Banning Laptops in the Classroom

Since law professors who blog seem to bring up banning laptops at least twice a quarter, I thought I should bore you with a law student post about law professors who want to ban laptops in the classroom. I’m just coming off of a long business organizations class about dividends, so let me assure you, this post will probably be just as rambling and incoherent as most of my posts.

I do understand that the vast majority of professors want students to be involved in discussion and to be attentive and engaged in their class.

Professors, on the other hand should understand that most students want to be involved in discussion and to be attentive and engaged in their class. When that doesn’t happen, I think it’s a personal dynamic, not a technology issue.
I think it’s important for faculty to step back for a moment, to the pre-laptop days, and ask themselves these simple questions:

• Were all of your students diligent note takers, not scrambling to copy your lecture verbatim?
• Did they never pass notes, whisper in the back row, daydream out the window, or doodle in their notebooks?

If you can honestly answer yes to all of those questions, then by all means. Ban laptops. You win. But I doubt anyone can _honestly_ answer yes to those questions.

I do support professor’s rights to manage their courses as they see fit. But I think they shouldn’t be discriminatory against the class of students who have piss-poor handwriting. Yes, we’re a class, and I think it’s time we were protected. If you’re going to ban laptops, ban all note-taking. Let’s face it, note taking itself is pretty distracting. Provide your lecture notes to the class as a handout after each class and forbid note-taking altogether. Then everyone in the class is on equal footing.

Okay, maybe that’s extreme, but it illustrates my point: banning laptops has a negative impact on all students who use the technology properly just to try to reach a very small number of students who wouldn’t be paying attention anyway.

Now, I’m sure there are some unique reasons for faculty to ban laptops in the class, but it seems like every article/post/rant I’ve read from a professor who was banning them fell into one of three broad generalizations:

*Laptops create a “physical barrier” to discussion.*

Several professors have claimed that the “picket fence” of laptop screens creates a physical barrier that inhibits discussion. But being in a horse-room shaped lecture hall with 150 seats isn’t a physical impediment to discussion at all. Nope. I love to have lively discussions with the back of my classmate’s heads. Very conducive to intellectual discourse.

Maybe, maybe, this would be true in a small seminar, with only a dozen students or so. Although, I think that’s more of a generational gap. I think faculty see the laptops as a physical barrier, but that most students don’t see them. Students today are comfortable with technology–it’s been a part of their education for most, if not all, of their lives. There might be a few students who think they are intrusive as well, but I’d also wager that there are a few shy students who are glad to have the shelter–and may even participate more because they have that shield. Either way, I think the actual impact is much more minimal than it’s often made out to be. In the end, I think it’s a wash.

*Laptops encourage people to take verbaitim notes instead of writing down just what is important.*
First, why is it _necessarily_ bad to take down notes verbatim? I’ve encountered a few students who do this, and yes, I think some of them are missing the forest for the trees. But I know of one classmate in particular who was a very good and diligent student who took “verbatim notes”. She did it because it was part of her learning process. It’s just how she learned. She internalized what was being said as she was transcribing, and it helped her later during the distilling process of outlining.

Second, are there really that many people in your classes with their fingers flying on the keyboard trying to take down every word? I’ve only ever seen a few people doing this, even in large 1L required classes. This is just a guess, I don’t have the data to back this up (although, I haven’t encountered a professor who did either), but I suspect if you took away their laptops, those same people would be scribbling away, filling their notebooks with your every word. Only now, they won’t be able to read half of it. So what would banning the laptop accomplish?

Well, for starters, it would penalize those, like me, with poor penmanship. But more important, it doesn’t accomplish the goal you’re trying to achieve, which would only “benefit” a handful, and instead penalizes the vast majority of people who take notes effectively with a laptop.

*Laptops create a tempting diversion from paying attention or participating in class.*

They do. I’ll acknowledge that the diversion offered by a networked laptop are multitudinous. Between instant messaging, the web, games… it’s a non-stop cornucopia of distraction. So what?

Laptops have increased the distractions, but they are hardly the first distraction in the classroom. In the days before laptops, I have it on good authority that students would sit in the back row and on occasion, whisper. I also have discovered in some boxes in my mother’s attic, some form of primitive instant messaging that she called “notes”. Apparently, these “notes” were constructed of paper and then deviously passed from one student to another–all during the course of a lecture!

