One of our professional duties in my department is sitting in on colleagues’ classes and writing peer-reviews of their teaching. This is almost always a useful activity, and I usually learn a teaching trick or two that I might be able to use in my own classes.
This semester, though, while sitting in on these classes, I’ve seen student behavior that, if not new, seems to have crossed a threshold where it is more prevalent and undisguised than I’ve seen before.
Those students who, from the front of the classroom, look all industrious on their laptops? Were playing games on Facebook, checking their friends’ online photo albums, posting messages on what looked to be gaming discussion boards, checking TV listings (and possibly setting their DVRs remotely), buying shoes, scoping out concert tickets, watching a kung fu movie (with the sound muted), and checking in on online discussions for other classes. The one student who was using her laptop during lecture to complete peer reviews of classmates’ papers (for another class) seemed like the model of diligence.
All of this, I should note, was on the quarter of the laptops in the classroom that I could easily see from my seat near the edge of the classroom. I cannot report with any authority on what was happening on the other 75% of the computers that were in use. Maybe someone was actually using one of them to take notes on the lecture.
I will confess to some relief that none of the screens in my line of sight were being used to view pornography. Perhaps this means that students are not quite as brazen as they might be in the classroom. Or maybe a 7:30 am class is just too early for porn.
Anyway, my problem now is returning to my own classes, where a fair number of laptops are fired up every week, with the full confidence that all of those are being used to take notes, consult the course website, and so forth. If there were a button at the front of the room that could block wifi reception in the classroom, it would be pretty tempting to use it.
I was just discussing with a colleague the other day about these topics and to what extent the prof has a right to demand behavior in the classroom where the students are consumers. My argument was something like the students are not buying the time to do what they wish completely, they are buying the opportunity undertake a course of study. I guess I view it as when you rent a house there are house rules.
My other point was that I will ask for a certain level of attention and behavior, and if the students don’t give it then that is their loss, but when their behavior crosses over into disruptiveness or they complain about their inability to understand or they evaluate the course in an inappropriate way, which has consequences for my career, then I think it is OK to hammer them for even somewhat passive behavior. I will never bust someone for sleeping in class I have some that check out every lecture, but it can be demoralizing to all involved when a class folds or there is brazen behavior. Just sit in the back, people- or better yet, stay in bed!
The main lecture hall in the Physicum building at the University of Helsinki was shielded from mobile phone signals – I think it had a Faraday cage around it. I sometimes wonder if all lecture halls should have this protection.
This has become a real problem in my class this semester as well. In the past there were only a couple students goofing off on computers, and it wasn’t disruptive, but for some reason this year there are dozens.
Starting next semester I’m banning computer use in the class (unless they receive explicit permission from me). I have colleagues who’ve done this for years now; I’m finally forced to join their ranks.
My first inclination is to be as non-paternalistic a teacher as possible. I am, after all, trying to teach my students to be autonomous agents and critical thinkers, not to follow the dictates of yet another in a long line of authority figures. I do use grade-based incentives and occasional exhortations to encourage good-student behavior (doing the reading, meeting with the instructor for help on papers, coming to class and paying attention and participating in the discussion, &c.), but I try to avoid using disincentives against bad-student behavior (I don’t take attendance and specifically say that I won’t assign pop quizzes so long as the students are keeping up with the reading).
Plus, I personally like using a laptop rather than hard copies for most of my reading, and I save hundreds of sheets of paper every semester. Some of my students tell me they especially like being able to download my lecture slides and take notes right in the PDF file as I’m giving the lecture.
So I let my students use their laptops, as long as they’re not being disruptive when they’re not paying attention.
Of course, I teach at an elite private school for compliant overachievers. Next semester I’ll be teaching at a local public university. We’ll just have to see if the same attitude works there.
PS Glad to see you’re back to doing a little blogging!
I’ve seen this too. I have two different opinions about it. First, if students choose not to really pay attention, then they can’t complain later when they do poorly in the class (of course, if they can still do well that’s another problem). The second is that if the instructor allows students to bring laptops to class, they should be used for something related to the class – not just note taking. Perhaps using poll daddy to get feedback about topics that have been covered – sort of like Mazur’s peer instruction.
I think some paternalism is called for in this situation. The demands on attention are extreme and I think many students struggle with it. I think that there are too many factors that add up to attentional deficit- and given that many classes build upon concepts, if you lose students early they are toast later in the class.
