SAMANTHA BLONS
Assistant A&E Editor
The click-clack of laptop keys is as common a sound in most Pepperdine classes as the scratching of ball point pens on paper once was.
However, Steven Lemley’s course in communication theory is not one of those classes. This semester, Lemley, associate professor of communication and former provost of Pepperdine, joined a growing list of professors across the country who have banned laptops during class to curb inappropriate use of wireless Internet technology.
Over the past few years, “I started noticing that some students seemed to be doing something behind their screens that wasn’t related to the class,” Lemley said.
Though most students on laptops were using them to take notes, he said that as time passed, increasing numbers were using the class time to surf the Web, check their e-mail or play computer games.
“Then in the last 12 months, I noticed that among the students who earned the lowest grades … were those using laptops inappropriately in class every day,” Lemley said. This correlation between poor grades and improper laptop use, along with other reasons, compelled Lemley to implement an experimental ban on laptops this semester.
Since the advent of laptop technology, universities nationwide have spent millions installing wireless access in classrooms, with the intent of equipping students with a high-tech education. More than half of all college classrooms carried wireless networks last fall, an increase of more than 65 percent since 2004, according to the Campus Computing Project, an annual study of information technology at colleges.
Ideally, educators wanted students to use laptops and wireless technology as instructional tools. However, students, who instead see the computer as an entertainment and a communication tool, often did not share their professors’ visions.
Freshman Autumn Ferrell brings her laptop to most of her classes, but lecture notes are rarely the only application open on her desktop. She said she often instant messages with her friends and updates her Facebook profile, in lieu of typing everything her professor says.
“It’s easier to type notes on a laptop, but on the other hand, there are so many distractions,” Ferrell said. Although she thinks she would perform better in her classes if she left her laptop in her dorm room, she continues to type her notes in class, usually while “multitasking” on the Internet.
Lemley thinks that certain students use laptops inappropriately during class because they think their behavior is not going to be noticed.
“When we’re in a group, we assume that we’re anonymous,” he said. “We also assume if there’s a presenter that he’s not going to notice us, and that he’s not going to care.”
All of those assumptions are incorrect, Lemley said.
Most professors have not banned laptops in class, and many allow students to regularly use the technology to take notes.
Sonia Sorrell, associate professor of art history, often finds herself lecturing to rows of laptop lids rather than faces when she teaches her three-hour Western Heritage class in Elkins Auditorium.
“The majority of students use their laptops responsibly,” Sorrell wrote in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, there are a few students who are not sufficiently mature enough to handle technology appropriately in the classroom, and those few students are making it difficult for everyone else,” Sorrell wrote.
And everyone else is noticing, according to Sorrell, who said she has received multiple requests from Pepperdine students to ban laptops in her classes.
“I have more and more students complaining to me that their colleagues’ misuse of technology during class is distracting and annoying,” she said.
Freshman A.J. Couvrette types his notes on his laptop for several courses, including Sorrell’s Western Heritage class. He said he does not think it is fair to ban laptops in classrooms, because it is often easier to type notes than to write them by hand during long lectures.
“If you ban laptops, people are going to struggle to take notes because they’re not used to it,” Couvrette said.
David Baird, dean of Seaver College who teaches courses in history, wrote in an e-mail that while students have not abused the use of laptops in his class, he has seen them abused in lecture classes.
“But it is the exception and not the rule,” he said. “I would not ban laptops from my class, but I can understand why someone would.”
Several of sophomore Bethany Estrada’s professors have banned laptops in their classrooms, she said.
“To the students who are trying to take notes and be productive, [a laptop ban] hinders their progress,” Estrada said. She said she takes her laptop to class only for courses that cover large amounts of information, because during slower lecture classes it becomes a distraction.
Many educators believe that the distractions offered by laptops are simply a new manifestation of an old problem: keeping students engaged and paying attention in class. Long before laptops, inattentive students passed notes, doodled, daydreamed or simply whispered to each other, sometimes distracting the speaker and other students.
“Students causing distractions is nothing new,” Sorrell said. “The means to cause problems in the classroom changes as technology change.”
Some colleges have implemented an Internet kill switch that allows professors to cut off the Internet access to their classrooms.
Bentley College in Boston put such a system in place for Ethernet-wired classrooms more than five years ago, but only recently updated the program to cut off wireless access. Although there are minor issues with the system, as students can sometimes pick up wireless signals from other classrooms, it has been successful on the whole, according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Baird said the implementation of such a system “would require far more discussion than has been devoted so far.”
Since he has banned laptops in his communication theory classes, Lemley said attention levels and quality of questions and comments in class have improved.
“I don’t know if it’s because we got rid of the laptops, but it may be.”
He predicts that the grades for this class will show improvement over the past semesters in which he allowed laptops.
02-15-2007
