[P2P-F] Fwd: FW: [IP] Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away

Tue Sep 30 11:17:41 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: anita <anita at itforchange.net>
Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 8:06 AM
Subject: Re: FW: [IP] Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away
To: inclusionroundtable2014 at googlegroups.com

 similar to our dilemma :)

 Begin forwarded message:

Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away By Clay Shirky
Sep 9 2014 <https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368>
<https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368>

I teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and am an advocate
and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely
candidate for internet censor, but I have just asked the students in
my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in
class.

I came late and reluctantly to this decision — I have been teaching
classes about the internet since 1998, and I’ve generally had a
laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom. This
was partly because the subject of my classes made technology use feel
organic, and when device use went well, it was great. Then there was
the competitive aspect — it’s my job to be more interesting than the
possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally,
there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even
if young ones — time management is their job, not mine.

Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to
allow technology use in class grew worse over time. The level of
distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same
professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of
students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The
change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility
of the devices themselves, rather than any change in me, the students,
or the rest of the classroom encounter.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to
ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids down’, in the parlance
of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room.
The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of
relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively
exhausting — when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as
a welcome change.

So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and
phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: “Stay focused.
(No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)” Here’s why
I finally switched from ‘allowed unless by request’ to ‘banned unless
required’.

We’ve known for some time that multi-tasking is bad for the quality of
cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive
work we ask of college students.

This effect takes place over more than one time frame — even when
multi-tasking doesn’t significantly degrade immediate performance, it
can have negative long-term effects on “declarative memory”, the kind
of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what they
learned from earlier studying. (Multi-tasking thus makes the famous
“learned it the day before the test, forgot it the day after” effect
even more pernicious.)

[snip]

-- 

<http://www.ITforChange.net/>*Anita Gurumurthy* | Executive Director
IT for Change <http://www.itforchange.net/>
(*In special consultative status with the United Nations ECOSOC)*
 91-80-26654134 |  T:00-91-80-26536890 | Fax 91-80-41461055
Email:anita at itforchange.net
------------------------------

* Have you visited: www.gender-is-citizenship.net
<http://www.gender-is-citizenship.net> *

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