In Context: 5 Web Perspectives On A Story In The News

Laptops in the classroom

(Maclean's) Some professors, such as Université de Montréal business professor Jean Boivin, have banned laptops in their classrooms because they say they’re too distracting. Boivin made the rule several years ago when he read in a newspaper that one of his students lost thousands of dollars during a lecture by trading stocks online. He says students have never complained about the rule. "My attention span only lasts so long. I don’t know what I’d do without my laptop," says Stephanie Poato, a second-year communications student at Simon Fraser University. Linda Stone, a lecturer at Towson University in Maryland and a former Microsoft executive, calls students’ online multitasking during lectures "continuous partial attention." The fear of missing a piece of important information causes stress and an inability to concentrate on any single thing at once, which some cognitive researchers say may hinder problem-solving skills and negatively affect long-term memory.

1.

Study saying laptops hinder learning is flawed

U Tech Tips
The Maclean’s article above cites a 2007 study conducted at Winona State University in Minnesota that suggested students using laptops in lecture classes spent about 20 minutes of every 75-minute class on non-course-related material. Their grades were also an average of five per cent lower than the grades of students who didn’t bring laptops to lectures. (Ironically enough, Winona State University requires every student to lease either a Mac or PC laptop from the school.) In this entry from the collaborative educational technology blog U Tech Tips, Jason Welker, a teacher at Zurich International School in Switzerland, tears apart both the methodology of the study and the assumptions behind it. For instance, the sample was only two large, lecture-oriented psychology classes -- and students were told laptops weren’t necessary for the course. Welker says laptops in the classroom are not an automatic productivity drain and professors should integrate them into lectures.

2.

Isolated county in North Carolina gets wired

NPR's All Things Considered
This radio mini-documentary from National Public Radio details the changes Internet access brought to Greene County, a tobacco-producing region of North Carolina. In 2003, about 30 households in Greene County had Internet access. Then the U.S. government decided to withdraw farm subsidies for tobacco growers, devastating local industry. Greene County leaders didn’t think they could attract a large factory to the community because they couldn’t offer a skilled workforce, so they decided to change the community’s fortunes by getting everyone online. Greene County Schools also started a 1:1 laptop initiative, where every student from Grades 6-12 got a laptop. Since the 1:1 laptop initiative was introduced, the number of high school graduates who applied to college has jumped from 26 per cent to 76 per cent and the number of high school students performing at or above grade level has gone from 53 per cent to 78 per cent. The county had North Carolina’s second-highest teen pregnancy rate before the laptops but now it’s dropped to 18th place.

3.

Technology and note-taking

Collision Detection
In 2006, University of Memphis law professor June Entman banned laptops in her class. Many of her students complained and some filed a complaint with the American Bar Association, arguing they were being denied a current education. The association dismissed the complaint. Entman said students were often either not paying attention to her at all, or too busy writing down every word of her lecture that they weren’t actively listening. In this blog entry, New York Times Magazine contributor and Wired columnist Clive Thompson discusses how different types of note-taking might affect students’ thinking. He responds as both a journalist and a lecturer, and ends up suggesting note-taking groups of three: "One will listen to the lecture and take notes on a laptop; another will use a pen and notepad; a third will just sit there and listen and think. Then they pool their notes and impressions afterwards ... Maybe the three of you would produce an entirely new and richer record of what had been said -- and, more importantly, what you’d understood."

4.

How professors can use laptops in the classroom

Tomorrow's Professor Blog
This MIT/Stanford blog posted an excerpt of the first chapter from the book Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 101. This section of the book suggests ways for professors to incorporate laptops into learning. The authors identify eight categories of in-class laptop activities that have genuine learning value and can’t be done as well or at all without laptops: data collection, self-assessment, research, collaboration, learning exercises, and analyzing digital performances (such as music or video). The chapter includes lots of real examples of how professors are using laptops as learning tools, from doing field research on milk production in a veterinary science program to running a calculus course as a "studio," in which student groups spend the majority of class time solving problems with Maple math software.

5.

LeechBlock

James N. Anderson
Designed mainly for office workers and academics, LeechBlock is a free plug-in for the Firefox web browser that allows you to block access to certain websites during certain hours of the day, or set a maximum amount of time you can access certain websites or even domains per day (the programmer helpfully identifies time-wasters "that rhyme with 'Blue Cube,' 'Pie Face,' 'Space Hook,' [or] '‘Hash Pot' ..."). The options dialog allows you to make it impossible to change or eliminate a site’s restrictions during its blocked time, and you can even set extra passwords to changing your options for an additional ounce of prevention.