skipping lectures altogether, and spending the time with your laptop in the library etc.