Banning Laptops from the Classroom
Today the Washington Post ran an article about college professors who ban laptops from their classroom. The article sparked a conversation among the digital humanities crowd on Twitter, some sympathizing with the ban, but most protesting. The debate reminded me of playing Trivial Pursuit this weekend.
Trivial Pursuit is ostensibly about your ability to recall facts—bits of trivia. But anyone who played with access to the internet would easily win. Which cities hosted the Summer Olympics? I don’t know, but Wikipedia does. If the game were really about recalling facts, it would be a complete waste of time. Any computer could play it better. Rather, the enjoyment of the game comes from the human element: gambling that you can remember one more fact, arguing whether a yeti is the same thing as the abominable snowman, laughing at what you consider obvious and your friends consider obscure (or vice versa).
My point is that education should be about teaching people to know and to do in ways that only humans can. This is especially true in the humanities. To be sure, computers are an extraordinarily useful tool for knowing and doing in human ways: the term digital humanities is not an oxymoron. But computers are not the only tool, nor are they always an essential tool. Discussing a book or a collection of primary texts, working through an argument, proving a theorem—these are parts of human learning for which a computer is usually not necessary and often may not be appropriate tool. When computers are a good tool for learning, by all means bring them into the classroom. But if education can happen without them, perhaps the laptop should take an excused absence.
For the laptop as a physical device is inherently distracting. The glowing screen of any computer demands attention over paper and even over other people. The vertical screens of laptops in particular erect a barrier between people in a discussion or a seminar or (far less desirably) in a lecture. Perhaps a device will be invented (Kindle? iPad? flexible e-Paper?) and made affordable enough to overcome these physical shortcomings of the laptop. But for now there isn’t such a device. In his recent TEDxNYED talk, Dan Cohen remarked, “We have to show precisely what the weaknesses of the old are … and we have to show how the new works better than the old.” Perhaps for many kinds of human education, our new technologies are not yet as useful as our old.
[Photo courtesy of Flickr user erik_found and available under a Creative Commons license.]
Personally, what I dislike about articles such as the recent one in the Washington Post is that they’re so simplistic. The subtext is LAPTOPS BAD, PROFESSORS AGREE. It’s just spreading FUD. That article made no mention of the possibility that students might do research during the lecture on points related to the lecture, for instance, perhaps even at the lecturer’s request.
March 10, 2010, 11:29 amAlso, why it it necessary to ban? There’s something so crotchety and disrespectful about that, and then you spend your time enforcing the ban. College students are grownups. There are plenty of times when I’ll say, in a class, something along the lines of “OK, laptops closed — pay attention to what I’m doing up here for a sec.” Pre-laptop, I used to do the same thing with pencil and paper note-taking. No autocratic banning necessary.