Laptop Bans by College Professors May Improve Class Discussions
Some professors at the nation’s most prominent law schools are
resorting to classroom laptop bans to help reengage law students in
lectures and discussions, and, despite students’ claims that the
anti-laptop policies deny them a proper education, professors are
seeing positive results, according to an article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education (“Law
Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class,” June 13,
2008).
Don Herzog, University of
Michigan Law School professor, conducted a one-day laptop ban as
an experiment.
“Not only was I stunned by how much better the class was, the
students volunteered that it was much better,” he said. Herzog will
make the ban permanent when he begins teaching again this fall after
completing his sabbatical.
In addition to Herzog, law professors at Florida International University,
the University of Wisconsin, Georgetown,
and Harvard, have
enacted laptop-ban policies for their classroom lectures.
David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown
University Law Center, stopped allowing his students to bring
laptops to class two years go. A survey of Cole’s students conducted
last year regarding his “no laptop” policy found that approximately
75 percent of his students favored the laptop ban and 95 percent
admitted to using the internet to engage in activities not related
to the class lecture.
“If half the people [in class] are checked out, then the
conversation just isn’t going to be as rich,” Cole said.
Not All Educators Agree with Anti-Laptop Policies
Ann Althouse, University of Wisconsin Law
School professor, says that there will always be distracted
students with or without the internet. Before the web, she says,
students doodled, fidgeted, or stared absentmindedly out the
window.
“The idea that we're going to somehow save these students from being
distracted is a bit absurd,” Althouse told the
Chronicle.
With the proliferation of iPhones, Blackberrys, and other
PDAs, it may soon be difficult to regulate who’s surfing the Web,
says Harvard Business School professor
John Deighton.
“Ultimately the only way to ensure that a class member is not on the
Web,” he says, “is to conduct an engaging class.”