<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">anita</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anita@itforchange.net">anita@itforchange.net</a>></span><br>Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 8:06 AM<br>Subject: Re: FW: [IP] Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away<br>To: <a href="mailto:inclusionroundtable2014@googlegroups.com">inclusionroundtable2014@googlegroups.com</a><br><br><br>
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similar to our dilemma :)<br>
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Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away By Clay Shirky Sep 9 2014 <a href="https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368" target="_blank"><https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368></a>
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 <a href="tel:1998" value="+661998" target="_blank">1998</a>, 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.)
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Have you visited: <a href="http://www.gender-is-citizenship.net" target="_blank">www.gender-is-citizenship.net
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</font></span></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan" target="_blank">http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
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