<story><title>Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dave_TRS</author><text>My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren&amp;#x27;t phased by the laptops and rarely ban them.&lt;p&gt;But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it&amp;#x27;s almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That&amp;#x27;s what I&amp;#x27;ve seen over and over in 7 years of post secondary classes. I don&amp;#x27;t know much about the professor in the article, but I would suspect improving his lectures will be more effective in helping students learn than banning laptops.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dgacmu</author><text>I have a counterexample - CMU&amp;#x27;s 15-112 bans laptops.  The professor for it for the previous 8 years, David Kosbie, is one of the most highly regarded professors in the university.&lt;p&gt;His primary rationale for it is the &amp;quot;externalized cost&amp;quot; effect described in the article, which I can attest is quite true in my experience teaching.&lt;p&gt;When you look out at a sea of faces, you can see where the laptops are because of the reactions of people &lt;i&gt;around&lt;/i&gt; them -- eyes keep flicking involuntarily to the interesting stuff happening on the screen, and then they peel themselves back to the lecture.  It amounts to a long sequence of micro-distractions that have a pretty pronounced effect on learning.  Humans are very attuned to things like motion, flickering, and changes in their field of view, and those are very present when browsing the web or reading facebook on your laptop in class.  Second, laptop screens are backlit, which means that they may be the &lt;i&gt;brightest&lt;/i&gt; object in someone&amp;#x27;s field of view in the class.&lt;p&gt;Zoning out on a kindle or printed newspaper has much less of an effect on the people around you.  I don&amp;#x27;t care if someone ignores my class -- that&amp;#x27;s their choice.  I used to not ban laptops, but I&amp;#x27;ve become convinced that it&amp;#x27;s worth it for the &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; students.&lt;p&gt;Also, think about the numbers.  It&amp;#x27;s very possible to have a lecture that&amp;#x27;s very engaging for about 95% of the class (which is a pretty impressive rate all-told).  But the remaining 5% have about 10 students each in a field behind them that can see their laptop screen, so a very small number of students goofing off on laptops can have a disproportionate effect on the class.</text></comment>
<story><title>Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dave_TRS</author><text>My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren&amp;#x27;t phased by the laptops and rarely ban them.&lt;p&gt;But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it&amp;#x27;s almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That&amp;#x27;s what I&amp;#x27;ve seen over and over in 7 years of post secondary classes. I don&amp;#x27;t know much about the professor in the article, but I would suspect improving his lectures will be more effective in helping students learn than banning laptops.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>valine</author><text>Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.</text></comment>