May 15, 2008
Why Solitaire (Might) Make Professors Better
In 2001 Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, took to the opinion pages of The New York Times to record his displeasure with those students who use their laptops during class to surf the Internet, play games, e-mail, or even trade stock.
Ayres now has a prominent supporter in Saul Levmore, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, which has taken the step of blocking Internet access in most of its classrooms. Levmore notes that Internet usage "appears to be contagious if not epidemic" during classes.
In praising Levmore's decision, Ayres stresses that there is no good a priori argument against multitasking. "The case is at best an empirically-informed hunch about what is the best way to teach. I see some power to a parentalism argument that teachers should ban surfing because it impedes students’ ability to learn," Ayres writes on the Freakonomics blog.
But Ayres does concede that some of his more crafty students have come up with a plausible argument in favor of laptop-based distractions in the classroom: If he is forced to compete with the Internet for his students attention he will have more incentive to be an engaging presence in the classroom.
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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As commenter #132 on the Freakonomics blog writes, “an alternative to banning the Internet is to integrate it into the lecture.”
Not only do I take this approach with all my courses, where my students are required to bring laptops to class, but I also do this with every conference presentation or guest lecture.
I simply assume everyone in the audience has access to the Internet in real time, and structure my talks accordingly. I toss out URLs, and expect the audience to pull up the website and follow along. I pose questions for the audience to answer in real time online. And I suggest articles and other resources that I expect listeners to bookmark for later reference.
Taking this approach allows me to cover more material, more effectively. The days in which audiences were limited to more passive roles are long gone; we need everyone to be active participants in the educational process. Those without Internet access in class are missing out.
— Paul May 15, 11:55 AM #
If you run an interactive class, engage in class exercises, including small group exercises, and cover material efficiently with few digressions, the problem will diminish. On the other hand, I remember doing lots of crossword puzzles in class and not being the worse for indulging in this diversion.
— luigi May 15, 03:42 PM #
As for multitasking, one would do well to remember Zen wisdom: He who reads while eating does neither.
— original marcii May 15, 04:19 PM #
Dr. Mei Lien, in the Department of Psychology, Oregon State University, is doing research on the efficacy (or lack thereof) of multi-tasking. http://oregonstate.edu/~lienm/research.html
— barbara May 15, 04:54 PM #
These professors are arrogant fools. The medium—oral lecturing—was orignally and is still now—a form of publishing, not teaching. It has had no relevance to teaching for the last 400 years. That people still do it merely attests to the depth and breadth and global distribution of human stupidity.
Secondly, lecturing—oral explanation of some sort about some thing—is a SLOW medium of communication. Research showed 80 years ago that it uses about 7% of human conscious verbal attention capacity. That leaves 93% unused, hence students want to do something, anything, during the long gaps between words, orally delivered. Creativity research, also about 50 years old, showed a distraction factor (cut blood flow to the brain via caffeine, smell of rotten apples in desk for composing music, etc.) increased creativity. It is quite likely that more than half of the internet-browsing students are increasing creative engagement with the lecture ideas via distracting their brains into other domains.
In other words, the forbid response of these professors, is unfounded in research, understandable in some childish sense, and lamentably un-scientific, un-professorial, and a disgrace to our profession. I wish they would desist.
Thirdly, we get to the ophan idea—education research. Ideas presented without grounding, in lecture formats, Kintsch et al showed at the U of Colorado Inst. for Research on Intellectual Behavior some 30 years ago, delivered 7% of themselves to memory 15 minutes after class and less than 1% to memory 30 days after class. It is just a little speech platform to make lonely professors feel important—the data shows IT DOES NOT WORK if you are trying to cram ideas into bins in brains. What does work is students while-engaged-in-some-challenging-to-them-task asking about points of need they encounter and in THAT context getting ideas that would have stupidly otherwise been delivered via lecture. That and a few related formats work—lecturing as usually done is pure ego, and has no relation to teaching at all.
Dover books is filled with lectures of genius by British scholars 50 and 100 years ago—lectures can be thrilling and worth moving one’s body to see—but they are NEVER effective, even when interesting, at delivering ideas to brains of others. They are merely publishings, not teaching and rather ineffective teaching, however “interesting” a Brit may be able to make them.
— Richard Tabor Greene May 16, 10:04 AM #
I will have the secret police ban laptops
— dan brown May 18, 08:31 AM #
hmm some students are so ingaged in their computer that they don’t even hear you when you talk right to them and ask a question… Learning is a 2 way street. Not all of it is the responsiblity of the professor.
— annon May 21, 04:42 PM #
Uh, what did you say Richard (#5), can you repeat that? From the repetitious nature of your rant, I bet you’ve given some of those lectures that I surfed the internet during…
— Bob Jun 3, 01:57 PM #