I’ve had classes where I told the students to bring laptops to class every day. Of course, where I teach, the largest class is 20 people. So far here I’ve taught four classes, two with 19, one with 9, and currently another with 9. What’s more, the organization of the classroom is such that students know I will regularly be able to see their laptops. I often have them working on a problem in pairs or some such, and I’m wandering around the room. I do see the students using the laptops to use Wolfram Alpha as a calculator, by and large.
I don’t think I’m special or my students are special; if they thought I couldn’t see what they are doing, I’m sure they would be goofing off with their laptops more than they do. This would especially be true if I were lecturing and they didn’t have active things to do more.
In my current class, I asked them not to open their laptops, to avoid distraction. My first class, though, was a statistics class, and a *lot* of what we were doing was working with GNU R in class, so they needed their laptops every day.
I also know that if I were a student today, I’d be very annoyed either by a prohibition of having a laptop, or by a blockage of the Internet in class. I type faster than I write, so I might well want to take notes on my laptop.
I should also note that I’ve been at undergraduate thesis talks where one of the *faculty* members present (of just four) on the student’s committee was reading mail on *his* laptop. And we all have to admit that we’ve done stuff like that if we’ve had laptops at colloquia or faculty meetings. We do model the behavior, if perhaps not to the same extreme….
Don’t worry about the laptops being used to distract and certainly don’t ban the use of laptops. Back in the day when everyone had paper and pen were they all diligently taking notes? Or were they doodling and not paying attention? I’m sure there are students who use the laptop to take notes (I was one).
And remember the sea of open student newspapers in huge lecture halls? Hell, I even remember the ashtrays!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1253382/Physics-professor-destroys-student-laptop-liquid-nitrogen.html
You’re welcome!
The place where I get worried is similar to Pinko Punko: if the students aren’t paying attention (and yes, for some reason non-scholarly activity on laptops has been especially high this semester for me as well), but then they don’t do well on the material or miss something, I am the one who gets blamed and I am the one who gets bashed on evaluations. I don’t have tenure yet and I do a lot of radical stuff in the classroom, and I make my students work pretty hard. These things, along with being a young woman, already lead to pretty inappropriate comments on evaluations. So while I have worked hard to not be paternalistic over the years, this semester I have actually had to provide some sticks as well as carrots to improve my students’ professionalism in the classroom.
Doodling and looking out the window are definitely less attention requiring than the entire internet and active conversations/IMs/response to stimuli. There really isn’t a comparison. Looking out the window is like watching things on the side of the road while driving, doodling is like playing with the radio, the internet is like talking on the phone/reading a book/texting while driving. There is a huge difference.
yeah that is true, but the distractions are always going to be there. The students need to learn not to goof around when they should be working. If they aren’t failing a class because their laptop is banned I doubt they will learn how to retrain themselves; the lesson will most likely be delayed and they will just get fired for it somewhere, the consequences more serious. College students are way old enough to know better, really. They really don’t have anyone to blame but themselves, and no real excuse for behaving that way.
I wonder if their behavior would change if there were angled mirrors on the ceiling?
I am most pleased that I retired before there were laptops!
I can’t believe you didn’t realize that’s what they were all doing!
Back when I used to take humanities classes I’d sometimes bring my laptop in to take notes. But I’d end up “multitasking” and miss most of the lecture. In engineering I never bothered because you have to write down so many equations trying to get it into MSWord is annoying. But as a student, I hate when there’s a student in front of me goofing off b/c it’s distracting to me. I’ve had professors ask all those with laptops to go sit in the back, usually the students grumble about it but I think it’s fair.
Pinko Punko – I see what you are saying, but I think it’s been a constant for hundreds of years that kids do something else to avoid doing what they are “supposed” to do. Yes the internet might seem more damaging than TV or Radio, but the end result is the same. I never bring a laptop with me into lecture but in cases where I have to go to get something or some information at the end and don’t care to listen I have been known to draw and completely ignore the professor the whole time or pull out another book from another class and start doing other homework problems by hand. The effect is the same: me missing lecture.
From a personal standpoint I can breeze in and out of a lecture while daydreaming/nodding off, but not while my attention is entirely diverted. I feel like I can go from zero to positive attention but not from negative to positive, I think that some of my kids are the same way.
“I type faster than I write, so I might well want to take notes on my laptop.”
This encourages a court reporter-style of taking notes. Just record the lecture if that’s what you want. Good noting taking involves more than writing words- it involves a lot of circling, starring and underlining for emphasis, arrows back to an earlier point, diagrams, and so on. You will quickly develop your own shorthand. As the years go by you get faster and more efficient at doing this, and today’s students are getting no practice. I believe it all that helps with learning, and recall during studying.
As far as typing right on the pdf with the slides, it is easy to do this later from your notes, and a great way of going over the material.
