A University of Michigan professor is the latest in a long line of instructors who don’t allow students to use devices in their classrooms. Susan Dynarski (“Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting,” New York Times, 22 Nov.) cites irrefutable research that banning devices in class increases student learning. Apparently cell phones, tablets, and laptops keep even students who are actually paying attention from fully engaging with the course material.
You’ve heard the arguments before: Classroom devices cause distraction. Typing is faster than handwriting, so students will spend less time mentally processing each word. Typing encourages copying verbatim; writing by hand forces students to digest and summarize what they hear.
But the arguments fail: pens and pencils are complex technological devices--if you don't believe that, try making a pencil at home. How many student notebooks consist of swirls, doodles, cartoon figures, experiments with signatures, or stray keywords indecipherable after the fact? As for verbatim transcription, there’s no research showing typed notes parrot the speaker more, or better, than written ones. Remember, too, that transcription originates as a handwriting technique; it took decades before typists could come close to the accuracy of stenographers.
Banning devices from classrooms is nothing new. Since the first teachers set up the first schools, teachers have been trashing technology for getting in the way of thought. In the Phaedrus, Plato recounts the Egyptian myth that the god-king Thamus told Theuth, the inventor of writing, that letters only interfere with understanding. Plato uses the example to argue that writing will destroy his students’ memory. We remember this because one of his students wrote it down.
Plato was not the first teacher to ban devices from his classroom, nor was he the first teacher whose students flouted that ban. Sumerian teachers complained that students who took notes on clay tablets routinely scored lower on standardized tests than students who just listened to the lectures. But their attempts to ban clay tablets from the schools were frustrated by Gilgamesh, the god-king of Uruk, who ordered students to use their analog devices to advertise his exploits. Before that, writing on clay was just for recording business transactions. In one stroke, Gilgamesh unleashed the power of letters to create both literature and its evil twin, public relations, and writing technology hasn’t been the same since.
Even devices that seem innocuous to us now were once banned by teachers. The big nineteenth-century innovation in pencil making was attaching erasers directly to one end of a pencil (before that, erasers were separate lumps of rubber students had to sneak into school). Teachers reacted to the better pencil with alarm: this new device—with its integrated eraser—would let students correct their work, but education was all about think before you write, no crossing out. Now teachers complain if students don’t proof and edit their writing. Imagine taking a fill-in-the-bubble test today with an eraserless No. 2?
And don’t forget the handheld calculator: once banned from math class because students would never learn their arithmetic functions, but now a back-to-school essential, particularly for advanced work.
Then there’s the hypocrisy, the teacher saying, “I use the device, but you can’t.” No doubt the Michigan professor who bans devices created her New York Times op-ed on a digital device. She may regularly accompany her class lectures with slides projected via device. She might have even used a device to look up the research she cites about the educational handicaps caused by devices in the classroom. And surely the 183 readers’ comments both for and against devices in class were sent in via device, vetted via device (the Times curates reader responses), published via device, and read on-screen.
Many of my colleagues have a no-device policy for class. That’s their prerogative. But that policy doesn’t work for me. I use my own laptop in every class I teach, every day, and sometimes I use my mobile phone to call tech support to fix the projector so I can show my slides, which don’t repeat what I’m talking about but illustrate it, and which some students even photograph with their mobile phones even though I make the slides available online. So I see no reason to forbid student devices. Plus, there’s a significant number of students whose devices actually allow them to be in the classroom in the first place. I value their presence; I don’t want to discourage them or single them out for special device privileges.
The ultimate anti-device argument is, “Attention must be paid.” That presumes an ideal classroom—Platonic if you will—where we all sit around under a tree and talk big ideas to each other. In my own experience, so far as paying attention goes, even without devices, or pencil and paper, I daydreamed my way through many classes, and many meetings—all while looking with attentiveness directly at the speaker, so I know that students who are not going to pay attention don’t need a device in order to escape the boredom. And speaking of Plato, he never listened to his students, he just told them what to think. Don’t believe me? Read the dialogues--they're actually monologues. You can read them, because someone used their device to write them down.
