This version is shortened from Clay Shirk's article:
https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368
I
teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and am an advocate
and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely
candidate for internet censor, but I have just asked the students in my
fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in
class.
I came late and
reluctantly to this decision — I have been teaching classes about the
internet since 1998, and I’ve generally had a laissez-faire
attitude towards technology use in the classroom.
...[But] the practical effects of my decision to allow
technology use in class grew worse over time. The level of distraction
in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and
largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected
using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to
correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices
themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of
the classroom encounter.
We’ve known for some time that multi-tasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.
This
effect takes place over more than one time frame — even when
multi-tasking doesn’t significantly degrade immediate performance, it
can have negative long-term effects on “declarative memory”,
the kind of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what
they learned from earlier studying.
People
often start multi-tasking because they believe it will help them get
more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is
degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect.... This side-effect is enough to keep people committed to
multi-tasking despite worsening the very thing they set out to improve.
Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their
ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics,
degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
This
problem is especially acute with social media, because on top of the
general incentive for any service to be verbose about its value, social
information is immediately and emotionally engaging. Both the form and
the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting,
especially compared with the hard slog of coursework.
Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider
is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the
emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and
plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider
and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if
they conflict, the elephant usually wins.
After
reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply
make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of
them as people trying to pay
attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of
which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional
reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong,
the rider still a novice.)
Regarding
teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s
not me demanding that they focus — its me and them working together to
help defend their precious focus against outside distractions. I have a
classroom full of riders and elephants, but I’m trying to teach the
riders.
The
final realization — the one that firmly tipped me over into the “No
devices in class” camp — was this: screens generate distraction in a
manner akin to second-hand smoke. A paper with the blunt title Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers says it all:
We found that participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who were not. The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.
There is no laissez-faire
attitude to take when the degradation of focus is social. Allowing
laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class — it lets each
person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.
Anyone
distracted in class doesn’t just lose out on the content of the
discussion, they create a sense of permission that opting out is OK,
and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their peers.
Against oppositional models of teaching and learning, both
negative—Concentrate, or lose out!—and positive—Let me attract your
attention!—I’m coming to see student focus as a collaborative process.
It’s me and them working to create a classroom where the students who
want to focus have the best shot at it, in a world increasingly hostile
to that goal.
*
