There’s been a lot of buzz in academic circles about an article that the NY Times recently ran. No, not the Nazi one. This one: Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting. That’s right, academia is fighting about laptops again!

Cartoon from Dynarski’s NYT post, by Peter Arkle.

Susan Dynarski, the author of the article, explains that she bans laptops in all her classes (with a few exceptions). The research, she rightly notes, suggests that laptop use correlates to less learning and worse grades. It does tend to, from all the research we have on laptops.

And I share Dynarki’s main concern, that laptops can distract other students in the course. This is the biggest reason I have banned laptops in the past. I’ve been in classes where someone in front of me is shopping or looking at pictures or doing any number of other things that are unrelated to the class. It’s hard to focus when there are shiny distractions. Full disclosure: I’ve even been the student on the laptop playing video games when I should be paying attention. I discovered emulators in college, and learned that you can play Super NES games

I spent way too much class time beating this game. But I *did* beat it, for the record.

on a laptop. I beat Donkey Kong Country one semester when I should definitely have been taking notes instead of throwing barrels at things. I was wildly entertained when I would see people at a bar or an intramural sports game and they would ask me if I was that girl who was always playing Donkey Kong in class. But now that I’m on the other side of things, as a professor, I realize that my screwing off in class was hurting others’ ability to learn.

All that said, I don’t ban laptops any more. And I want to urge other educators not to either. The biggest reason for this is that some students need laptops because of a disability, and banning laptops across the board means that the only people who have laptops are students who need some sort of accommodation. Too bad if those students didn’t want to disclose their disability to the class — they don’t have a choice now!

Updating this post here, in light of some conversations I’ve had today. I want to note that I’m basing this objection on a lot of the lived experiences and objections of disabled students who have shared (often on Twitter) what it is like to be “outed” as disabled against their will. These are two of many many such accounts that show up if you search for “laptop” and “ableist” on Twitter. Just because I haven’t personally ever had a student approach me about how an ableist policy was negatively affecting them doesn’t mean that it didn’t negatively affect them. That’s a lot of my rationale for not banning laptops any more, even though I have in the past. I don’t want to put a student in this sort of position.

There’s another less overt but still important way that students “need” laptops in a class. We sometimes forget that not all students have the same preparation for our classes and sometimes they need to Google something. Hell, I need to Google things all the time at conferences. Usually I do, so I can follow the talk better, but I have years of academic life under my belt and I feel like I can do that (in certain times and places) and it’s worth any perceived rudeness for me to be able to understand the rest of the talk. Undergraduates who have been told NO LAPTOPS, NO PHONES don’t have that options. Wikipedia and the rest of the internet is a great equalizer for students who are not as academically or culturally conversant. When we take that away from them, we’re removing a tool they have to learn more in our classes.

And I’d be lying if I said that I don’t use a laptop when I’m in a setting where I want to take notes. I type much faster than I write, and I want a record I can return to later. Yes, I can write a near-transcript and don’t retain that information as well as I might if I had to synthesize what I was hearing and pull out the main points. But I have notes from classes I can still go back to even now, and they’re searchable and relatively permanent.

So, what to do about the clear problems surrounding laptops in the classroom?

I urge my students to be thoughtful users of technology. I tell them that I have a hard time not checking Facebook and email if I have my computer in front of me, and I suspect that it’s the same for them. I tell them that laptops can be distracting for their peers — I urge them to consider sitting to the side or the back of the classroom if they know they’re going to be a potential distraction. And I ask them to think about leaving their laptops at home, with the exception of classes where their laptops will be particularly helpful. I also tell them that if I hear from other students that their laptop use is distracting (I run a very pro-snitching classroom), we’ll revisit this policy.

In my experience, very few students bring their laptops to class after I ask this, and those who do are relatively well behaved. I’m sure they’re on Facebook or Twitter (or whatever the cooler social media thing is right now) from time to time, but if it isn’t distracting from anyone or anything else in the class, it’s not really my problem. When I explain to my students why and how laptops can be a problem, and I ask them to be thoughtful and considerate when using technology, they usually are. It turns out that telling students you trust them can encourage them to be trustworthy. If you treat students like they’re immature and in need of constant supervision, they might just live up to that too.

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1 reply added

  1. Harriet December 10, 2017 Reply

    Thanks for this post, Amy! In the past I’ve allowed laptops but ask students to turn off the wireless. Your point about Google/Wikipedia is something I’ll have to think about.

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