And yes, printing out the pdf is wasteful, but so is running all those computers unnecessarily. Just bring a notebook and a mechanical pencil with a nice bold line-I like the .9mm lead- with a built-in eraser (around $5) and you’re set. Lighter to carry around, easy to review (excellent practice that will reduce your study time) whenever and wherever you get a moment.
“But as a student, I hate when there’s a student in front of me goofing off b/c it’s distracting to me. ”
Yes. It is extremely distracting when someone is using a computer in my line of sight, unless it’s a static screen, and even then the bright screen is annoying during a seminar when you are trying to focus on the speaker or slides. Obviously not all students will feel this way, but many will and do, and we also have an obligation to those students. It is now more difficult for *them* to pay attention. It also feels rude and disrespectful and lowers morale in the class in general.
> Good noting taking involves more than writing words- it
> involves a lot of circling, starring and underlining for
> emphasis, arrows back to an earlier point, diagrams, and so on.
This really depends on how you take notes and what sort of learner you are.
FrauTech wrote:
> But as a student, I hate when there’s a student in front of me goofing off b/c it’s distracting to me.
This is the big one for me. If a student wants to waste their own time, its one thing. They don’t even have to come on some days. But when they start preventing other students from learning, then its my responsibility as an instructor to do something about it.
The issue gets a little bit more subtle in classes that have a significant discussion/group work component. If we are discussing a journal article, then I expect that all of my students will be learning from what each other has to say. If some students are goofing off, they aren’t doing the work that other class members need them to do.
Or, if not block wifi, at least jigger the routers so they can’t access anything but university resources via wifi. That would be feasible, given the political will. (Now, excuse me while I fall down laughing at that last clause.)
Pinko Punko: some more points in favor of “house rules” are that Dr. Free-Ride’s institution, if not yours, is a state-subsidized school and that most of the students probably get financial aid on top of that. These students have been given a very nice ride at the expense of the taxpayers, often their parents, and possibly other entities, and they’re pissing it away.
Yeah, and they are taking someone else’s spot to boot.
Re: “cheating the tax payers”. Do you really think grades measure what people get out of the classes? There is a minimum level of knowledge needed to pass a class (unless there is cheating), but it represents almost nothing about what a person learned in the class. I know many people with associates degrees in biology who do not understand evolution- but I do, and I only got one class under my belt, I know because I read about this stuff on my own. I care about it so I learn, the people I am referencing are going to college as a means of increasing their income. I don’t think I will ever go back to college, considering how much of it is about learning how to seem like you went to college (rather than learning subjects).
Gotta chime in w/ FrauTech up there:
I’m a social science/math major. Obviously, this isn’t nearly as large a problem in the math half of things – it’s hard to get equations and other notes quickly into a computer, and most of the professors I’ve had in math classes teach slightly outside of the book scope, or from a different angle, so that it’s imperative to write this stuff down.
But in any of the social science courses I’ve taken – sociology and psych, especially – the constant flash of games, movie watching, and other distracting activities from the front row make it neigh impossible to pay attention to the professor – especially when the professor is a below-average lecturer, or a TA who is a little insecure in their role in front of the class.
I’ve never been so relieved as when I’ve been in classes where laptop usage was banned. While my mind will still, occasionally, wander, it makes fewer distractions.
Also, I wouldn’t assume that students who are doodling are not paying attention. Doodling is by definition something one does absentmindedly while thinking about or doing something else. That something else can be day dreaming, but it can also be listening.
Yeah I always drew in every class, I can listen more effectively that way. I did this from like 4th grade on. I drew some neat stuff, too.
Perspective setting for those who don’t know me:
I’m 39, I’ve been going to grad school part time (1 class/term) since 2006. I’m in a PhD program in Information Science at Claremont Graduate University. I also work full-time as an IS manager for the Computer Science Department at Caltech. I was not a terribly awesome student as an undergraduate, but I bust my ass off in grad school.
I have, on two occasions, done work during class. It’s the nature of my job, emergencies happen.
I have, on most occasions, used my laptop to take notes (I used to use a tablet PC for this, as I often take diagramming-style notes). I’ve also used my laptop to blog about the class and/or chat about what the professor is talking about in a chat room for the class itself. What I do varies by instructor and class presentation style. It also varies by the makeup of the rest of the class.
I have, every once in a while, used my laptop to do non-academic/non-work related things while in class. Because quite frankly, if Joe Schmoe in the Third Row is having a topic Explained Patiently for the third time this hour, I’m going to get something else done. This is a requirement when you have two kids, a dog, two cats, a full time job, and you’re going to grad school, you have to make time.
