Professor Anonymous teaches political science at Laptop U, where her students are too busy clacking at their keyboards to look at her or her PowerPoint slides. Are they taking notes? Or surfing for naked celebrities?
To me, in-class internet surfing falls under the “your funeral†policy. If students want to bomb my final because they weren’t paying attention to the lecture, then go for it.
In the end, I am not sure the PowerPoint slides or the laptops are making the kids smarter. They swear that they have neater notes as a result, but I’m not sure that neat notes = good grades. And don’t give me “the modern students are visual learners†nonsense. When they eventually have to get a job, they aren’t going to get a PowerPoint presentation at the job interview.
Web surfing has been banned at University of Chicago Law School, my daughter tells me.
I suspect this is related to the earlier post about 20 somethings being the “dumbest” generation.
I teach college and I see students who have great technical skills – when it comes to navigating MySpace or downloading music (or, I suppose, other things). And they may have a great store of disconnected facts.
But for a lot of the students, everything is so much on the SURFACE – there’s not really a lot of effort made to link the knowledge they gain in different classes, there’s not a lot of effort made to think more deeply. And I do think the “powerpoint” or “surf” mode of doing things – perhaps along with the extreme emphasis on testing and “assessment” we see these days – are all a contributing factor.
And God forbid you ask them to “research” something academic – they totally shut down, or else flee to the comfort of Wikipedia and other “obvious”-but-not-fact-checked sites.
My policy: No laptops open in class unless I tell you we are using them that day, which is a rare occurrence. Case closed.