The Teaching with Technology Tuesday for 26 October 2010 was held as a panel discussion, a different format for the CLC series. With the special sponsorship of the Graduate Teaching Center, we featured three graduate students discussing their views and policies on laptops in classes they have taught and sections they have led. Our moderator was Jennifer Frederick, Associate Director of the GTC. Our participants were Maureen Canavan from Epidemiology and Public Health, Michael Meadows from Italian, and Alexandra Seggerman from History of Art. (A photo of each is on the GTC site.)

Jennifer set the stage by noting the near- or seeming-ubiquity of laptops and other mobile computing devices in the student population and asked us to consider the pedagogical implications as well as how we can manage their use. First up was the strong con position, taken by Alex, partly on the basis of the distractive power of the network as well as the laptop as physical barrier between the instructor and student. For her there is also a distinct drawback of the rapidity with which students can take notes, resulting perhaps in word-level comprehension without any learning occurring on the part of the students. Michael took a more favorable view, arguing that students can use the network to fill in their knowledge gaps during class discussion or lecture. He acknowledged that some students engage in off-task activities but that this has not been a majority of his students or a majority of the time, and emphasized that the instructor bears the burden of teaching students how to integrate their laptops into the course appropriately. Finally, our middle ground was supported by Maureen, who tries to focus on and foreground the course or section goals for her students and incorporating (or forbidding) laptops as needed.

The bulk of the time was taken up by thoughtful back-and-forth with the audience (though the contributions suggested it was more a group of fellow participants).

One commenter noted that she really only interfaces with education through a laptop. That is, she loses paper notebooks, but always retains her computer and consequently makes better use of class notes on a laptop. Alex responded that she feels students would just the same learn better by taking fewer notes and digesting them after class, implying that paper note-taking acts as an automatic throttle on note-taking speed for most students. Maureen added that she also organizes her education better on a laptop, but that having them in a discussion section pushes the instructor to be a “hall monitor”.

Another brought up lecturecasting as a way to discourage students from feeling pressure to record every word from the instructor’s mouth during a lecture. This, he said, might make it easier to forbid laptops and encourage thoughtfulness during class time. Alex wondered why students would bother going to class in that case. Michael suggested that lecturecasting continues to foster the negative behavior of students trying to record everything that is said during a lecture. Maureen suggested that lecturecasting would end up not serving anyone, since most students would be unlikely to access the recorded lecture later.

The conversation quickly broadened into the role of the instructor in the classroom and the role of the traditional lecture in a Yale education. Participants commented on gaming the undergraduate educational system, on the long tradition of students not paying attention during lectures (reading newspapers, sleeping, thinking about other subjects), and on problematizing lectures in the contemporary environment of multiple alternate avenues to much of the material shared in a lecture. We didn’t solve the problem, but it can be hoped that participants left considering how they will organize their teaching and learning efforts differently in the future.

Ken Panko asked for some closing comments from Michael Farina, an Italian instructor known for frequent and affirmative use of the network in his courses. He strongly feels that it is not an instructor’s responsibility to police students. Rather, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make the class engaging, to ask students to close laptops if there is a particular point in the class session that demands it, but also to encourage the students to take notes collaboratively, thereby contributing to other students’ learning and broadening their own.

Further reading:

• 50 Ways to Take Notes (note: the piece is from 2006, so some of the referenced tools are likely dead)
• ProfHacker post on teaching with Twitter
• 2004 EDUCAUSE Quarterly study report on integrating laptops into a West Point course [PDF]
• Two blog posts from Inside Higher Ed bloggers: University Diaries and Technology and Learning
• 2003 article from the Journal of Computing in Higher Education on multitasking (or not) during a lecture. (Contradicting citations welcome!)

Participants should add corrections, correct mischaracterizations, and continue the conversation in the comments below.