While I can appreciate that some students have a hard time with distractions, there is also a place that corrects for virtually all potential distractions. It’s called “the front row of the lecture hall” – you know, the one that virtually always has open seats? I’ve used it myself in particular lectures
Generally, I’d say that this is an issue that can best be handled by a dialogue with the students in your class. Make it clear that you expect them to be engaged with the material. That may mean rigid attention during lecture. It may not. It may mean you need to change your lecture style to be less of a one-way street; if you don’t engage the students, that’s at least partially your responsibility as an instructor. If 40% of your students don’t learn well with a classic “teacher talk, student take notes” approach, you’re probably going to have to alter your approach to a degree.
“If 40% of your students don’t learn well with a classic “teacher talk, student take notes” approach, you’re probably going to have to alter your approach to a degree.”
And you can measure this by observing how many are paying attention vs how many are surfing the web! How handy. And it’s the insructor’s fault anyway! Isn’t the whole point that students sat they want/need to take notes with their computer?
And no, in a class of hundreds, not all of the serious students can fit in the front row. Why are you still taking classes? And why don’t you sit in the last row at least? And blogging about it or chatting in a chat room devoted to the class? wtf? If that is being done by arrangement with the instructor it is not even relevant to this discussion. Same with other, legitimate uses of computers.
Oh, and we can hear you typing away even if we sit in the front. Another distraction. Sounds like a roomful of people with chattering teeth.
> And you can measure this by observing how many are paying
> attention vs how many are surfing the web!
I would say this is at best a marginal proxy. For example, I have seen students looking up something related to the lecture on wikipedia or some other reference site while the professor is engaging some other person in the class on a different tangent, where the first student is already comfortable with their understanding of that tangent (I’ve done this myself). This enables the part of the class that needs that part of the lecture to absorb it, without running the lecture off the rails. And when the professor is done closing out that tangent, you’re ready with a question if you have one (or, if you’ve already figured out the thing you didn’t understand, you’re ready to move on).
> And it’s the insructor’s fault anyway!
No, it’s not, but I didn’t say that. (Although, to be sure, there are some really bad lecturers out there. This isn’t a surprise given that few people in higher academia have actually taken classes on educational methodologies; they’re usually pretty smart in their fields but that doesn’t mean they can engage an audience worth a damn.)
> Isn’t the whole point that students sat they want/need to take
> notes with their computer?
I can take notes in a lab book. I have, for some courses. Sometimes writing the material does a better job of implanting it in my noggin. However, this comes at a major drawback, as I have to transcribe my notes (handwriting recognition being a suboptimal technology). Also, I’m almost 40. Someone who is 19 and is an undergraduate is likely to have a *much* faster typing rate than penmanship. I’m pretty much the poster child for the first generation to grow up with ready access to technology, but the new kids haven’t lived at all, ever, without computers. Many of them haven’t lived without a computer in their hands for years. I would say that it’s bad teaching practice to dictate how people take notes, but that’s just me.
> And no, in a class of hundreds, not all of the serious students
> can fit in the front row.
This may or may not be true. In my experience, I have *never* seen a full front row of *any* class at full population. Admittedly, I didn’t go to USC or UCLA, I’m certainly not suggesting that my experience generalizes. However, I suspect that it would be fairly easy for a student to find a seat near the front of the class if they wanted one.
> Why are you still taking classes?
I still have classes to take. I can’t take them full-time, I have a job. Not to mention the fact that my employer only reimburses so much for tuition, and goddamn grad school is expensive.
> And why don’t you sit in the last row at least?
I usually (read: almost always) do, unless I’m suspecting that I desperately need to be fully focused on a particular lecture… or, in some other cases, when I want to force myself to participate more in a seminar class. Then, I’m usually taking notes in outline form with a pencil.
> And blogging about it or chatting in a chat room devoted to
> the class? wtf?
Lots of students won’t raise their hands. I’m a talky bastard, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. However, you learn a lot from other graduate students, and I’m in a school with quite a few non-native English speakers who communicate via typing quite well but don’t like to communicate verbally. Their input is usually worthwhile.
> Oh, and we can hear you typing away even if we sit in the
> front. Another distraction. Sounds like a roomful of
> people with chattering teeth.
This is a legitimate complaint, which is one reason why I try to stick to the tablet. However, I see most lectures nowadays (both where I work and where I take classes myself) with a substantial population of laptops. So I expect that you’re going to have to learn to live with it.
I would also counter that if some of the students are getting actual academic use out of their computers, and some are distracted by it, it’s hardly just to say one side deserves more consideration than the other.
