Professors and laptops vie for students' attention

Three semesters ago, in an ORF 245 lecture, Elisabeth Merrill '08 was taking notes as her professor, Savas Dayanik, demonstrated a statistics program for the class on his laptop. Suddenly, Dayanik received an instant message from his wife.

"I'm teaching a class right now," he replied, as the message flashed on the projector screen.

"Sorry, am I bothering you?" she wrote. "I'll go."

"First, say 'hi' to the class," Dayanik wrote back.

Dayanik's wife greeted the class, the message window closed, and the lecture moved on as if nothing had ever happened.

Laptops in class are nothing new for the current generation of students and professors, but with the newfound availability of wireless Internet in dorms and classrooms around campus, the effects of the new technology are.

Just as the ringing of cell phones in class was once the distracting bane of most professors' existence, instant messages cropping up on screens is the modern day equivalent. Stories of varied reactions abound — everything from Dayanik's friendly acknowledgement of the situation to one professor slamming a laptop screen on a student's fingers.

Merrill, the student in Dayanik's class, uses a tablet PC to take notes in class to save paper, and though her father has contacted her through instant messenger programs a couple of times in class, she personally does not find laptop use too distracting.

"But I definitely have seen people not paying attention," she said. "There's always going to be someone surfing the Internet or just asleep."

In June, Harvard Law School faculty considered a universal ban on laptops in the classroom. But a vote was never taken. At schools such as Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., software is available to instructors that blocks wireless Internet access during class.

At Princeton, in contrast, most professors have accepted laptops as an inevitable part of contemporary classroom instruction and trust their students to be mindful when bringing them to class.

"I told them that they are welcome to take notes on their laptops, but not to surf the web or communicate during lecture," operations research professor Richard de Veaux, who currently teaches ORF 245, a class of 190 students, said in an email.

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"Although I try not to ban anything, I'm happiest when students are just listening and not even taking notes. I put the notes up later, so I think trying to stay engaged with the material (in whatever way possible) is the best."

Anthropology professor Lawrence Rosen took a more active approach to addressing laptop use in class. Before the first session of his Anthropology of Law (ANT 342) seminar, he instructed students not to bring laptops to class.

His goal, however, was not to ban laptop and Internet use, but to make a point that students needed to be attentive to others' comments, Rosen said in an email.

"My intention all along was to have the students not bring computers for the first class so they could see how interesting it was, in a three-hour evening seminar, to look at one another, engage each other in conversation, and listen rather than worry about noting every point," he said.

Since the first meeting of the seminar, Rosen has given students permission to bring laptops to class if they wish, and does not yet know if they will make a difference.

Some professors find other electronic devices to be worse distractions than laptops.

"I have a bigger problem with cell phones than with laptops," PSY 101 professor Daniel Oppenheimer said in an email. "If a student decides to check email in class, so long as the sound is off, it only affects that student. When cell phones ring it distracts everybody in the class, and can disrupt the flow of a lecture."

Economics professor Elizabeth Bogan agrees with Oppenheimer that students have an impact on the atmosphere during a lecture.

"The thing I worry about a little bit with computers in the classroom is that I and many other professors take a certain energy from looking at students, from eye contact, and if they're very absorbed, even if they're taking notes, I don't get the same level of eye contact," Bogan said.

Oppenheimer, who has never personally had a problem with laptops in class, feels that if a professor bans laptops, there is probably a good pedagogical reason for doing so. But, he also sees great value in engaging students on their laptops in class.

"I've given lectures on statistics where I would have loved for my students to all have laptops so that they could follow along and actually do the statistical analyses as I taught them ... And certainly having the ability to access reference materials during class exercises could be useful," he said. "Ultimately, I think it depends a great deal on the topic whether laptops help or hinder learning."

Bogan, who has taught ECO 101 or ECO 100 every semester since 1990, has not seen a difference in student attention since laptops started becoming more prevalent in classrooms and lecture halls.

"The thing about bringing laptops is that I as an economist think of the relevant alternatives. And if anyone wanted to bring newspapers, they did," Bogan said. "Occasionally, while it hurts my feelings, all my life I've had students who read the newspaper."

And then, "there's always the student that sleeps."