That just sounds bad, doesn’t it? Would it help if I told you that I was looking for a clip of Hannah Arendt being interviewed during a seminar on the intellectual history of Europe? We had just read Arendt’s essay, “On Totalitarianism,” and my professor wanted us to see her in Technicolor. Actually, it was probably that seminar which moved me to the camp of people who bring a laptop to class, as the internet came in extremely handy week after week (like when we Google-image-searched for the picture of Nietzsche’s sister 90-year-old sister enthusiastically shaking hands with Hitler). When that seminar started, I was one of a few people who did not bring my laptop with me. When it ended, almost everyone, including me, brought our laptops, allowing us to not only take better notes, but also to expand our intellectual reach.
I have converted: There are many reasons to take a laptop to class.
How many times have you been in a lecture or a seminar and had the professor bring up a topic or thinker you’ve never heard of before? In ye olde days you had two choices: Raise your hand and ask a question, or suck it up and pretend you understood what was going on. Obviously, the former is the best solution, but it can sometimes be problematic, driving a lecture off course for fifteen valuable minutes while the professor explains, and often students might be too embarrassed to ask, especially if the student is branching outside his comfort zone and doesn’t know whether he should know this or not (who really wants to be “that guy” who had never hear of Milton?). Now, the internet provides a generally suitable third option: Look it up! Don’t know what that word everyone is throwing about means? Look it up on the OED! Unfamiliar with Kant? Try Britannica or, if that doesn’t work, Wikipedia. If that doesn’t clear things up, raise your hand.
Beyond that, however, ready Internet access allows us to double-check our knowledge or do quick research before blurting an idea that might be brilliant (or bull). If something being said about Nietzsche reminds me of something Oscar Wilde wrote, I can quickly search through Google Books to verify the context.
Quite aside from the didactic benefits that can be found online, bringing a laptop to class can be an efficient way to conserve resources. Last semester, one of my course books was the extremely expensive 5-volume “Summa Theologica” by St. Thomas Aquinas. Reading it and referencing it in seminar meant either buying the $150+ set and dragging it to class, printing out hundreds of pages of it and then dragging the printouts to class or reading it online and bringing my tiny laptop to seminar for reference during class. I initially tried to go with Method B, because I really like paper, but then I realized that not only was it morally suspect to print out dozens of questions (kind of like chapters), but it was also a terrible hassle. I realized that having the digital ‘Summa’ with me in class was extremely useful because it allowed me to have multiple tabs open, flipping from question to question much more easily than I could have done with the hard copies, and the internet browser added all the convenience of the search feature.
Different people will find different uses for laptops. Some will do much better with pencil-and-paper note taking. Others, for a whole host of different reasons, may find it much easier to take notes with a keyboard. This is a personal choice, and it would be unfortunate for a professor or a group of students to handicap those students who for one reason or another find it more efficient to take notes on a laptop. Even asking students who use laptops during class to sit in the back row would unfairly disadvantage students using laptops, especially in large lecture halls.
Will all students with laptops in class refrain from using the internet for less-than-pertinent reasons? Probably not — we are human after all, and really, who hasn’t daydreamed during a lecture, doodling instead of taking notes? Sometimes this extracurricular surfing is legitimate: if your room draw slot is set during class, or if you need to coordinate a job interview or precept time-change via e-mail. Sometimes it isn’t. If students can multitask, good for them. If they can’t, it’ll probably show in their grades. Being distracted is nothing new. On the other hand, we’re going to be working intimately with computers and the internet for the rest of our lives, and I don’t see a reason for not starting now.
Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York, N.Y. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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