Does the Tap-Tap of Laptops Drive Professors Insane?

The kids will soon be back in those hallowed halls of academia and a good number of them will have their electronic appendages with them. Professors are working overtime trying to figure out how laptops, PDAs, and cell phones fit into the classroom.

Every professor has tales about the downside of laptops in their classrooms. They say that kids turn off their thinking skills and turn it into a touch typing class. Or that the annoying tap-tap of the keyboard drives them to distraction as they try to frame their next thought. They complain about kids who doze behind their open laptop screens (some report looking out on a sea of open laptop cases with logos) and about kids who IM, shop, and eBay to wile away the class hours.

Not all professors think laptops should be ousted from the classroom though; many talk about laptops the same way they talk about the students in their class—engage them and they'll be fine.

Campus Tech Fight
A few campuses are fighting back with their own technology. Some rig the campus network to be turned off in class. Some are experimenting with modifying a student's privileges to disable email and web accounts while they're scheduled for classes. Some schools have it written in school policy that students need explicit permission to be on their computers in class.

But aside from a few experimental campus-wide tactics, notebook policy varies from classroom to classroom, professor to professor. I spoke to an English professor at Columbia University (who happens to write about technology for PC Magazine as well) and his answer would have made Hemingway look verbose. "I don't allow laptops in class. Period. Teaching is a kind of conversation, even if one person participates only through facial expressions, and you can't have a conversation with someone who's typing on a keyboard."

Curiosity piqued, I wrote to my son's economics professor at Reed College to ask him what he and his colleagues thought about notebooks in the classroom. "Mixed feelings," he answered. He pointed out the many laptops add to the classroom experience—supporting arguments and gathering facts (what is the currency in Bulgaria?). Ultimately he felt that Reed College "would make this sort of behavior generally unacceptable by the community, not just the professor."

Another professor at Elon University pointed me to a thread from the Association of Internet Researchers where professors shared both philosophical and tactical thoughts on laptops in the classroom. One described her tactics, which basically amounted to humiliating the students into never having their phones disturb a class again. Another would have laptop time and laptop-free time at her discretion. Many spoke of laptop/cell phone policies making it an offense for students to be texting, taking photos, or otherwise misbehaving electronically.

A professor from Virginia Tech told me that she makes sure the laptops are closed during her Q & A sessions, but allows them during the rest of class time. To her, surfing the web is sort of the modern day counterpart of doodling. And she reminded me that "students think it's a great tool so that they don't have to transfer their notes to their computers later. They can also create files with class notes, blackboard lectures, and more all focused on the topic so it becomes a management tool for learning."

What do you think? Should college classrooms be laptop-free zones, free-for-all zones, or something in between?