Clay Shirky, who teaches theory and practice of social media at New York University, has banned the use laptops, tablets and smartphones in his class.
Say what?
“The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow,” Shirky says.
I came late and reluctantly to this decision — I have been teaching classes about the internet since 1998, and I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom. This was partly because the subject of my classes made technology use feel organic, and when device use went well, it was great. Then there was the competitive aspect — it’s my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones — time management is their job, not mine.
Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time. The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of the classroom encounter. …
So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: “Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)”
Shirky notes that “multi-tasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.”
Ironically, using more and more technology is all the rage in lower ed these days. Unfortunately, some districts don’t roll out implementation properly, and the whole premise becomes a massive boondoggle.
Most of the technology in my own classroom has been used … by me (computer with high-def projection screens, Internet activities put on screen in front of room, for example). However, students occasionally can make use of the school’s laptops for research and translation purposes, and for smaller assignments they sometimes are permitted to use their smartphones for assistance with the latter.
h/t to Instapundit.
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