Should Professors Allow Students to Use Computer Devices in the Classroom? | HASTAC - 25 views
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One final comment, a funny one. On Monday, in my "Twenty-First Century Literacies" class where laptops are required for a whole range of experiments and inclass collaborative work, I caught one of my students with his laptop open and with a book propped secretly inside it, reading away in his book when he should have been paying attention. So maybe that's the next class, "Should Professors Allow Students to Use BOOKS in the Classroom Devised for Computer Learning?" I'm being facetious but that's the point. A book is a technology too. How and when we use any technology and for what purpose are the questions we all need to ask.
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Do you see the difference? "Computer learning" doesn't exist. In 2011, it exists less than it did a decade ago and, in a few years, that phrase won't exist at all. Students learn. Computers are tools for all kinds of things, from checking the Facebook page, to making notetaking easier, to being fact checking or calculating devices that can take a class to a more sophisticated level to interactive social networking devices that can either distract a class or allow for new forms of group collaboration. There are many other uses as well. The point is that most profs have (a) simply "adapted" (as a colleague told me recently) to computers without understanding the intellectual and pedagogical changes they can enable; or (b) resigned themselves to their present, gleefully or resentflly; or (c) made them into a pedagogical tool; or (d) all of the above.
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The point isn't that the class has to be designed for "computer learning" but that there are different forms of learning available with a device and profs should be allowed to determine if they want to facilitate and make use of those different forms of learning or not.
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Great post by Cathy Davidson. Her final facetious question of we will ban books because they can distract students makes a nice point.