This has become a real problem in my class this semester as well. In the past there were only a couple students goofing off on computers, and it wasn’t disruptive, but for some reason this year there are dozens.
So a significant fraction of your students choose to spend a significant fraction of their time in your lectures engaged with something other than listening to that lecture, and you view that as a failing on the students part? Really?
Here’s an exercise that may be revealing: Have somebody, maybe a student or an automated system, whatever, make a transcript of everything you said during a two or three hour lecture, verbatim. Then read it, front to back. It won’t take you three hours. It will take you fifteen or twenty minutes. That should tell you what the real information density of your lectures is like to people who used to have the option of reading other books, making doodles or just struggling to stay awake, but who now have the option of wifi.
Standing in front of people talking to them might be the slowest, least convenient, most error-prone way of conveying information available in the modern world. The solution to this problem, assuming you’re even willing to admit it’s a problem, isn’t to get rid of laptops or distractions. It’s to get rid of the unbelievably inefficient tedium that are low-bandwidth, one-person-talking lectures.
What kind of transcript? Are you going to include pause lengths? Are you going to include phonetic and phonemic detail? Prosodic information? Or are you only interested in the putative referential “content” (ignoring the relationship between form and content)? One imagines that that is what is meant by the naive suggestion of “verbatim,” reducing languages to mere “words”. This is a pervasive Western language ideology, but languages are more that mere “words” and information is conveyed well beyond mere “semantico-reference”. (One would probably want a video as well as an audio recording so that gesture and the like could be transcribed. All of which convey information.)
As someone who actually works with transcripts, who actually sees transcribing as a form of analysis, that has transcribed numerous three hour orations and has spent years analyzing such stretches of talk, I find this suggestion woefully misleading. This is the high art of the referentialist fallacy. It also has a naive technological determinism embedded within it as well. We are now to believe that speaking is “inefficeint”, laptops more “efficient”. This is such a shockingly ill-informed suggestion that one can only assume that this is parody. Or do we mistake “automated” transcripts for faithful transcripts of the speech event?
Which begs the question, why would you have a “student” or “automated system” do the transcription?
Already replied by others, but cross-posting from EphBlog (http://www.ephblog.com/2011/05/16/lecture-surfing/#comment-122655) :
A good portion of Heidegger, for instance, is derived from his students’ lecture notes. At an undergrad level, I could not process written Heidegger faster than he delivered the lecture.
What a live lecture is doing, is using mnemonic cues, gestures and other devices to teach people how to think. It is an exercise in attention.
It is perhaps lost on many, but that’s another story.
The solution to the problem above is to block ports, turn off the internet altogether, or hand out Es.
As a faculty member at another CSU, and one who has only just received tenure, I share the worries expressed in this thread! I too have wondered from time to time what the students with laptops were doing in my class. That said, I have say I’m inclined to agree with Pat Cahalan and Mike Hoye in that I too must take some responsibility for any students seeking online distractions while sitting in my class. If 25% or more of my class were thus distracted, and a peer-evaluator noticed it, I would expect that evaluator to tell me I was doing something wrong! Or at least ask me to try a different approach rather than just blame the students.
Students have always had distractions and wandering minds, and modern technology surely exacerbates the problem, but ultimately (like Dan Hicks above), I want to treat them like adults who are in my classroom by choice. It is my responsibility to capture and retain their attention, and hard as I find it, I have to experiment with different approaches to engage them. One thing I do, if a particular student distracts me because I think s/he is on the laptop for non-class activities, is to throw a question at that student and thereby attempt to bring her/him back to the class! Next semester, I will use iclickers in the classroom for the first time and am hoping that helps engagement if students are required to interact – but it has its own set of problems. Ultimately, I cannot escape the reality that if I am not an engaging presence talking about something exciting in the classroom, students will pay less attention to me.
As Rob Knopp notes, it is not uncommon to find faculty members getting distracted like this in thesis seminars and such as well. So we are modeling that behavior – but again it is at least in part a symptom of the quality of the presentation, not just bad behavior on the part of the audience. Let me put it this way: if you find the audience at a research seminar or a conference seeking distractions during a talk (and we’ve all been there, haven’t we?) would you react the same way and blame the audience?
I have to disagree. To some extent the information is the attractant. Professors are not sweeps week programming. The attitude that if students are lazy or goofing off meaning there is a defect in the presentation of information is a little too pervasive. We are talking about students that may not want to be in college at all, may not be prepared, and are away from home and going through what for some is four years of camp- dealing with freedom they have never had before. Self-motivation is very very hard, and if students make it through their major just barely getting by through watered down courses with grade inflation, what will eventually happen when they are so far in over their heads? They might still be on their laptops at a taping of “Oprah’s favorite things.”
