HoodaThunk?

Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit notes a story where a college professor is reacting to unresponsive students by banning laptops in his classrooms.

When Don Herzog, a law professor at the University of Michigan, asked his students questions last year, he was greeted with five seconds of silence and blank stares.

He knew something was wrong and suspected he knew why. So he went to observe his colleagues’ classes — and was shocked at what he found.

“At any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90% of the students were online,” Professor Herzog says. “And what were they doing online? They were reading The New York Times; they were shopping for clothes at Eddie Bauer; they were looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco when their new job started…. And I was just stunned.”

Wireless Internet access at universities was once thought to be a clear-cut asset to education. But now a growing number of graduate schools — after investing a fortune in the technology — are blocking Web access to students in class because of complaints from professors.

Herzog first went on the offensive in his own law classes, banning laptops for a day as an experiment. The result, he says, was a “dream” discussion with students that led him to advocate more sweeping changes.

As a network engineer and architect, this discussion is right up my alley. I’ve seen situations exactly like this in the business world as well. Companies go to great lengths to install wireless technology everywhere in their premises and then complain when their employees use it. One of the questions I always ask when I’m framing the design with the client is something to the effect of, “do you expect your people will need this capability more often than not?” In the case of college students, I have to ask whether the students generally need access to the Internet in the classroom.

My personal thought is: no. Does that mean the wireless access is useless and that laptops should be banned? Again: no. All too often people think that having wireless access automatically means Internet. It doesn’t. The wireless access points deployed in the classrooms are methods of connection, not content. The network connecting those access points can be configured to allow access only to University assets, such as internal web servers, e-mail, or file servers. They can be set up to disallow access to the Internet entirely, which would handle the issue of people shopping, bidding on e-bay, or IM’ing via AOL. It would still allow access to the University web servers and any content the professors placed on them.

The fact of the matter is that many folks are faster at typing than they are at writing by hand, and typing has the advantage of being legible for everyone. Speaking as a person with atrocious handwriting, I can empathize with wanting to type notes rather than take them longhand. The article quotes a professor using an argument I’ve never heard regarding note-taking in class:

For some, the issue comes down to learning styles. Professor June Entman of the University of Memphis Law School in Tennessee says some students with laptops end up typing every word said in class.

“When you focus primarily on transcribing everything said, you are not making good use of the class as a practice opportunity,” she wrote in an e-mail to her law students, explaining her decision to ban laptops.

I might counter that argument by suggesting that some professors manage to pick out the most obscure of their verbal wanderings as specific items on upcoming tests, thereby making it necessary to transcribe everything said. Forcing students to take notes by hand will require them to take extra time later to transcribe them from their written notes into electronic format and that’s time they likely don’t have, if I recall my own college days correctly.

The article also mentions the common lament that “students will find a way to connect to the internet anyway, so why bother to block it?” This is what passes for rational argument on many a college campus and on many a topic these days. The counter I usually offer is this: Is the fact that some people will find a way to circumvent a policy a good enough reason to not have a policy? Short version: why make it easy on them? If the student will connect their cell phone to their PC and do a cellular dial-up connection in order to connect, then make them do exactly that. Don’t make it easy on them by providing an 802.11 wireless connection that allows them to get out there. Sure, they might walk around your prohibition, but make it at least unconfortable for them to do so rather than just capitulate.