Should Professors Allow Students to Use Computer Devices in the Classroom?

Yesterday, Wednesday February 9, Duke University ran an interesting informal poll asking faculty the question "Should professors allow students to use computers and other electronic devices in the classroom?" and offering four answers to choose from.   Here's the poll, with the results as of 9 am on Thursday:

DUKE TODAY Poll:  iPad learning: Tool or menace?

Should professors allow students to use computers and other electronic devices in the classroom?

Thanks for contributing! Here's how your answer compares:

• Yes, they are a learning aid (31%)
   
• Yes, but only if the class is designed for computer learning (33%)
   
• No, they distract the student (16%)
   
• It doesnt matter, students will use them anyway (21%)

HASTAC readers will not be surprised to hear that, for me, the correct answer is "yes, students should be allowed to use electronic devices in the classroom" but the only box I wanted to check was one that was not offered:  "None of the above." 

The reason is that there are many reasons to use devices in the classroom that do not come under the rather vague heading of "only if the class is designed for computer learning."   I think that is basically the right answer (as do many) but I would tinker with the language:  Only if the desired forms of learning in the classroom can be assisted by having a laptop or other electronic device at the students' disposal.    Sound nitpicking?  Actually, the difference in the poll formulation (quick and clear and designed, rightly, to get a quick answer) and that longer one (designed to make a point) is the space where programs like ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) or HASTAC exist.   The point isn't that the class has to be designed for "computer learning" but that there are different forms of learning available with a device and profs should be allowed to determine if they want to facilitate and make use of those different forms of learning or not.

Do you see the difference?   "Computer learning" doesn't exist.   In 2011, it exists less than it did a decade ago and, in a few years, that phrase won't exist at all.   Students learn.  Computers are tools for all kinds of things, from checking the Facebook page, to making notetaking easier, to being fact checking or calculating devices that can take a class to a more sophisticated level to interactive social networking devices that can either distract a class or allow for new forms of group collaboration.   There are many other uses as well.   The point is that most profs have (a) simply "adapted" (as a colleague told me recently) to computers without understanding the intellectual and pedagogical changes they can enable; or (b) resigned themselves to their present, gleefully or resentflly; or (c) made them into a pedagogical tool; or (d) all of the above.    

Technology that is important is never simply a tool.  It facilitates and embodies whole sets of new social, intellectual, and practical relationships.   One thing I like to do in my classes is require laptops and then activate their presence in myriad ways:   I have students find information in the course of the class and sometimes have them find opposite points of view and then debate those.   We have written whole assignments in class using Google docs.   This year, in "Twenty-First Century Literacies," I'm experimenting (I'll report back:  I have trepidation!) with having the entire class collaborate on one midterm exam question, written over the course of a day . . . or a week, if they choose.   Since collaborative thinking and leadership and team-building are all "literacies" we are addressing, that test will be either an Epic Win or an Epic Fail, as gamers say, for the class .. . and a learning experience in any case.  (Yes, there are fail-safes built in.)

The point is to disaggregate the meaning of "computer learning" and to think about how and why we use devices.   Some days I do the famous Howard Rheingold experiment and tell my students:  Okay, today, close your laptops.  Close your cell phones.  Close your eyes.    I then ask them to try, for five minutes, with no electronic devices capturing their attention, to chart the range of thoughts inside those closed eyes.   What they learn is attention is always divided.  There is no baseline.   When they open their eyes again, we then can talk intelligently about what really is a distraction, what we really mean by multitasking.   Being human (with or without an electronic device at the ready) is to multitask.   How we can do that in the best way to facilitate learning is the key.

One final comment, a funny one.  On Monday, in my "Twenty-First Century Literacies" class where laptops are required for a whole range of experiments and inclass collaborative work, I caught one of my students with his laptop open and with a book propped secretly inside it, reading away in his book when he should have been paying attention.   So maybe that's the next class, "Should Professors Allow Students to Use BOOKS in the Classroom Devised for Computer Learning?"   I'm being facetious but that's the point.  A book is a technology too.   How and when we use any technology and for what purpose are the questions we all need to ask.