Today, while attending a New Media Perspectives lecture, I discovered that the view from the last row of Webb Auditorium at RIT provides a sobering lesson for the budding teacher. From my vantage point I watched as student after student opted out of the lecture with the help of portable electronics. The student immediately in front of me spent most of his time watching anime episodes on his video iPod
I’m not sure how to react to this or take it into account in planning classes. The knee jerk extremes would be to either ban laptops (which is just plain dumb) or simply pretend that it shouldn’t happen (or even worse, won’t happen to me). I’m just not quite sure what the middle ground would be. Any thoughts about it?
Embrace it. Figure out how this connectivity can be channeled for class. Besides, if we had the means in school we would have used these devices also.
To a point I agree. And thats what I’ve been thinking about.
At the same time, I’m just not sure quite how yet.
On an aside, watching a wireless deathmatch being played during a class was a bit of a paradigm shift. Up until that moment, that type of networked interaction was restricted, in my mind, to places with hardwired connections such as dorm rooms, houses, and lan parties. While the notion of wireless web browsing was pretty much a given for me, this was new. And really pretty interesting.
Admittedly, it isn’t really any different than txting or e-mailing from any wireless device. I guess it just is a bit more involved/intimate use of the technology.
Can you incorporate some of your lecture/lesson online in a way that would require students to click on links to see what you’re demonstrating? Of course the issue is then the fact that not everyone has laptops. Unless, knowing that several students will have a laptop, you make the others gather around the screen. An idea full of holes for sure. Don’t know what kind of class you’ll have, but anything that combines the different learning styles will at least help those who want to pay attention (lecture w/ visual aid and handouts).
I dunno. Isn’t work at the university level “sink or swim”? If you MUD 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in your dorm room, you’ll miss out on class and fail. If you play WoW 24 hours a day and get the occasional change of scenery by playing on a laptop in a prof’s classroom, then you’re going to fail. Sound familiar? :)
Students are paying to learn something. If they want to throw their (or their parents) money away, that’s their problem as far as I can tell.
Let me put it this way: It’s your responsibility to be engaging, but it’s also the student’s responsibility to meet you in the engagement.
While it might be nice to get something together to actually utilize all those spare cycles being used to watch LOST in your class, you might have a hard time making it a course requirement to have a certain amount of equipment if it isn’t clear that it’s required. But you might want to give it a shot.
So on the one hand, I say, ignore any tech distraction abuse, but on the other, I say if you want to use all that tech out there in the audience for good, then go for it with the caveat that you can’t necessarily force it.
Come down hard on it. No networking in class that’s not promoting the purpose of the whole class. It’s incredibly distracting to sit near one of these jokers, so they’re essentially capable of bringing the whole room down with them. Having just dealt with the fun of being a student in the “modern” college lecture hall, I can assure you, it’s okay to have a policy and to follow it. Throwing a student out for letting a cellphone ring actually does make an impression.