Via: TimesOnline.com
The perfect university lecture, it is sometimes said, involves the transmission of information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notebook without passing through the brain of either.
Now laptops are getting in the way of that time-honoured educational process. Lecturers in America, who once embraced the portable computer as an invaluable learning aide, are increasingly banning them from the classroom so that students are not tempted to update their Facebook page or play World of Warcraft when they should be listening.
Allan Rubin, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, banned laptops in his 120-strong class on natural disasters after discovering that some of the students were playing online poker during his lectures.
“What I found, and it was getting worse over the years, was that a larger and larger fraction of the students just had their heads buried in their laptops as I lectured,” he said.“I know from teaching assistants who were wandering around when the laptops were open that they were surfing the Web. They were playing poker with each other.
“When I lecture now, there is a sea of faces that are looking at me.”
Kieran Mullen, a science lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, went even farther by destroying a student’s laptop with liquid nitrogen, in a videotaped scene later broadcast on YouTube. Mr Mullen admits that the destroyed laptop was already broken and had been provided by a willing student — but he proved his point.
“Students in a large lecture class can be distracted by others watching movies, reading news websites and playing games on their laptops. I had warned students many times about not using their laptops during lecture,” he said.
“I am perfectly happy with students actually taking notes on their laptops in class. The demonstration did have the desired effect of improving student attention.”
Studies have found that “multitasking” actually impedes learning and that laptops distract not only the user but also those sitting near by.
Diane Sieber, who teaches humanities for engineers at the University of Colorado, says it is now clear that people who think they are multitasking are actually just being distracted from one task to another.
“They have shown this in studies of cellphones or texting in cars. We do not seem to know how distracted we are,” she said. “We are not multitasking. We are serialised interrupting. We are simply being interrupted.”
Ms Sieber allows laptops in her class despite what she calls the “cone of distraction” for students sitting behind someone with a laptop open.
“My students have agreed with each other in almost every class that people with laptops should move to the back of the class,” she said.
Some other professors have even considered establishing “laptop sections” in the lecture hall.
José Bowen, the dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” by giving up the use of computers in classes. Now that students can download lectures online, class time should be devoted to stimulating debate, he says.
He ordered all the computers to be removed from his school’s classrooms and is urging professors to stop using PowerPoint presentations.
David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, is so intent on commanding his students’ full attention that he also forbids them from taking notes — even with a pen.
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