Get your nose out of that screen and participate in the class

I'm adjunct faculty at the local campus of a state university and I think it may be time to consider what this guy has done.  He's banning laptops from his classroom.

Since most students can type very quickly, laptops encourage them to copy down nearly everything said in the classroom. But when students stare at the screen of their laptops, something is lost. The students shift from being intellectuals, listening to one another, to being customer-service representatives, taking down orders. Class is supposed to be a conversation, not an exercise in dictation. 

This is not just vague worrying on my part. There’s now good research on the topic. Take, for instance, a recent study by two psychologists, Pam Mueller at Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer at UCLA. Mueller and Oppenheimer asked 67 undergraduates to watch videos of lectures. Half the students were randomly assigned to watch the lectures while taking notes on a laptop, while the other students were asked to watch the lectures while taking notes with paper and pen. Afterward, the students were all given an exam. The students who took notes longhand scored much higher on conceptual questions than did the students who used a laptop.

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York Univeristy, recently asked his students to stop using laptops in class. Another recent study convinced him to do so. The title: “Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers.” A research team in Canada found that laptops in the classroom distracted not only the students who used them, but also students who sat nearby. Meaning, not only do the laptop-using students end up staring at Facebook, but the students behind them do, as well.

Both of those research studies suggest that, in the classroom, laptops actually hinder learning. And you don’t need a randomized-controlled study to know that.  It’s just hard to focus in front of a laptop. (I checked Twitter twice before finishing that sentence.) Everyone struggles to focus when the Internet is only a click away. So why bring that distraction into the classroom? 

There's the overarching issue of no one being present with one another in public spaces anymore due to the ubiquity of devices, but, more specifically, the issue professor Gross raises here - digestion, retention and synthesis of presented materials - has nagged me for some years now.  I can definitely tell by the contour of responses to essay questions on exams whether a student has full considered an idea we'd discussed in class, or had committed just enough keywords associated with it to hopefully sound knowledgeable enough to qualify for a B.

It's offensive to a lecturer who has spent hours preparing an evening's presentation.  Campus administrations may talk a good game about fostering community, but the reality on the ground is a focus on what's needed to skate through the whole experience of going to school and get the brass ring.