All Posts Tagged With: "laptops"
The danger of laptop theft
More than just a financial loss
With so many students crammed into the library studying for final exams, I’ve been hearing lots of stories lately about students getting their laptops stolen.
On the University of Waterloo’s website, there’s a page about laptop security that advises students to “assume the worst” if their laptop has been stolen. “Your password has been compromised, your files have been compromised. Change passwords everywhere, watch your bank accounts carefully.”
I’m sure it’s not any worse at Waterloo than it is at any other school, but it’s horrifying to even imagine my laptop suddenly disappearing.
Never mind the whole financial side of things. Even if I could push a button and get a new laptop for free, at any given time during the semester, my laptop contains a lab report in progress, maybe a draft of an essay, a chemistry assignment, and lecture notes for an upcoming test. Not to mention all the non-school related stuff.
I’ve heard enough horror stories about hard drives crashing that I do keep a backup of most of my files. But if I’m working on a biochemistry assignment that’s due in three days, I rarely bother to save a backup. And I’m sure there isn’t a backup of every picture, video or document on my laptop, either.
And according to these stories I’ve been hearing, the thieves are other students.
-Photo courtesy of Pink Sherbet Photography
Laptops in the classroom
Facebook doesn’t belong in lecture halls
Are laptop-users ignoring their professors or just multitasking?
Put your laptop away
And your phone. And your iPod. We have work to do.
Another day, another attack on us mean old industrial-age professors.
This time, it’s historian Fred Donnelly telling us all to chill out over lap tops in class. Students are not ignoring the work at hand, Donnelly suggests. Instead, they are returning to a pre-industrial mode of work:
Consider how people worked in the pre-industrial era. Labourers in agriculture and construction sang on the job. Weavers composed poetry to the rhythm of the loom and many skilled artisans employed a boy to read to them while they worked. Everyone talked on the job and took unscheduled breaks quite frequently. In short, they laboured away in a multitasking environment.
Right. And if slaves in the old South had had the internet, their masters would have been perfectly happy to let them caption Lolcats instead of picking cotton.
But seriously, the argument fails not just because of what seems to be an overly romanticized view of pre-industrial labour (oh to be a medieval serf: that was the life!), but because it creates a false analogy. There are some tasks you can do while you listen to music or chat with your friends. Who has not whiled a way a long car ride singing along to the radio? But there are other tasks that require one’s full concentration if they are to be done well. Listening to a lecture, and thinking about the content, and considering its connection to other things in the course, and taking notes — not to mention asking and answering questions — these are things that simply cannot be done effectively while watching videos on YouTube or killing zombies or updating your Twitter feed.
The laptop, Donnelly suggests, is a challenge to the authority of the professor, who is really no more than a Dickensian shop foreman:
Now, students have their own portable windows to stare into, their own songs to listen to, their games to play and messages to send to friends inside and outside the classroom. All the while they are seated at their work benches – oops, sorry, their places in the classroom – and presumably also taking notes from an instructor.
But that’s just it. They’re not also taking notes. They’re chatting with their friends in other classes:
ths class = CWOT prof thinks we r t8king notes FAIL LOL
That’s what kills me about the new apologetics of this supposed digital generation. While professors pat themselves on the back for being in touch and progressive, for creating a dynamic new learning environment, they are really creating an environment of increased contempt for learning and study.
All these students with laptops? They’re not multi-tasking. They’re just ignoring you.
Can I have your half-attention, please?
Profs say laptops are creating culture of ‘constant partial distraction’
I’m sitting in the back row of a darkened lecture hall at the University of British Columbia. Nearly half of the 200 students have their laptops open, giving off a piercing blue-white glow that reminds me of driving at night.
A girl directly in front of me is toggling between two chat windows, a website of song lyrics, email, her Facebook profile, and, every now and then, her lecture notes. It’s hard to concentrate. I feel a pang of sympathy for the professor at the front of the hall. His multitasking students are certainly busy, but by bringing their online lives into the classroom, are they paying enough attention to him—or their educations?
Université de Montréal business professor Jean Boivin decided enough was enough a few years ago, when he read in the newspaper that one of his students had lost thousands of dollars in the stock market—while trading online during a lecture. Boivin was then at Columbia University in New York, and in consultation with students, he banned laptops from the classroom. It’s a rule he brought with him when he returned to Canada.
“I’ve never had any students complain about the policy,” says Boivin, He says bright, flashing computer screens, particularly when used for surfing the web, are a terrible distraction. He believes the laptop ban has led to his students paying better attention and scoring higher on exams.
But ask many other students and the idea of forbidding laptops is practically sacrilegious. “My attention span only lasts so long. I don’t know what I’d do without my laptop,” says Stephanie Poato, a second-year communications student at Simon Fraser University, whose laptop screen shows a large Facebook profile photo of herself. “Plus, I pay for this class, and it’s my money, so if I fail I only have myself to blame.”
Students are under too much pressure to concentrate exclusively on any one thing, says fellow second-year student Nadia Saeker. “I know you can’t really be focused on everything at the same time, it’s just not possible,” she says. “But we all have jobs and are trying to get everything done at once. I don’t have the luxury of sitting here and concentrating only on my lecture.”
While some professors seek to exclude the devices from the classroom, others are creating multimedia-rich curricula in which students can draw on online resources and interact with each other. Banning laptops is just plain wrong, according to Don Krug, associate professor at UBC’s department of curriculum studies. He says students are adults, and the best a professor can hope for is a “respectful learning environment,” where students limit their own behaviour. “If they really want to learn the information, they will. They’re paying a lot of money,” he says. “We’re better off teaching them how to be responsible learners.”