I want professors to be dynamic and interesting but their jobs go beyond circus performing. I just see the other side of the coin to this argument, and it goes for research presentations. In many cases the audience are not “voting with their laptops” they are simply doing other things. When you get distracted and surf the internet instead of doing important work, does that mean your work isn’t important or engaging?
+1
> We are talking about students that may not want
> to be in college at all, may not be prepared, and are
> away from home and going through what for some
> is four years of camp- dealing with freedom they
> have never had before.
No, you’re not.
Well, okay, maybe *you* are, but in general the students that I see are highly motivated (my grad school peers but also the undergraduates here at Caltech, where I work).
This phenomena occurs in those populations, too. And these are people who are really smart, busting their asses off, generally over-performing to a large degree on their deliverables whether or not they’re paying attention to every minute of the lecture. So this isn’t limited to the post-18 year old “I have to get a degree to get a job but damn I hate this class and I’m only taking it because I’m required to take Calculus/Art History/2 Semesters of English Lit/Whatever to graduate”
Surprisingly, many of these students who *aren’t* paying attention in class, who don’t give a crap about it other than it’s a Core class or a prereq that they need to take to graduate… those students still get B’s or A’s, so it’s obvious that they’re learning *somehow*. But that’s an aside.
Look, I’m not utterly bagging on the lecture as a method of information transfer. I think it’s generally poor for many types of students and many types of particular knowledge units. Seminar style classes are hugely more effective (again, this is my experience). I realize that this isn’t a possible forum for some classes given the practical limitations of class size and demographics and a whole bunch of other institutional factors.
It’s like science, sometimes you don’t have the budget to do a fully rigorous, double-blind, statistically random, longitudinal experimental study. You make due with what you got, and if you’re teaching freshman calculus or biology at a state school with 120 undergraduates you’re probably stuck with the lecture format. I understand that.
But “students may not learn well in that lecture environment, and thus might not be paying full attention” is not a problem that you can lay directly at the students, or the lecturers, or even the institution, really.
Caltech is an amazing institution with the best students in the country. Of course there will be generalities in common, and differences based on cohort. I think the majority of argument here is that Mike Hoye’s statements about lectures and their improvement are not really applicable to many students. Additionally, I am not arguing that students are to blame, my statements allude to the fact that lecture is least amount of effort for students, and when much information needs to be covered, going beyond a lecture format requires dedicated effort from students to familiarize themselves with concepts before interactive or group work can be performed, and this is a huge, huge barrier.
Perhaps an interesting experiment would be to send evaluators to classes taught by the most highly-rated professors in terms of “engagement” based on student evals, and send them to some profs who rank on the lower end, and compare rates of students “goofing off” on laptops. We can complain all we want, and throw blame on ourselves as educators and on the students as learners, but some actual comparative data would be nice.
I’m a career-changer in grad school. I would be lost without my laptop in class. In biology classes I enter terms into my flashcard program, in stats I try out the in-class examples in R (sadly, I am the only student in the class using R), in a class where the professor leaves a bright light on that drowns out the projected image of her slides I view the slides on my laptop. This has the added bonus of allowing me to move backwards in the slides when I need to check something for my notes, or forwards when she’s on a pointless tangent. I also take all of my notes on my laptop — which these days are usually just addendums to slides. Occasionally, I’ll look up articles when I want to confirm for myself that what the professor is saying is true.
Do I ever check my email — certainly. I’m paying a lot of money out of my own pocket and if the professor wastes my time going over and over obvious material, or goes off on tangents unrelated to the course material, I am not going to sit idly by drumming my fingers on the desk.
There is one class for which I keep my laptop closed. In this class professor does not give tests — no terms or lists to memorize — she only gives assignments. She grades on how well we used the information from her lectures and the readings in the assignments. Her lectures are engaging, useful and involve a lot of class discussion. For this type of class, no laptop is needed.
Professors are not sweeps week programming. The attitude that if students are lazy or goofing off meaning there is a defect in the presentation of information is a little too pervasive.
You’re conflating “being entertaining” with “using your audience’s time wisely.”
The only remaining place on the planet where a single person speaking for the duration of a three hour meeting to an audience of twenty or fifty or two hundred, delivering information that could better be sent in a single email attachment, is not (correctly) regarded as an enormous waste of everyone’s time is the classroom. You may as well be a town crier complaining that everyone’s flipping through their newfangled “news-papers” and ignoring your yelling.
