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November 08, 2007, 01:46 PM ET
One Cellphone, Gone but Not Forgotten
Like many of his colleagues, Ali Nazemi tells his students that they’d better turn their cellphones off before they come to class. But Mr. Nazemi, a professor of business administration and economics at Roanoke College, has gone to unusual lengths to drive home that message. When a student’s phone rang during a recent lecture, the professor confiscated it and proceeded to demolish with a hammer.
The incident was staged—Mr. Nazemi had arranged it with the student before class—but it had plenty of shock value. And that was precisely the point: As Samuel G. Freedman notes in The New York Times, plenty of professors are considering drastic measures to keep students from spending lecture-hall time fiddling with cellphones, iPods, and laptops.
One such tactic seems particularly interesting. A Canadian company called Smart Technologies has developed a program, called SynchronEyes, which lets professors monitor their students’ computers and freeze any machines that are not being used for note-taking. The software might be effective, but how many professors are willing to play the role of police in their own classrooms? —Brock Read
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