Laptops in the Classroom: Okay or No Way?

The Associated Press reported May 3rd that professors at a number of universities are working to ban laptops in the classroom campus-wide. They already prohibit them in their own classes. These professors have found, with good reason, that numerous students are doing other things on their laptops besides typing neat notes. As most colleges and universities of any size now sport WiFi networks covering almost every inch of campus, it is just as possible for a student to read e-mail and play online games in class as in a dorm room. Proponents of the bans point out that they make students more like stenographers, who will then miss out on discussion and social interaction with the class. Professor Charles Mooney at the University of Pennsylvania banned them two years ago for these reasons, and then this year, he allowed them back in as an experiment. His conclusion has been to continue the ban.

This does happen. I've found students in my own classes trying to pretend they're interested, when really they're bidding for something on eBay or playing solitaire. However, I've had just as many, and probably a lot more, students who actually are using the computer for its intended purpose in my classes. Being an Instructional Technology guy, I'm in the middle on the issue. I can see the point about limiting discussion by staring at a screen, since it is definitely true that the students who seem to talk the least are the ones who are looking over a laptop screen. The act of typing out notes does take some involvement from the class. I can also see the point about students playing games, chatting or surfing the web during class, because I've seen my classmates in my doctoral classes doing it, so it's not just eighteen-year-old greenhorns doing it either. I'm up in the air on whether to ban them because of the supposed interference with classroom discussion...sometimes I wish I had a little more cash, so I could have one myself. I can't read some of the notes I take sometimes, and typing them might help. Whether or not I would notice myself being removed from discussion by the act of typing is debatable...probably something I could study at a later date. I'd like to see the studies on this one before I try to make a decision.

The solution? Instructors need more control over their classroom environments. WiFi has made it easy for people to get online virtually anywhere. Heck, with a $50 hotspotter and a WiFi-equipped computer, you can log onto somebody else's network just by being close enough. So we need to be able to let students use computers for notetaking if they choose to, yet limit the internet availability. Simple. Just shut off the network locally. Chances are, it's probably not more than three Wireless Access Points (WAPs) serving even the largest classrooms. If instructors have the power to shut them off just before class, they won't need to worry that a student is more interested in Yahoo! Mail than notetaking, because the computer won't be good for much else. Sure, a student could still play a game loaded on the computer, but at that point, they're paying good money to sit in a lecture hall and play solitaire, which is just stupid. Universities not wanting to give instructors that kind of technical control could just have instructors choose certain hours of the day to have the WAPs shut off by their IT people. This would still make it possible for technology classes to have WiFi access, but not other classes. For example, there could be 'dead time' from 3:00 to 4:00 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for English Comp I, but the network would be back on in the classroom at 4:00 for Mechanical Engineering 101. This is most definitely possible, because our home wireless router has this option. I think it's meant to limit kids' internet surfing, but that's what we're mostly talking about anyway, isn't it?