Resource tool causes controversy
Morgan Modjeski, staff
Laptops may improve your game but not your grade
It’s in university classrooms to see students using laptops, but how many of them are really using the laptops for academic purposes?
In the beginning of one psychology class, 20 students were using laptops to take notes, but near the last 45 minutes, half of students who were taking notes at the beginning of the class had turned to less academic ventures like solitaire.
Despite that, these electronic resources have been beneficial, according to John Markham, an assistant biology professor who teaches two classes with over 100 students attending each.
“For my larger classes, I have power point notes. [Students] can have those notes on the computer, whereas most students would print them off. [Having the notes on a laptop] would be more convenient than the printed copies,” said Markham.
Ian Hudson, an associate professor of economics who teaches a class with 160 students attending, says that he has absolutely no idea what is going with laptops in the classroom.
“I have no idea if they are a distraction or not. For some students it’s clearly a help [that] they have very organized notes . . . but I have no clue what goes on in the back of the classroom when people are on their laptops,” said Hudson.
When asked about the idea of banning laptops, Hudson said that it is really up to the students.
“Like everything else in university, it’s up to the student what they want to do with their stuff. If some student wants to come sit in my class and look at things like [Facebook.com], that’s really up to them. It’s not elementary school anymore,” said Hudson.
Hudson said that he has had no negative experiences with laptops within the classroom yet, but he knows that there is always room for potential disaster.
At other Canadian universities, some professors have banned the laptop from their classrooms citing it as a distraction for students.
According to a recent article released by University Affairs, Teresa Dawson, director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Victoria, suggested that some faculty members use active-learning approaches like problem-based learning and the new clicker technologies that allow simultaneous class response to questions.
“Kinesthetic learners, in particular, need to be active in class, and so if we make them sit passively it is harder for them to learn,” Dawson says.
At the beginning of this school year, the University of Manitoba implemented the new I-Clicker technology for many classes.
