Hello, my name is Austin and I am a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. I am currently studying Information Science and exploring a possible minor in AEM. I am from Fairfax, Virginia which pretty much is to DC as Westchester is to NYC except fewer Jews. I love music (rock, hip-hop, jazz, house, indie, folk), DJing, hi fi stereos, cars, Entourage, Flight of the Conchords, standup comedy, and working out.
Like most of you I have never been on the writing side of blogs. However, I am somewhat of an RSS addict with Google Reader always ready to give me a fix. Feeling a little bit of withdrawal in my Psych class this morning I quickly browsed through blogs and feeds from Lifehacker to CNN Money to Digg. Through a twist of ironic fate I ran into this article. Minding the Meeting, or Your Computer? (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/business/yourmoney/26pre.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).
While it is not specifically about one specific online space, the article, written by a Microsoft employee, describes the ubiquity of laptops in meetings as well as classrooms and the common negative consequences resulting from having so much information at our fingertips. Thus our interaction with online spaces is simplified however our behavior in offline spaces may be affected
How can I keep myself from being distracted by my laptop when I am sitting in class trying to escape boredom?
The usefulness of bringing a computer to class is definitely there, you can take notes, go through lecture slides, look up terms in Wikipedia or have an intelligent, on topic AIM chat with other students in the same class (yeah right). The other side, however, is infinitely more tempting. This encompasses the solitaire playing, ESPN stat checking, email writing, AIM chatting, Facebook poking, or Youtube watching that I’ve do in class. Hey, I see you do it too. Putting aside the fact that I was guilty of the distraction caused by my computer, I think this article emphasizes how the more easily we can access information, the more time we spend processing it. This leads to less focus on the content of information but more time spent on categorizing the overflow of news, lecture notes, to do lists, etc.
I remember the days when schools banned pagers because the thought of having that much information accessible to kids automatically meant they were drug dealers. Professors that outlaw laptops from their classrooms would lose popularity faster than Lindsay Lohan. Limiting Internet access in classrooms would also limit the educational reasons for bringing a laptop to class. As laptops eventually replace planners and notebooks as the de facto classroom tool, professors will look at walls of Dell and Apple logos instead of the bobbing heads of dozing students. How will we tame the beckoning our technology to pull us away from what we should be doing?
1 comment:
Hi Austin,I really enjoyed reading your blog. Although I personally do not partake in the tempting classroom laptop phenomenon, I envy those who do. My laptop is unfortunately a monstrous pain to truck around, and I'm jealous of all of you who can seem to multi-task using your laptops with such ease. I stare with a bit of drool hanging as you enlarge the lecture notes and cartoon visuals to your heart's content. I'll be honest, when a laptop junkie is in front of me, I spend more time watching his or her screen then the front screen. If he/she is distracted by the whiles of the internet, so I am. If he concentrates on the lecture, I read intently as he takes ample notes and makes astute personal observations.
I agree with you that laptops in the classroom is unavoidable and of course has numerous advantages. Although it sometimes distracts, it can be an excellent learning tool that makes any lesson multi-dimensional. If not a laptop to occasionally distract us from a droning lecturer, we are sure to find replacement occupations (texting, crossword puzzles, sudoku's anyone)? It seems as though one is less likely to find a student completely absorbed in a lesson at hand. It almost seems as though we must have occasional distractions to gain anything from lecture at all. We've become a society of incessant multi-taskers. Which poses the question, "how much are we retaining with our brains divided amongst so many distractions?" I believe the physical space of laptops in classroom is an interesting concept which needs more investigating.
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