After Being Educated About Negative Effects, Students Stop Using Laptops In Class

from the education-works?-imagine-that! dept

A while back, we noted that some professors at my school, Georgetown, were joining the trend of banning laptops in classrooms, pointing out that it was probably a futile attempt to force students to pay attention -- distracted, disinterested students have been and always will be a fact of life. However, one professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder has decided to actually educate her students about why using laptops in classes is a bad choice. Diane Sieber noted which students used laptops the most and, after their test, informed them that they had done 11 percent worse than analog-only students. The number of laptop users dropped and their scores went up. While Professor Sieber could have just as easily banned laptops, by treating her students like capable adults, she has produced a win-win.

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Turning Off Internet In The Classroom Won't Make Lectures Any More Interesting

from the competing-for-attention dept

Just about two years ago, we wrote about some law professors who were threatening to ban computers in their classrooms because students just weren't paying attention. While some apparently did so, perhaps it wasn't enough, because as Slashdot points out, the University of Chicago's law school has now decided to pull the plug on classroom internet connections entirely, as a dean was upset at how many students were surfing the web during class. However, as we noted two years ago, this seems to say a lot more about the lecture quality than the internet access in the classroom. Especially when it comes to a graduate school-level class, where students are supposedly actually interested in the subject, if the professor can't keep the attention of the class, that should be a problem for the professor to deal with, rather than by cutting off internet access. Either way, with 3G wireless access (and eventually 4G) schools simply won't have control over internet access anyway. So, if these schools are really concerned about it, rather than cutting off the connection they do have control over, perhaps they should focus on making the lecture experience more worthwhile.

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