<p>It’s about decorum. Bad manners are contagious. No professor can stop students from daydreaming, but when it becomes okay for a student openly to not pay attention, then everyone feels free to do it and the classroom environment suffers. No professor can be more interesting than the endless distractions and entertainments of the internet. It is a very rare student who can resist the pull of electronic distraction, no matter how engaging the professor is. Therefore such distractions have no place in the classroom, at any level, in any place, unless the student is held accountable for using the laptop in an academically responsible manner.</p>
<p>As I mentioned couple of posts back, my daughter found laptop to be very useful for her art history (and many of her humanities courses), but not so much for her math and finance courses. Frankly, if she is so stupid as to surf FB while she is in class then she deserves to fail the class.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>While this may be true for some students, it was certainly not true for me. The only class in which I used my laptop for facebook/games/etc. was a truly painfully bad science-for-non-majors class that I would have LOVED to drop if there had been any other science class that was open and fit my schedule (I was looking to fill a requirement). Got an A, anyway, BTW – it was that stupid of a class. I won’t argue that some students use the internet as a distraction, but many do get a lot of value from using a computer for notes. I know I did, in a certain kind of humanities or social science lecture class, where there was a lot of information thrown out very quickly. I occasionally didn’t bring my computer to those classes, because I forgot to charge it or whatnot, and my notes on those days were markedly less clear, less organized, and much harder to read. I imagine I would have done notably worse, or at least had a hard time doing as well, without my computer. </p>
<p>Also, I would occasionally use it to play a “snake” like game while listening to class discussion, in classes that were half lecture, half discussion. I was only playing the game half-heartedly, barely looking at the screen, and it served the same purpose as doodling for me – I’m one of those people who HAS to do something with their hands, or it is actually harder for me to pay attention. I was very engaged in the discussions, and got full participation points. Not everyone operates in the same way. </p>
<p>So, OP, I think you should encourage your son to experiment, see what works for him. Most people, I think, find that computers are very useful in certain kinds of classes, but not in others, and he’ll probably find that balance for himself. I left mine at home for discussion based seminars, for instance, but last semester I was in a Religion seminar with a girl her brought her laptop, and she sometimes looked up terms and myths that we were puzzling over, and it was actually useful – for everyone.</p>
<p>Agree with oldfort. S1 has found having a computer in class, in his case an iPad, to be quite useful. He has a system of correlating his notes to the readings and other research that would be much more difficult if he had to transcribe handwritten notes. Further, he types super fast and is not as well practiced in handwriting. For him, a computer in class is essential. He knows of few students at his school that do not pay attention since argument and discussion make up a great deal of the class. It also makes for a different structure for note taking. Class size is also typically small. No classes over 14 this past quarter, so it is hard not to pay attention.</p>
<p>I think it depends on the class/major a lot.</p>
<p>In comsci it’s a maybe, in history type classes you can TOTALLY get away with it, so long as you’re not using IM or social networking things. </p>
<p>In physics, I had my laptop but rarely used it. Depending on the teacher, I’d keep it on the table next to me (usually unoccupied haha) and pop it open if something came up that I wanted more info on. </p>
<p>In math, never really used the laptop, except that my recent math book is a PDF so I sometimes pull it out for that… At one point I broke the PDF up and had it on my iPod, and used that during class (which set off one of my professors one day… HE THOUGHT IT WAS SO COOL lol)</p>
<p>In English, my teacher banned it. However, the one day that she let people use laptops to type their midterm essay, I didn’t find out until it was too late and wrote the essay on paper (she loved it anyway). </p>
<p>Sometimes, I don’t pull out anything at all. I found in the English classes in particular, no notetaking was needed and having a piece of paper out would usually tempt me to start drawing all over it. >></p>
<p>That’s been true in a few other classes too! </p>
<p>If you want a laptop for taking notes, buy a tablet. SERIOUSLY. I wanted to do this and was a dumbass not to (the Vaio I bought was cheaper than an IBM X201t… I couldn’t help it!! Ugh!)</p>
<p>Yet another professor chiming in here.</p>
<p>I’m a math prof at a tier 4 public, and I’ll admit that colors some of what I’ll say here.</p>
<p>Decorum is an issue: If a large enough minority of students behaves in an unprofessional fashion (facebooking, emailing, etc) then the class as a whole does suffer. Students sitting near a student who is using his/her computer to zone out are often distracted. Cell phones ringing in class are distracting to the whole class. This is nothing more than a modern day version of students talking too loudly to their neighbors about irrelevant stuff. And it does bother the students who are there to actually try to learn something. And it is different than daydreaming and doodling, neither of which tend to create distractions for the students around the daydreaming doodler. And doodling is for some people (including myself) a way that lets me actually focus more clearly on what’s being said if I already have written notes (i.e. power point slides etc)</p>
<p>Decorum issues can even be affected by a minority of one, if that student is laughing at what he/she is watching on you-tube instead of at least trying to pay attention in class.</p>
<p>In my own classes (as opposed to colleagues in other departments), I don’t see students trying to take notes on laptops. That’s probably because the only word processor they know is Microsoft Word, which is absolutely terrible at dealing with even the simplest of mathematical formulas. Many years ago I wound up banning cell phones from my class due to the large increase in the number of classes interrupted by very loud and obnoxious ring tones. I still ban cell phones outright, except for one rather new feature: Occasionally I will have a student ask if they can photograph the board after a particularly nasty, long involved piece of mathematical work. I’ll say yes, but I do ask them to email me the photo so that I can post it on the course web site. Sometimes the student remembers, most times not, but I try to not let that bug me too much.</p>
<p>I do teach some classes where there computers are used for sophisticated problem solving sessions where the students are doing the problems rather than watching me do them. In these classes, all the students have laptops to work on; they can either be the student’s own laptop or one of the department’s. And yes, sometimes, I do notice students having trouble staying on task.</p>
<p>And I guess the thing that puzzles me the most about texting, facebooking, gaming, emailing in class, web browsing that’s not class related, listening to music on the ipod, and even old fashioned sleeping in class and yakking too loud is this: Do students really think that we (the professors) are so oblivious as to not notice their rude behavior?</p>
<p>There are times when I’ve thought about telling a student who is particularly distracting that I really wish he’d just skipped the class.</p>
<p>robinsuesanders: You should read this post to your first class of the term.</p>