Like a growing number of college students, Michelle Mei brings her laptop to most of her classes at Bentley College, using it instead of a spiral notebook to take notes.
Well, sometimes she takes notes — if whatever the professor is going on about seems important. At other times, she uses the wireless Internet access in the college’s classrooms to do some online shopping or chat using instant messenger. “If it’s material that I know, most of the time I will surf the Internet a little bit,” says Ms. Mei, a junior.
Professors worry that as wireless networks and laptops become ubiquitous, students will direct about as much attention to the front of the room as airline passengers do to a flight attendant reviewing safety information.
“You’ll say something, and you’ll see these chuckles from a couple of people,” says Norman A. Garrett, a professor of computer-information systems at Eastern Illinois University’s business school. And that leaves him wondering. “Is what I said funny, or are they not even in the same universe as I’m in because they’re looking at the Internet?”
To keep students focused on class, some professors now ban laptops from their classrooms, arguing that the devices are just too much of a temptation. Other professors ask laptop users to sit in the front row, in part so the professors can glance down occasionally to see what is on the students’ screens. And a few colleges, Bentley among them, have set up systems that let professors switch off classroom Internet access during some sessions.
Such measures come after colleges nationwide have spent millions of dollars equipping classrooms with Internet access — and most recently with wireless-Internet nodes.
Many students dislike the restrictions, arguing that people raised in the era of multitasking can balance Internet use and classroom participation. Even some professors feel that banning laptops is wrong, and that students need to learn for themselves how to juggle online and offline worlds, since students are likely to carry those same laptops into corporate environments in the future.
Of course, professors also point to moments when having laptops and Internet access has helped illustrate a crucial point in a lecture. The trick, they say, is figuring out how to manage the new technology.
Banning Laptops
An incident at the University of Memphis recently brought national attention to the practice of banning laptops.
June Entman, a law professor at the university, forbade students from bringing their computers to her civil-procedure class this spring, arguing that the devices were literally getting in the way of learning. In an e-mail message she sent to the students explaining the ban, she said that when students in the auditorium had their laptop lids open, she could not make eye contact with them.
“The wall of vertical screens keeps me from seeing many of your faces, even those of some students who are only neighbors of a laptop,” she wrote. “The wall hampers the flow of discussion between me and the class and among the students. Also, by giving students a sense of anonymity, many are encouraged to feel that they are present merely to listen in.”
The law students objected. Some of them signed a petition against the policy and even filed a complaint with the American Bar Association, arguing that they were being denied an up-to-date education. Although the association dismissed the complaint, the quirky classroom battle caught the attention of the national media and bloggers.
In a statement to The Chronicle, Ms. Entman expressed frustration over the level of attention her move sparked, noting that many professors ban laptops. “During [the] brouhaha about the matter, I heard from law professors at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, Widener, and Pace who have also banned laptops for much the same reasons. One had done so three years ago,” Ms. Entman wrote. She said that newspaper accounts “blew the events all out of proportion.” She declined to comment further.
Ms. Entman is hardly alone in wishing that students would stop using laptops in class, or in trying to make such a wish come true.
Douglas Haneline, a professor of English at Ferris State University, tells his students that they cannot turn on their computers or cellphones in his classes.
“It’s a matter of class consideration and of not disrupting the learning environment,” he says. “I want to arrange it so there are as few distractions as possible.” He says he tries to use humor when explaining his ban on laptops and on cellphones: “If you’re not careful, suddenly you can be a bald-headed old man standing at the front of the room pounding on the table ... railing against the modern world.”
Andrew B. Aylesworth, an associate professor of marketing at Bentley, says that even though the college for years has required students to buy laptops, this academic year was the first time he saw a critical mass of students use their machines during classes.
“They claim that they’re taking notes — and they may well be,” he says. “But it still is annoying.”
Now he frequently tells students to close their laptops, joking that the class session will be “old school.”
“A couple of them have said, ‘I don’t have any paper,’” says Mr. Aylesworth. He had them borrow some from classmates.
Other professors argue against banning laptops, saying the quality of instruction is to blame if students are seeking distraction online. “The laptop isn’t the problem,” says Dan Weiss, associate director of instructional technology at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, in Los Angeles. “It’s teachers who refuse to engage students well enough and who don’t set proper boundaries as to what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in their classroom.”
Internet Kill Switch
Attempting to use technology to help find a middle ground, officials at Bentley College set up an on/off switch for Internet access in each classroom. Called the “classroom network control system,” it allows professors in many classrooms to choose one of five settings: turn off Internet access but allow e-mail access, turn off e-mail access but allow Internet access, disable Internet and e-mail access but allow computers to reach campus Web pages, shut off all access, or allow all access. A computer at the front of the classroom lets the professor change the settings at any time.
