Allow laptops in lecture

It seems that an increasing number of professors and preceptors have been demanding that students put away their computers for class or lecture. They insist that students should instead take notes by hand and print out all of the readings to bring to class.

The argument for closed laptops makes some pragmatic sense. If students do not have computers, they do not have the Internet and are therefore less likely to be distracted by games, shopping and the universal scapegoat: Facebook. This argument is true. Some people claim that they actually listen better and retain more information when they are slightly distracted, but all of the empirical data thus far has indicated otherwise. In fact, studies have found that “multitasking” is really just frequent switching of focus between different distinct tasks. The data shows that the switching causes students to perform worse on all the involved tasks. Armed with this information, as well as many years of personal experience, professors are not wrong, per se, to prohibit laptops.

But should professors dictate how students allocate their attention? College is supposedly a time during which we are given the freedom, for the first time, to determine our own life practices. This freedom exists in many parts of life at Princeton — from getting work done to making plans for every day and for life. The call for greater independence and maturity among students is one of the main tools that professors and preceptors often use to shrug off questions about upcoming exams or reject requests for extended paper deadlines. However, within the classroom, we are told to close our laptops “for our own good.” If we really are independent, then professors should give us the flexibility to be as distracted as we please. Those who choose to shop online instead of listen to lecture will realize after midterms that they paid $160 plus a full letter grade for that new pair of Uggs.

Laptops in lectures make a difference. For those who record and store notes on their computers, prohibiting their use is very impractical. Instead of carrying around a single machine throughout the day, students would also have to tote several notebooks or binders to appease certain teachers. For many of us, typing is much more efficient than writing by hand (e.g., you can’t copy and paste notes from the blackboard into your spiral notebook). Furthermore, the availability of Wikipedia and Google at your fingertips gives you an instantaneous mechanism for background research. (Finding other professors’ slides on the same topic is often very helpful.) Because assets such as these serve to facilitate learning rather than hinder it, I would hesitate to arbitrarily forbid laptop use in lecture.

Precept is a somewhat different matter. Although we each have a vested interest in participating in class, we do not pay nearly as much attention with laptops in front of us as we do without them. Perhaps precepts that allow computers suffer from less participation per student because the students take cues from each other. If a student sees others are speaking less, he or she will also speak less. As a result of this pluralistic ignorance, everyone ends up speaking less, and eventually the precept grinds to a halt, leaving the preceptor to ask those obvious, almost rhetorical, leading questions that everyone hates. (“Was Great Britain the only imperialist power during the 19th century?”) At the same time, banning laptops from precept prevents students from referring to their notes, which can lead to sessions of awkward silences just the same. Additionally, students would have to print out all the readings, which is annoying, time consuming and, of course, unsustainable.

There is a simple compromise here: Evoke the honor code to ask students to turn off their wireless capabilities during precept. If we can all agree not to cheat during unmonitored exams, I’m sure that we can collectively refrain from playing Sporcle. This will allow students to refer to their notes while abstaining from the online activities that generally make precept a drag.

Though I believe that these reforms of laptop policy would work, I doubt they would ever be implemented, because attention and participation comes down to one thing: the teacher. Although anyone can artificially create an environment in which no one is distracted by literally outlawing the distracting materials, attention is always a function of people’s interest. You can force people to hear and look, but you can’t control whether they listen or learn. The bottom-up approach to conducting lectures — banning all distractions — is contrary to the spirit of interest and enterprise that most departments strive to foster. Heads will rise from Amazon.com shopping lists when the lecture material becomes more relevant or compelling than reasonably-priced online goods. Until then, let students ignore lecture, to their own detriment, if they so choose.

David Mendelsohn is a psychology major from Rockville Centre, N.Y. He can be reached at dmendels@princeton.edu.