Laptops: A College Essential, But for Class?
Professors debate whether laptops are a help or hindrance in the classroom
Mini-fridge? Check.
Book bag? Check.
Spiral bound noteb … er, uh … laptop? Check.
A luxury item less than a decade ago, the laptop computer is perhaps the most essential item a college freshman will pack-up when headed off to school.
And for good reason: Word processors ease paper writing, access to e-mail and instant messages connect family and friends, and the World Wide Web is a library of unprecedented scope and size.
But when freshmen settle in for their first lecture, their professor may demand the unimagined: leave your laptop in your bag.
Laptop computers and wireless Internet access have revolutionized education, just not entirely as anticipated.
"Laptops are often an attractive nuisance," says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Cole wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post this April about the negative impact of laptops on classroom learning.
Note taking has become stenography and e-mail, IM, and the Web are irresistible distractions, he argues.
Cole outlawed laptops from his classroom this year to positive results: About 80 percent of his students reported in an anonymous survey that they were more engaged when laptop-free.
"When I wrote that op-ed, I got hundreds of e-mails from people, probably about 98 percent of which were positive from students saying that was their experience – that laptops were very distracting in the classroom," Cole says.
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Interactive Class
But in some classes, students will miss out if they leave their laptop in the dorm.
Christian Jernstedt, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, relies on Internet-connected laptops to keep his lectures hopping along.
He pioneered a system – originally with hand-held computers – that uses the college's wireless network to pose interactive questions to the entire class. Everyone answers on his or her laptop. The replies show up on an overhead display and prompt class discussion.
"The goal is to engage the student," Jernstedt says.
For example, when Jernstedt starts a unit on what stress does to the brain, he asks the students how frequently they feel stress in their lives.
"Most students are surprised to see how many other people feel like they do," he says. "And so that sort of question is, in a sense, a hook to what's coming."
And hooked students, he adds, are not tempted to toggle over to their Facebook profile or check e-mail.
"You don't have to think at all about what else they're doing because they're engaged in what's going on," he says.
Stephen Acker, a communications professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, encourages the use of laptops in his small, seminar-style courses.
Their use, he says, allow students to perform fact checks; find alternative points of view for discussion; and plug their machines into a projector for class presentations.
On occasion, he admits, students give in to the temptations of the Web – particularly if they are just using the machines to take notes. But the behavior, he says, is nothing new.
"In some sense, that is just a tangible representation of daydreaming, a wonderful escape from a non-engaging class session that always has been part and parcel of the student's defense mechanisms," he commented in an e-mail.