Sarcasm aside, I’m sympathetic to the frustration of competing with a laptop for students attention. But the reality is that it is a part of the job. Your job as a faculty member is to organize and present the material in a comprehensible and engaging manner. I’ve had some outstanding professors over the years, and those who were passionate about their subject matter, well prepared for class, and dynamic speakers *never* had to “compete” for the attention of their students. Period. There will *always* be one or two (or six, in a class of 150) people who are “checked out”. But you kind of just have to ignore them.

Making the other 144 people in the class suffer while you try to reach those six is doing a disservice to everyone, yourself included. Here’s my advice: write them off. Maybe they will fail your class: but it will be their own fault. It’s the best gift you can give them–they don’t want to be their anyway.

But, if I may make a gentle suggestion… if you find yourself consistently competing for your students attention in class, you should revisit your organization of the material (if not the material itself) and you should get some brutally honest criticisms of your speaking skills. Some academics are outstanding in the classroom. Some are outstanding in print. Some are gifted in both, but that rare. There’s nothing wrong with that–but recognize your own limitations and work on improving them instead of focusing your misplaced frustration on technology that actually helps a great many students.

*Laptops are being used by the government to emit thought controlling radio waves to track my movement.*

Okay, no professor (to my knowledge) has ever proffered that argument. But if they did, they’d be the coolest faculty member ever. Or insane. Or both.

So where does that leave professors who want to ban laptops in the classroom? Recently, a professor posted his laptop policy, which essentially allowed students to use them for notes, but if they were found using them for other purposes, they would lose the right to use them.

At first, it sounds like a good compromise, but it’s still really discriminatory against laptop users, and it still is only treating the symptom, not the disease. Would students taking notes on paper “lose the privilege” if they were caught passing a note? Or doodling in the margins? Or actually writing fiction instead of taking notes? (I knew a student who did that in one class… I noticed he was writing a whole lot during one not very interesting lecture. I asked what he was working on, and he said, “A short story.” Since all lawyers secretly want to be writers, it seemed like an okay idea to me.)

I do use the net during class. In fact, it saves me time and my back. When we’re looking at a statute in class, instead of flipping through the 1200 page supplement, I pull it up on Westlaw/Lexis. Nifty! But that would (technically) violate such a policy. And it wouldn’t be possible with an all out ban. And what reasonable argument can be made that it’s better to lug around a 10lb. book to get the same information?

The problem professors are really struggling with here is not the laptop. The laptop is the symptom, not the disease. In fact, the laptop is the symptom of a few diseases, not all of them afflicting students. There’s student apathy, boring material, poor speaking skills, the list goes on.

So I would ask that any professor considering banning laptops try these steps first:

1. Make a note of how many people are *really* “checked-out” in your class. What percentage of the class is it? Is it really that high? Or is it just the percentage of people who are going to be checked out anyway?
2. If the percentage *is* high, re-examine your class. Review your course materials–is the material interesting? Can it be made more interesting by doing something out of the ordinary (role playing, incorporating current events, interesting hypos?)
3. Finally, take a good, honest look at your lecture skills. Videotape yourself and see if you would be interested while you were lecturing. Or ask past students who did well in your class what you could do to improve. I’ve had one or two classes where I checked out, simply because the professor was a very poor lecturer. And in both cases, I actually enjoyed speaking with the professor one-on-one, they were very different in that type of interaction. I have no doubt that if they made a real, concerted effort to improve their skills, their classes would have improved dramatically.

If you’ve tried all of that, and you still are having problems in the class, try the laptop ban. But be fair about it:

1. Make your policy known in the registration bulletin/course descriptions so people know your policy *before* they have to register.
2. Consider using a “compromise” ban–that is, laptops only for notes but a violation of that policy results in a total ban for that student.
3. If you do decide to ban 100%, and your course is a required course, make sure there is at least one other section taught by someone else for those who depend on the ability to actually read the concise, type-written notes they do take.

And of course, if you’re banning laptops to escape the mind control radio emissions of the National Security Agency, try a tinfoil hat first.