All university students have had email accounts and network access for twenty years. Virtually all of them have laptops and smartphones now. Which is to say that you, as an instructor, have wildly better tools and avenues for conveying information to students than they have ever had at any point in human history, ever. And you’re still writing things on a chalkboard and muttering about blocking wifi.
You want to try meeting the 21st century halfway here, folks?
Thanks for the condescension. Of course it will be argued that I’m simply a horrible teacher, but I would love to assign readings and leave class time for discussion, question and answer, problem solving, increased use of primary sources, team exercises, but if I can’t get the students to do the reading because they want nothing more than the list of terms to memorize and a date by which they have to have the information memorized.
Arguments about lectures being passé are meaningless in terms of why students choose alternate distractions. It is not the Nielsen ratings. People choose to text while driving, does this choice say something about their intentions to increase the probability of killing someone or themselves? Choosing to screw around in class is not necessarily a rational decision between two possible ways to spend ones time.
In teaching, there is some baseline of information transfer that will allow larger concepts and more sophisticated methods to be utilized. If the fight is constantly between remedial learning and mediocre mastery of the topic, and when that topic includes a massive amount of information (for example a survey course), the menu is limited.
Student sophistication in using technology to do less work is ahead of the curve of professors’ ability to deliver to them information in wondrous and spectacular ways.
Okay, so some lectures could be improved. That is a given. I doubt that everyone who is describing this problem needs improvement in that area, however. That isn’t very fair to the people complaining. How many would need to come forward before you would decide it isn’t a matter of a professor’s skill?
“The only remaining place on the planet where a single person speaking for the duration of a three hour meeting to an audience of twenty or fifty or two hundred, delivering information that could better be sent in a single email attachment, is not (correctly) regarded as an enormous waste of everyone’s time is the classroom.”
You don’t get out much, do you? Spend some time among the Ku Waru or the Kuna or, closer to home, Navajos. Among such groups, three hours for a speaking event is not a waste of time. Never conflate your personal bias for a universal feature of the world.
Again, given the ways your posts are massively ill-informed, based on a naive view of the world, people, and language in use, I can only assume your posts are parody.
I’m with those above that say that this is not a new problem. Personally, I earned a lot of spending money in college providing notes for those that would rather sleep in. But the modern era, with a pdf online that gives the slides of the lecture, that fund-raising prospect must be pretty much obsolete. So I also agree with Mike Hoye above, why is the lecture itself unchanged?
Reading the above comments is my first introduction to the existence of “R”. Fascinating. Ok, maybe everybody else out there already knew about this. Google certainly knew how to locate it quickly.
But I think it exemplifies what Mike Hoye is saying above, that in the modern era there ought to be plenty of things that an instructor could be doing that would make an hour of class time into an engaging, intense and incredibly useful session.
As another example, I have found wifi to be incredibly useful for getting the background information necessary to compose a zinging seminar question. Can you teach your students to do the same?
What if that awesome stuff you are doing in class relies on student mastery of even a simple text book or prepared notes that they refuse to read? The goofing off in lecture is beyond being bored- it is much easier to study for something by having someone personally try to explain it to you, unless you are smart and have no problems with the texts. Many of the people in the thread are not talking about students who are bored, unengaged bright lights, many students could be four years into a major where they are doing charitable C work. Some percentage of the class could be playing out the string.
Team trivia with Clickers on Chapter 21 for fun and prizes isn’t a lot of fun if nobody wants to do the reading without hand holding.
I don’t know, maybe Peanut M&Ms could be part of it.
In addition, it is a fine line using technology in class if that technology adds a financial burden to a substantial subset of the students.
I really would love to use the Clicker in my class to keep people interested and change up the lecture, but if they aren’t already required to buy it, my class is now an ESSENTIAL textbook plus an expensive Clicker rental/purchase.
> What if that awesome stuff you are doing in class
> relies on student mastery of even a simple text book
> or prepared notes that they refuse to read?
Uh, FLUNK THEM?
Seriously, this *is* something that you have responsibility over. You really shouldn’t care too much, as an educator, how the students are learning the subject (except for the ways in which it informs your ability to teach, of course). But if students are showing up and goofing off… and it’s not because they have already learned the material, and it’s not because they won’t do well on the exam anyway, but it *IS* because they’re not *going* to learn the material, get them out of your class.
