Educators and students agree that emerging technology can either help or hinder education.
Popular Web sites like Facebook and MySpace can easily be accessed from cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops during class time.
However, students who attend class without a laptop find the technology to sometimes be an annoying distraction.
“Laptops are occasionally distracting,” University junior Amanda Holzgang said. “Last week, there was a girl sitting in front of me checking her Facebook. I couldn’t help but look.”
University sophomore Amelia Botteron said laptops should only be used in the front row.
“The first few rows are usually where the most attentive students sit,” she said.
Senior Michael Nodurft does not use his laptop in class any more because it was too distracting for him; however, other students’ laptop use does not distract him.
“They can work for some people and not work for other people,” Nodurft said.
Just like students’ note-taking preferences, laptop use policy differs from professor to professor and department to department.
Regarding in-class technology, political science instructor Ken DeBevoise’s syllabus states, “The only machine necessary for real classroom learning is the one you have on top of your neck. No laptops or cell phones in use please. They will be confiscated and destroyed. Expect the Department of Homeland Security to be in almost immediate touch with you.”
Physics professor Raghuveer Parthasarathy previously allowed laptops in his classes, usually large lectures with more than 100 people, last school year. Students began complaining, and he changed his policy winter term to not allow laptops in his class.
“Laptop (use) doesn’t just distract the person in front of them, (it) also distracts people around them,” Parthasarathy said.
Ethnic studies professor Irmary Reyes-Santos docks 10 percent off of students’ participation points if they use their laptops for “activities not related to the course,” and laptop users must sit in front row, according to his syllabus.
Geography professor Shaul Cohen’s class policy is that laptops may be used only for note taking, and any other use of a laptop can result in an “F.” Cell phones in class are encouraged to be turned off, and if a cell phone rings during class or a student is caught texting, their grade will go down one full letter grade for the course.
But some educators and professionals are trying to turn these distractions into helpful educational tools.
“Each year I have heard complaints from students about the distraction that comes from texting, Web surfing, messaging, and game playing that goes on around them. Let’s eliminate that this term,” Cohen’s course syllabus states.
Cohen said he is pro-technology and anti-distraction. He has a Facebook page for each of his classes.
“It’s not that I don’t allow laptops,” Cohen said. “I want to control the way laptops are used.”
Technology is not reserved to only laptops and cell phones.
Recently invented classroom technology such as the i>clicker aims to assist students and teachers in the classroom and improve lecture classes by inciting students to interact. The Duck Store sells i>clickers for use in large lecture classes.
University of Illinois professor Mats Selen, one of the inventors of the i>clicker, visited the University Wednesday afternoon in a workshop on how technology has changed teaching.
“The technology is very simple,” Selen said. He added that while i>clickers may be helpful in the classroom, it is the way teachers use them that makes the technology effective. “No tool is going to make a class better by itself.”
[email protected]
[email protected]