“Every time I give a tour, it clicks, and people say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s exactly what we need,’” says Phillip G. Knutel, director of academic technology, library, and research services at Bentley, who helped set up the system. “It became obvious when the Internet became more popular in the mid-90s, we had to figure out a way to rein it in.”
The system has been in place for over five years for wired Internet connections in Bentley classrooms. But it was not until this fall that officials figured out how to use the system to shut off wireless as well. Doing so is trickier because even if one professor turns off Internet access in his classroom, students might still pick up signals from nearby classrooms in which access has not been disabled.
“I had said, We will never be able to address this issue because of bleed,” says Mr. Knutel. “But we’ve got it working. I don’t know of any complaints.”
Mr. Aylesworth says he appreciates having the option, which he is not shy about using. “I cut off access in the middle of class because I got so frustrated with the students at one point,” he says.
On a recent afternoon, Monica J. Garfield, an assistant professor of computer-information systems, switched off Internet access in her classroom while students took the final exam — which involved using their laptops to solve problems. Students at the college are required to buy laptops, and Ms. Garfield had asked them to bring their machines to class that day.
The test was open book, but Ms. Garfield wanted to make sure students were not using Instant Messenger or other Internet tools to give each other the answers.
“It’s not open partner, not open e-mail, not open IM,” she told the students.
Before switching off the Internet, Ms. Garfield allowed students to get online to download the exam, which she had made available through the college’s course-management system. “Go ahead and download it, and then I’m going to disconnect again,” she said.
The network-control system appeared to work well, and the students sat intently working on the test. One even had an old-fashioned pen pushed behind his ear, which he occasionally used to jot notes in a paper notebook.
But just down the hall, where another computer-science class was having an exam, the system was not performing as smoothly.
Mark E. Frydenberg, a senior lecturer in computer information systems, was having trouble getting the system to allow students to get to the campus course-management system to take his computerized exam, while disabling off-campus network access. In the end, Mr. Frydenberg left all Internet access on, though students seemed to be focusing on their exams without seeking out help elsewhere on the Internet.
Students say that many professors use the system, and that it generally does work. But they would rather that Internet access be left on as much as possible.
“It shows they trust the students,” says Nusrat Mahmud, a sophomore. “It’s the students’ responsibility” to keep up with the course material, she adds.
“I do like to have the option” of surfing the Internet in class, says Jenna Arnold, a sophomore. But she does admit that “if they turn it off, it does make more people pay attention.”
Concerned About Distractions
Kenneth G. Brown, associate professor at the University of Iowa’s business school, recently asked the technology staff there to install an Internet kill switch in classrooms.
“I don’t want to ban laptops across the board because increasingly we have a lot of students who are using laptops to take notes, and they seem to get some real advantage out of that,” he says. But he says he is concerned about the distractions the Internet can allow.
“Even in my larger classes in lecture halls, I am very sensitive to whether people are paying attention, and I use that information for whether I speed up, slow down, or offer another example,” he says.
He would ask a student reading a newspaper to put it down, he says, but he has no way of knowing whether a student with a laptop is taking notes or reading an online paper. “As more and more laptops come in,” he says, “I’d like to have the ability to have the same level of control that I have over people reading the newspapers.”
Even Ms. Entman, the professor at the University of Memphis who gained publicity for banning laptops, says she initially asked campus technology officials to give her some way to shut off Internet access. “Before reaching my decision to eliminate laptops entirely, I tried to get the WiFi turned off on the third floor of the law building,” she wrote in explaining her policy to students. “I was unsuccessful in securing the cooperation of those on campus who control the system.”
When the idea of installing a classroom network-control system came up at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, officials also decided against it.
“I’d say banning laptops or shutting off wireless on demand is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Brian D. Voss, chief information officer at the university. “Both are draconian solutions to a problem that requires something a bit more diplomatic.”
Instead, the university is encouraging professors to come up with their own policies for classroom computer use. A draft report of the university’s new “Flagship IT Strategy” noted that “Students should remain able to use technology, as appropriate, to gain clarity or research class content in more depth.”
“I actually think taking notes on laptops is a great idea if you’re a student because you have it in a form that’s so easy to work with,” says E. William Wischusen, a member of a committee drafting the IT strategy and an associate professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State. “This is something we need to work through. We need to think of policies that make sense.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 52, Issue 39, Page A27