And what if your class is 4th in a series where previous professors have NOT flunked students who have clearly not mastered what are the pre-reqs for your class. You start with kids that are behind where they need to be. You want to help them learn- your job is not just assessment but teaching. It is a very delicate balance, one that many in the thread get without apportioning blame on “wasting student time.” Teachers wasting student time is very low on the list of issues in my experience for the average student (top students’ time I think is wasted at the majority of institutions save the best)
I can understand that this happens, but it seems to me that the push-back again ought to be immediate; if not on the students, then on the department.
“I’m teaching Calc II for Business Majors. It’s fairly apparent that 40% of them don’t understand limits. Not, like, “Well, okay, they don’t really get it but they can plug numbers into a formula and really they’re business majors and let’s just get to the point where they can do integration.”… I mean, “They stink on ice, and should not have received a passing grade in Calc I for Business Majors”
Yeah, I understand this can be a politically tricky widget, but if your co-instructors aren’t doing their job, that needs to be fixed. You can’t teach two semesters (quarters) worth of material in one term.
“So I also agree with Mike Hoye above, why is the lecture itself unchanged? ”
It isn’t. It’s more likely incorporating colorful images, animations and other videos, and emailed notes; discussion is encouraged (no one wants to speak up and challenge the professor? same old story). Even with all the amazing resources at their fingertips they are still helpless at coming up with good paper topics, and leading a discussion on a cutting edge, controversial topic is still like pulling teeth.
Yeah, it’s all the instructors’ fault.
“Yeah, it’s all the instructors’ fault.”
No, it’s not. Many of the solutions are difficult, technology (money); smaller class sizes (more money); laboratories and hands on projects (more money yet).
But there are things that can be done (and you are probably already doing many of them). Pulling teeth sounds like a good place to start. Maybe a session to really lead through the process of how to pick a good paper topic. Because they really are helpless because they really don’t know. Set up a few ground rules to help those easily distracted, come up with some excuses to stride to the back of the lecture hall occasionally. Give clear guidance as to what you expect them to learn from the lectures.
You may think that written notes are best, and I may believe than no one can understand logarithms as well when it is a “log” button on a calculator rather than logarithmic scales on a slide rule. But the main ideas that need to be grasped can still be conveyed and recorded using modern technology. Sometimes better. The basics of what you describe above for note-taking: link this to that, annotate those points, and so forth, still needs to be taught.
I’d be really tempted to start each class by saying:
There will be a two minute quiz at the end of the class. The questions will be short identifications on 3 main topics. You will get credit for attending this class by answering at least two correctly, signing your name and turning in the paper before you leave.
This is a signpost goal. I’m not an overly big fan of these.
If you get to the end of the term and 90% of the students know the material, you’re doing okay.
If you get to the end of the term and 40% of the students know the material, you’re not.
Probably the first step is to identify whether or not “paying attention in class” is a good metric for predicting your students’ performance. If it’s not, then encouraging attention isn’t getting you anywhere, right?
What this most speaks to is that university undergraduate teaching, in its current form, is an anachronism, outrageously costly and inefficient.
1) Most strikingly, the large lecture class should go the way of vaudeville and travelling medicine shows. Students should be watching the lectures on their computers, not going to lectures and watching something else on their computers. The lecture hall is a massive waste of energy and maintenance costs.
2) Students should work on non-laboratory/field work–i.e., book learning–individually, with all the aid a computer can give. They can submit questions via e-mail, which the professor can collate and answer efficiently. As far as large classes are concerned, well, that’s what TA’s are for. Professors and TAs alike will benefit from having a central data set to identify challenges and shortcoming in teaching the subject.
3) Discussions, seminars, etc. can be arranged either on-line or in a classroom, with topics agreed on beforehand.
4) The best part about this is that it will allow students to ask questions and engage with the material at their own pace and interest, as opposed to the usual classroom situations, which entail compromises in addressing student needs or are dominated by a strong individual or group.
TAs grow on trees and are free. Computers are not wasteful or costly. Students don’t spend enough time staring at their computers.
Things are might not be true, multiple answers possible. Show your work.
Terrific discussion with some clear lacks of experience on both sides of the debate (student and instructor). In class today, I asked students how many of them had used a laptop in a college class for something unrelated to that class. All but one or two students raised hands, primarily students who don’t have laptops. We instructors certainly don’t have it all figured out when it comes to how to present our material effectively but students are coming to the table less prepared than they used to be (where sample=1). Assuming “technology” can solve either of those problems is naive, at best. I use Youtube, Powerpoint, Blackboard, notes as pdfs, etc. in all my classes and if anything, this semester has had some of my biggest challenges in reaching students and getting them to learn the material. Some students have done great, some have done miserably. Even instructors who I admire and respect have the distraction problem among their students.
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