Affordance Anxiety: Questions of Laptops in Class in Blended Courses

Laptops, with the many affordances they offer for learning, are ubiquitous on campus. But they are no longer welcome in many classrooms. When faculty members first began prohibiting them, anxious about the distractions they posed, students protested that they were needed for notetaking. But research by cognitive psychologists, now widely cited, demonstrated (in 2014) that note taking by hand was actually a more productive method for making a record of classroom activity. It strengthens memory, the synthesis of ideas, and conceptual thinking, key features of academic student success.
       Still, a debate continues between laptop resistant teachers—often contributing Op-Eds to national publications—and faculty members finding reasons to allow the technology in the classroom, often to recognize the everyday habits of today’s students. The debate is no longer limited to notetaking but extends to questions of digital connectivity in the classroom.
       The session is in three parts. The first will offer an account of the different views with the help of a one page handout summarizing them. At first glance, laptops in class may look like a problem of the conventional classroom. And, indeed, accounts of resistance come from professors of face-to-face classes. Thus, the presentation will begin with recognition that blended courses are also a potential location for the controversy. According to Michelle Miller (in Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology [2014]), “For [blended courses] to work, students have to master a certain amount of the material before coming to class and remain attentive and engaged while they are there. Because class time is so limited in blended designs—even more so than in a typical lecture-based class--not a moment can be wasted.”   
       Personal statements by professors in many fields have brought visibility (in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, and other print and digital publications) to the uses of laptops in class. The influential NYU Media Studies scholar Clay Shirky said this in explaining why he decided to reverse his classroom policy of encouraging laptop use in class. “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 towards involuntary and emotional reaction. . . . Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they focus—it’s me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions.”
        Indeed, distraction is the primary reason behind the bans. One widely cited empirical study (in Psychological Science) is titled “Logged In and Zoned Out: How Laptop Internet Use Relates to Classroom Learning” (2017). But Shirky (and others) note the “second hand smoke” problem, or what University of Michigan economist Susan Dynarski named (in the vocabulary of her field) as “negative externality,” which happens when one person’s consumption harms the well being of others. Dynarski’s strongly worded 2017 New York Times Op-Ed termed as “unequivocal” the research showing the ill effects of laptops in class. Observation of students, for another professor, indicates how many are so engaged with devices that routine interactions with other students suffer.    
       The other side of the debate reflects the view, as noted in a 2019 article in a business education journal, that teaching should accommodate student preferences: “Though some evidence indicates digitalization may be a distraction in the classroom, the answer may not be to resist technology but rather to embrace it. Digital is not going away. It has become a part of how young people communicate and process information as well as how they view the world and themselves in it.” A common theme among opponents of bans is that students deserve to make the choice themselves. Composition scholar and teacher John Warner, leaving room for laptop users to consider what their preferences mean for others, says in his regular Chronicle of Higher Education blog, “I am uncomfortable with ‘bans’ because my philosophy and values bend towards a privileging of student agency and responsibility. They have the right to make bad choices which may result in poor grades or a diminished intellectual experience. That right does not extend to harming others, but this is why I frame the classroom as a community with an ethos including responsibility to others.”
         Multi-tasking in class and elsewhere has been defended as a new way of learning, reflecting ubiquitous technology and cognitive plasticity. An experienced English professor, contesting bans, says imply that “since I can’t conduct a class without my laptop I’m going to let students use them.” And in explaining how he capitalizes on laptops in class for active learning a young professor has ridiculed academic reluctance to change.
        Perhaps not surprisingly, in its 2018 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology EDUCAUSE rejects any bans, classifying them as signs of that the faculty is overly skeptical about technology, accepting research that “simply confirms their biases against those digital devices—that they are distracting, that student device usage implies disrespect or a lack of attention, or that students are not taking good notes.”  
       The core of EDUCAUSE’s position is the need to protect the needs and prerogatives of particular classes of students: “Instructor policies that ban or discourage mobile device use in the classroom may disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities, first-generation students, students who are independent (with or without dependents of their own), and students who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Given that these groups of students attach high levels of importance to these devices for their academic success, instructors should set aside their concerns about the use of such devices in class.” Dynarski herself allows students with learning disabilities to use electronic devices in class. She recognizes that means a loss of privacy, but she says that while this is an unwelcome byproduct of her policy “it must be weighed against the learning losses of other students when laptops are used in class.”  
        What are blended course designers and instructors to do is the subject of the second part of the presentation. That may be simply nothing, accepting the default position of allowing students to act as they wish with laptops. But that might still include (in the syllabus and in instructor talk) inviting students to be self-governing and to recognize what Warner calls “the ethos of responsibility to others.” Some instructors address the problem by asking that laptop users sit in the back of the classroom. For others the solution is simple—be so effective in teaching that students will not be tempted by their Internet connections, a strategy Shirky relied on until he decided that the forces of distraction were more cognitively powerful than he could ever be.
       According to EDUCAUSE’s figures, as many as 19% of instructors are now banning or “discouraging” laptops in class. For Michelle Miller, who, again, registers in her book on online learning the significance of the problem in blended formats, there is this advice: “Creating a specific policy on the uses of different devices in class—and following through on enforcing it—is well justified by what we know about the power of multitasking to undermine learning both in the multitaskers and others around them.”
       A policy statement will be made available (in a handout) from the syllabus of an Ohio State University economics professor who bans laptops and other digital devices. He notes University rules against “disruptive behavior” in class, that “learning requires attention and focus,” and that “the use of technologies for extracurricular purposes during class is highly disruptive to the instructor, rude, immature, disrespectful. and distracts from course discussions. It interferes with access to an appropriate educational environment. Similarly, numerous experimental studies have shown that personal technological aids are causally related to poor performance in courses.” The syllabus reflects Miller’s view of “enforcement.” Thus: “Failure to abide by this policy may result is permanent dismissal and/or disenrollment from the course for disruptive behavior.” Such a categorical approach to classroom technology constitutes a bold step at OSU which recently entered an ambitious partnership with Apple making it a “Digital Flagship” institution.  
       The third part of the session will begin with a straw poll on the options reflecting what participants think is the best course of action in relation to laptops in class. Participants will then be invited to speak from experience and principle in naming effective strategies. An NPR story last year asked if there was a “happy medium.” The recent written record shows no signs of one but participants will be encouraged to identify such a possibility. Also, the discussion can be about more than the nominal topic of the session. The NPR story cited a professor who believes that the laptops in class problem has become a "a Rorschach test for so much that's going on in education.”