James R. Harrigan
Editor’s note: Professor Michael Munger of Duke University thinks students should be allowed to bring laptops and other forms of technology into class. James R. Harrigan, Director of Academic Programs at IHS, doesn’t. Consider this the Laptops-In-Class version of Keynes vs. Hayek. Rap video to follow.
Below is James’s rebuttal to Munger’s opening volley. Munger’s no-holds-barred argument is reposted below in case you missed it.
Professor Munger has me in a tight spot before I even begin. He has, after all, accused me (and others like me) of engaging in prostitution and/or slavery. I suppose it isn’t the first time for either, but still. And this because I have the temerity of banning laptops (and all other electronic devices) from my classroom. How was I to know when I implemented this ban that I would be either paying students to attend me or forcing them to do so? There I was thinking that I might be helping them learn something.
I know, I know. I am clearly out of my mind in thinking that students both can and should learn from the texts before them without having access to a limitless number of toys and gizmos open on their tiny desks, but there it is. I do think this. Hard.
And before I get into it let’s be clear. Slavery is the owning of another human being for the purposes of forcing him to do involuntary labor. The minute a student willingly signs up for a class, slavery is off the table. Prostitution, in Munger’s calculus, is a tougher nut to crack. Given, though, that I have never bribed a student do anything I rather doubt that I have to crack it. Extra credit? Please. This leaves only the matter at hand: should students be permitted to bring their electronics with them to class?
In the interest of fairness, even I can see where this might be a desirable thing. There are all sorts of classes, presumably, that might even require such things. Computer science comes to mind quite readily. Given that I do not teach such things, though, I just don’t care. I teach political philosophy, and one just does not need a computer to learn Plato. I am pretty sure Plato didn’t have one and he did just fine. I am also reasonably certain that Aristotle did not have one either, and he did pretty well learning his Plato. Of course, he learned his Plato from Plato, but I digress. Somewhere along the way I suppose some imbecile out there said “Today we turn to the allegory of the cave…please refer to the following Power Point presentation.” But just because a thing has been or can be done does not mean that it should be. I can eat tofu after all; I just see no earthly reason for doing so.
So I find myself in agreement on one central point with my colleague. Stop. Sucking. Indeed.
What is needed to learn is a book. And some conversation. And some guidance. That is all. It has ever been so, and ever will be so. Notice that I do not get all carried away here with studies about how people learn and about how many breaks per hour they might need. People can converse for a very long time, typically longer than any class, without falling victim to a case of the vapors. So do it. Just do it. Do it and stop your whining. Facebook will still be there when you are done, and you can exit the class and start calling and texting your friends the minute the book gets closed.
But not one blessed second before.
Learning –true learning– requires calm reflection, interaction, and quiet consideration. While these things cannot be guaranteed by a prohibition on laptops and other toys in the classroom, they can most certainly be encouraged.
And what is education in the end but the highest form of encouragement?
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Original post by Dr. Michael Munger:
If you have to pay someone to attend you, that’s prostitution. If you have to force someone to attend you, that’s slavery.
I have never understood why so many professors believe that students must be prostituted or indentured. But that is what the “ban laptops” crowd is arguing: We can’t count on students to learn voluntarily. So we have to bribe them, or we have to force them to leave their laptops home.
Look, profs: If you seriously find that most of your students are daydreaming, facebooking, or cruising porn sites (not that that’s a bad thing…), you might want to try an old and honorable solution. Two words.
Stop.
Sucking.
Academics is the only business I can think of that allows itself to blame the customers when the product is lousy. In any other business, we would propose improving the product. But whenever professors get together and have a group séance about “the life of the mind” and how cool our ideas are, you hear them talk, in the next breath, about how bad their students are.
The fact is that laptops don’t waste students’ time; professors do. Laptops are neutral tools. If the professor brings up an interesting topic, the student can Google it, go to Wikipedia, or look up some extensions. They can take notes with links to things that are useful. Or, the student can get bored and go to her friend’s Facebook page and get distracted, thinking “That’s not a real puppy. That’s too small to be a real puppy.”
There is a considerable body of research showing that the maximum sustained period of intense attention the human mind can focus is somewhere between 15 and 30, depending on the student. The model of having a professor read words and the student write the words for 75 minutes ignores the fact the student will likely focus, wander, and focus three or four times during the class. This piece, from 1996 (before laptops or Facebook were problems) makes an interesting point.
“Not infrequently we observe students having lapses of attention. And we’ve found that it’s not enough for us to tell faculty with whom we are working about the problem. They’re often aware of it already…After three to five minutes of “settling down” at the start of class, one study found that “the next lapse of attention usually occurred some 10 to 18 minutes later, and as the lecture proceeded the attention span became shorter and often fell to three or four minutes towards the end of a standard lecture.”
That is, the problem is not the distraction offered by the laptop. It’s the need of the human mind to have things broken up into pieces where concentration is possible, for focused attention is interesting and enjoyable. If the students weren’t looking at their laptop, they would be dozing or doodling.
The same article suggests a solution:
“Combining what we know about attention span and how the mind works, we suggest that lectures should be punctuated with periodic activities. Johnstone and Percival report that lecturers who “adopted a varied approach . . . and deliberately and consistently interspersed their lectures with illustrative models or experiments, . . . short problem solving sessions, or some other form of deliberate break . . . usually commanded a better attention span from the class, and these deliberate variations had the effect of postponing or even eliminating the occurrence of an attention break.” Many of our colleagues also report that when they intersperse mini-lectures with active engagement for students for as brief a time as two to five minutes, students seem re-energized for the next 15 to 20 minute mini-lecture.”
For those of us who teach that way already, having laptops from the classroom is not a problem. For those who don’t teach that way, banning laptops from the classroom is not a solution. Enslaving your listeners won’t feed anything but your ego. Free minds will pay attention if they want to.