The issue: Three editorial board members share their viewpoints on whether or not students should have their laptops in class.
In a scene from National Lampoon's Animal House, Professor Jennings tries to take undergraduates through the intricacies of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Multiple student distractions are displayed. Jennings, dismayed, pleads “I’m not joking! This is my job!”
Yet the student distractions are those of 1962. Grip exercisers and doodling on notepaper are the co-culprits here. The bottom line is that just as the sun rises in the east, students will occasionally be, even in the best teaching circumstances, bored and distracted.
I say co-culprits because technology is a still-debated sharing of agency between human and artifact. I could blame distraction today on laptops and smartphones. Assuming they are the culprits, I could try to ban them from my class. But just as I do not go to the Outer Banks to try and fight the incoming tide with a bucket, I have no interest in fighting our relatively new dominant technologies with my official power to run a class however, within reason, I want.
Socrates aired a famous beef with technology, only this technology was writing. He believed that the exteriorization of memory and thinking to the page would destroy the oral culture that had made Greece a pinnacle of civilization before he quaffed his rather stiff last drink. Yet civilization went on in the fits and starts of progress that it normally entails.
There are as many classroom policies on technology as there are instructors. As a student, whether you think you have an absolute right to your personal devices, or you hate other students using them, the macro lesson in dealing with these variant policies is this: the university is among other things training for a collaborative workplace. Policies on devices will be as various as bosses, and part of your education is adaptation to what technological resources are favored or banned. (Hint: Private email servers, Republican or Democrat, maybe not a good workplace idea.)
What I would warn, after decades in the audio/visual industry, is that all technology fails at one time or another. If it fails on you, there had better be something in your head to carry you through that supremely awkward moment where the PowerPoint is not happening.
I try to use the presence of the cloud brain to the advantage of my class. If I am fuzzy on a date or statistic, I ask my students to look it up and announce it. I allow them to use devices to do presentations and debates, but do not require devices: you can go old-school rhetoric if you want. Required notes can be typed or written on notepaper. As long as you are not chuckling over a Vine compilation out loud or distracting others, if you waste your own time in our course, it is not the instructor's money and time at stake.
Just don’t blame your instructors when your boss asks who the most interesting character in Paradise Lost was and you don’t know (Freebie: According to Jennings, it is Satan).
