Technology in the classroom always comes with a certain dapper
flashiness about it; it’s usually impressive, eye-catching and attention-grabbing…
on the surface at least. There are of course, many benefits to not just
allowing, but encouraging and integrating devices such as smart phones, laptops
and tablets into the class or lecture room. It’s not the principle that bothers me as such,
but rather the practicalities of it.
I can’t help but think back to the more rudimentary, less
exciting, perhaps more quaint and old-fashioned skills: listening,
concentrating on one topic being discussed in one room, note-taking, feeling
the weight of a textbook, of the active shuffling between pages for easy
reference. Things that don’t seem to happen very much anymore, as if classes
have been overcome with a kind of technology-induced laziness, a reliance that
seems to rob the incentive to actively engage at that particular moment. It’s
almost as if those devices, such excellent tools to search out information, put
up a barrier to the more immediate, real engagement and interaction of learning
in a class or lecture room. After all, everything can be googled later or
lecture notes downloaded so that it can be justified to check messages, emails,
facebook, do a bit of browsing; effectively there is no need to fully “be” in
the class at all. I know it’s not meant to be like that, but somehow it just is,
and it appears as if these devices rob our already divided attention further instead
of enhancing it.
These thoughts have been going through my mind since I read
Nicholas Carr’s interesting post on
Students and their Devices, which lead me to Hembrooke
and Gay’s
landmark study, “The laptop and the lecture: The effects of
multitasking in learning environments” (2003). In it, two groups of students
receive the same lecture but one group is asked to keep their laptops (and
therefore access to the internet) closed. The group who had free access to
their laptops did noticeably worse on a test of the content after the lecture
than the group who had to keep their laptops closed. It certainly seems to
indicate that we are not as good at multitasking as we may think and that it
comes with a certain cost to how information is processed from working memory
to longer term memory and ultimately how it is transformed into deeper
knowledge and understanding.
Hembrooke and Gay point out, “the ubiquity, pervasiveness
and mobility of new technologies encourage a simultaneity of activities that
goes beyond anything our culture has heretofore ever known. Indeed, the ability
to engage in multiple tasks concurrently seems to be the very essence or core
motivation for the development of such technologies…Of course, distraction in
the lecture hall or classroom is nothing new; note passing, doodling, talking,
completing other class assignments, and even taking notes on the current
lecture are all familiar forms of low-tech distraction. However, mobile devices
and wireless access in the classroom have the potential to bring distraction to
new heights; especially as the study of their effects and benefits is in its relative
infancy and schools and universities grapple with issues concerning boundary
setting and high-tech classroom etiquette.”
These are certainly words that still hold true today.
