a new thought provoking article about the downside of most students using computers to take notes by a U of Michigan Education professor.
It sure makes sense to me…
I ban computers in my class unless I specifically need them to use them for whatever reason.
I’m glad that laptops exist though as someone who has a hard time holding a pen. I do understand why they’re not good for most people.
His viewpoint makes sense to me. btw- I am hearing how students don’t even bother attending lectures because they can get them on their computer. Pros and cons. I wonder how many students learn material without multiple ways of reinforcing it in their brains- and how many don’t learn it because they can so readily look it up. Writing by hand is labor intensive enough it forces people to focus on the important points- not like taking dictation with a computer.
btw- romani… a friend with severe rheumatoid arthritis has pain and difficulty with a keyboard. She went from chemistry crystallography post PhD work in an era hands on work was essential compared to today to college CS (MS in that) teaching to not using computers. Touch and voice computer tech currently available came too late for her to function well. Things sure are different for your generation.
My friend has accommodations and is allowed to use a laptop for note taking in every class. Some teachers put restrictions on it like requiring laptop users to sit in the front row or on the side and friend thinks that’s unfair and drawing attention to her disability (as only those with disabilities can use the laptops) but I think it is to lessen the interference to other students. In this article it shows that the laptops are distracting to other students.
One of my kids has a learning disability that affects her handwriting. An accommodation she has had since 1st year of HS is to use a laptop for notetaking. I know she feels conspicuous in lecture when she does it if the prof won’t let others.
I see this article also says maybe you shouldn’t have them in business meetings as well. THAT would be a disaster for me. I am usually in charge of tracking the takeaways and information discussed in a business meeting. I literally type continuously – I’ve mastered typing most of what people say and running the meeting as well. Even when I am projecting the meeting I’m still doing this. And some of it is related to having the memory of a 55 year old – it is like having a backup for my brain to do this. I sure don’t want to say that to my clients, though. Honestly, I’d leave a client ASAP who tried to keep me from having a laptop in meetings.
@wis75 voice to text is a lifesaver with my papers. I bow down in awe of my fore-mothers and fathers who made it through without modern technology. I am certainly not that strong.
@intparent FWIW, I do not make my students provide documentation for their laptops. I trust them. I do give them a one-strike warning though. If you’re not taking notes, you’re not only not paying attention but everyone around you is distracted. So usually a handful of students will have them. It seems like it’s becoming more accepted among undergrads that they can’t use them… they put up less of a fight than my cohort did.
This is a major concern to me, and it annoys me that the author skates right past it:
This singles out students with disabilities and/or accommodations, and it forces them to out themselves publicly. The author seems to think this is minor or OK because his university also has not figured out how to not out students who need extended time to take a test. (The students who needed extended time in my classes were administered the test at an alternate time, not in the same administration as everyone else.) To me, this is an unacceptable byproduct.
IMO, college students are adults. Young adults with still-developing brains, but adults nonetheless. Life is full of distractions and someday, they must learn to cope. If your learning is impeded because you are taking notes on a laptop, how will you learn when you work in a computer-focused world after you graduate? I sit in meetings where grown people check their email during the dull moments; if I hadn’t learned how to marshal my own responses early on in life I’d be messed up in the game. Shall we also cancel college sports and extracurriculars because they, too, can be distracting?
I have taught in classes, though, where laptop users were asked to sit in the back (not the front). The rationale was that if you are shopping for shoes or watching YouTube videos in the back you aren’t subjecting everyone behind you to that.
Well… my kid’s HS accommodations also had her sitting in the front… just saying.
Whoa- people need to learn in less than great conditions just to accommodate someone’s distracting behavior? So what if a disability becomes noticeable. It wouldn’t be a disability if it were of no consequence. And, one would expect the adult college students to already have been taught to accept that some can do the work with a disability. Everyone has limitations- we are not all star athletes, musicians, artists, mathematicians, writers…
I like the thought of laptop users needing to be out of the way, such as in the back. Cell phones included as well- they function as tiny laptops. distraction for many of us who tend to include our surroundings in our sphere of awareness.
I agree that laptops are distracting in class and advised my D not to use her laptop to take notes in class. She has been taking notes by hand this semester (freshman) like she did in high school.
I actually didn’t know that some people need laptops due to a disability and agree that they should not be singled out. Plenty of people have invisible disabilities, and it is up to them whether or not they want to share that information with others.
But they are asking for the accommodation, so if the accommodation is that they get to use a laptop and everyone knows that the rule is no laptop except for those with an accommodation, then they have a choice to ‘reveal’ the fact that they have an accommodation (not why, which could be because of a learning disability or because of a writing issue or vision issue) or to not use the laptop. Some people had these same issues when laptops didn’t exist, and they got notes from other kids in class or recorded the lectures and then typed them up later. We had a guy in my class who was deaf so had a signer. He sat in the front row (an accommodation) and she sat in front of him, off to the side so as to not be in anyone’s way. Others took notes for him (an accommodation). It wasn’t a secret.
As an adult at work, I really find far more efficient to take notes on a laptop as I listen to someone talk. It is wildly inefficient to try to read my handwriting and sort/merge information later on for a more coherent set of notes. I don’t know why we would ask our kids to go back to the old fashioned way of doing it.
As far as I am concerned, it is the other students’ issue if they get distracted by the computer and do something else with their time, and their loss when test time comes if they didn’t collect the right information.
My kids went to a HS where they had school assigned laptops, and were expected to bring them to class every day (charged and ready to go). Like we used to have to bring a pencil and paper. Even my kid without a disability took notes on hers all the time – she was put off by colleges we visited where students weren’t using them in the classroom. She thought they were pretty backward. And it certainly didn’t hurt her to use one in college – she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
My kids’ school went through a laptop phase, and noticed a sharp decline in learning. They pointed it out to the students and gave them the option. 95% reverted to pen and paper notes.
I’m old school. If I get bored in a meeting, rather than answering emails or browsing on a computer, I start daydreaming. It always seemed kind of rude to have people typing away on computers when someone was talking, because you can tell when people are taking notes vs. when they’re not just by when they’re typing. Most people weren’t taking notes.
It’s been six or seven years since I’ve taken any kind of college class other than online classes, but I do remember students bringing laptops into class. Seemed like about half were actually doing something class-related with them, and the other half were on Facebook. As someone who didn’t bring a laptop into class, I found all the computers to be very distracting.
My daughter got paid to take notes in college. She did them by hand, in her lovely handwriting (a gift she did not inherit from me!), then scanned and emailed them to her clients, who had disabilities that made note-taking difficult.
I think it is up to the student to take responsibility for his or her learning. It would not make sense for laptops to be banned in a professional world so if laptops are banned in a lecture setting students will not be adequately prepared for the real world that has many distractions. Right now is the perfect time for students to learn how to use laptops as an educational tool, not a distraction. However, if a student feels like they will learn more by handwriting his or her notes, I think that is of course okay.
@roycroftmom, our kid’s school went to laptops far before it was common. The teachers had to learn to make the laptops a useful learning tool, just as the students need to learn to use it to improve their effectiveness as students. That took them a couple of years, but now no one would go back.
I agree with Rachel – it is a critical skill for today’s workplace to be able to use technology as an extension for notes, creating documents, quickly researching items during working sessions, etc.
There are certainly business settings without wifi and even without electricity to recharge.
I’m glad my kids learned cursive and have beautiful penmanship.