In Teaching Naked: Why Removing Technology from your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, José Bowen argues that technology can be employed most effectively outside the classroom, freeing class time for substantive discussions among students and faculty that increase learning.
Flashy powerpoints with video and synchronous e-conferences are impressive, but the best reason to adopt technology in your courses is to increase and improve your naked, untechnological face-to-face interaction with students. Technology is often accused of pushing people further apart (the interaction is really with a computer screen and not another human being, they say) but a few minutes of questions at the end of an hour covering material from behind a podium is hardly an interactive experience either. However, simple, new technologies can greatly increase your students’ engagement outside of the classroom and thus prepare them for real discussions (even in the very largest classes) by providing content and assessment before class time. The goal, in other words, is to use technology to free yourself from the need to “cover” the content in the classroom, and instead use class time to demonstrate the continued value of direct student to faculty interaction and discussion.
From Tomorrow’s Professor Blog.
This reminded me of a professor at Georgetown Law who has banned laptops from the classroom:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/04/09/georgetown-law-prof-david-cole-no-laptops-for-you/
I agree with the point that the basic components of learning should be pre-class preparation, i.e. students should do their homework so that a worthwhile discussion can exist in the classroom where the students are able to be proactive in asking and receiving answers to the questions that came up during their homework/class preparation.
However, public schools have taught students to wait to be spoonfed information instead of seeking it out themselves. This is what has been the reason for the demise of sciences and math learning and reasoning in the public schools and universities. Students obviously desire communication but they use their time unwisely for class due to the SPOONFED mentality. Class time should be discussion of the usefulness of the materials to current issues and then go back to make sure that the new material being taught is learned correctly and applied correctly to the problems based on societal needs.
Laptops in the classroom are not being used to stay on the classroom task which is to communicate only about the material currently discussed in the class time. There is too much texting of off task communications, i.e. students mentally taking themselves away from the discussion to talk to others outside of class tasks. It would be great if the students can stay within the confines of the class discussion by finding materials online to support the discussion.