Why Clay Shirky just banned technology use in class

I went to college in the late 90&#x27;s, before laptops were really viable for use in lectures (despite what I recall from the 1986 movie Back to School). We <i>did</i> have our math class in the computer lab, so we could graph functions. Of course, I spent most of my time reading newsgroups and mailing lists, the equivalent of modern students on Facebook.<p>Looking back, I really regret the use of technology. I&#x27;m talking about the computer distraction, but also the heavy reliance on advanced calculators like the TI-92 that did symbolic integration and differentiation. The classes were focused on making the graphs appear and getting answers, not on grasping the fundamental, underlying concepts. I&#x27;d prefer a strict paper and pencil analysis course.<p>I also remember the countless student questions, &quot;will this be on the test?&quot; The basic concept of testing student knowledge is that you can only administer a test where a small set of questions are randomly distributed across the much larger subject matter. You aren&#x27;t supposed to memorize the answers to some questions, you&#x27;re supposed to demonstrate that you learned everything.<p>I didn&#x27;t even learn <i>what learning is</i> until a good fifteen years after I was done with school. I suspect the students engaging in these behaviors, also, don&#x27;t understand what learning is, and will graduate having passed some tests without knowing much.

Shirky quotes Sana et al [1]:<p><i>The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.</i><p>I want to kiss all these people on the mouth. I feel like a cross between Don Quixote and the stay-off-my-lawn guy for fuming whenever someone sits down next to me when I&#x27;m trying to concentrate, and engages in a constant stream of messaging, or playing some game that&#x27;s chirping and beeping and booping. There is such a thing as a &#x27;tragedy of the attention commons&#x27; but it seems like nobody gives a shit about it. But maybe this piece, and this research, means the tide is about to change.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002254?np=y" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0360131512...</a>

For some reason the article didn&#x27;t link to the actual Medium post: <a href="https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cshirky&#x2F;why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-...</a>

Really wish my profs at UW Seattle would have done this. So many of my classes lacked discussion or engagement because so many people were chillin on Facebook. I think I also met fewer friends because of it. Very few of the people actually cared about getting an education and were instead just there to get the credits and then get a job (this was in the business undergrad). Having no devices might have forced people to engage out of sheer lack of an alternative.

The notion of using a computer to be productive in class is desirable, but walk into your average college classroom and you&#x27;ll see ~50% of the computer users on Facebook. In one of my classes the kid in front of me would straight up watch Netflix or The Daily Show. And bear in mind this was a top private school.<p>I used a computer through most of my classes in college to &quot;take notes.&quot; Personally I took a computer to every class, and was taking notes &lt;10% of the time. Most of the time I was reading stuff that I did care about (and do use today, as opposed to most of what was being taught to me in class), but the notion of using a computer in the class to be more productive in the class was just a cop-out I used to pursue what I was interested in.

I agree with his conclusion. Open laptops degrade the classroom experience -- especially when the classes (like Clay&#x27;s) are meant to be both lectures and conversations. Behind laptops, too many students seem to treat the class itself like a television program that happens to be running in the background. Instead of something they need to actively engage with.<p>Note-taking is the only thing I&#x27;m concerned about interfering with. I think note-taking can actually increase engagement with the content. Going back to pen and paper feels weird. But so does expecting students to just take notes on a device that, as Shirky notes, is pretty much designed for distraction.

My favorite lecture-style classes were ones where the prof (or more often a TA) would post notes for each lecture online. You still benefitted from taking your own notes, especially to remember what concepts the prof was really hammering home (and likely testing on). But it freed you up to appreciate and mentally digest the lecture, without worrying about recording every little fact.<p>I&#x27;ve never understood why every lecture-style class doesn&#x27;t work this way – except for the minimal extra effort required.

I went through undergrad at a time when it was relatively uncommon for students to use a laptop in class. There were usually a couple students in a typical lecture using them and they got a lot of flack from their neighbors if they were typing too loudly.<p>In grad school, I recall sitting in on some lectures of a course I was TA&#x27;ing. In just a few years it seemed that a technological revolution had occurred. More students had laptops open than not. It was like sitting in a field of frantically mating crickets. The subject being taught was classical mechanics (for non-physics majors), so there were plenty of equations and diagrams. The students nearest to me seemed to have a variety of solutions. Some had tablets that allowed them to draw directly in their notes. Some had a pad of paper that they switched to. Others seemed to be ignoring anything they couldn&#x27;t type. Suboptimal, to say the least!<p>The really disturbing thing was how many laptops were not engaged in anything that remotely resembled note-taking. People were writing emails, browsing, sending text messages, watching T.V. shows, you name it. There was one kid sitting in the front row, happily watching South Park with a giant pair of headphones on. She clearly didn&#x27;t care about the class, nor did she care about letting both the prof and everyone sitting behind her know about it. Why did this kid even bother showing up?<p>I was just there so I&#x27;d know what was being covered, but I think I missed half of that class just gawking at how technology was being (mis)used. Even once I&#x27;d gotten over the initial shock and started paying attention, my eyes were repeatedly drawn to South Park being played on a huge 17&quot; monitor in the first row.<p>Hats off to Clay Shirky. I&#x27;m normally in favor of treating students like adults (even the childish ones), but laptop use has a big impact on people who aren&#x27;t using them. If I&#x27;m running a lab or tutorial and people are being noisy in the hall, I close the door. I do what I can to give my students a good learning environment. Banning laptops and phones is no different.

I think that in an ideal world, it is more effective to refrain from multi-tasking and instead to focus on an influx of information provided by a skilled teacher. Unfortunately, many classrooms do not represent the ideal world. Teachers may be unengaging, uninformed, or just plain not good. Students may be unprepared, overqualified, or uninterested. Sometimes there is simply a mismatch in expectations and understanding. If the professor and students are driven to overcome these inefficiencies, and work incredibly hard to avoid them, then and only then do I think that this &quot;rule&quot; should be put forth. Although, one could argue that students and professors should strive to achieve this goal in every setting.

For 100+ years, and likely much longer, students attend lectures with paper and pencil to take notes on. There&#x27;s not a shred of evidence that having laptops, phones, tablets in class has engendered the slightest improvement in results.<p>I don&#x27;t even know how one takes notes on a laptop. My college notes were full of diagrams, arrows, freeform jots, etc. The only way to do that with a laptop is using a stylus, at which point might as well just go back to paper, and then after class run it through a scanner.

I&#x27;m surprised to see that the increased use of electronics in lectures hasn&#x27;t started to make people doubt the merits of the lecture system itself. In my opinion, university has two main benefits: learning and socialization with like-minded people. Even before the occurrence of laptops and tablets, I always thought that lectures are a terribly inefficient way of achieving either of those goals. If I want to learn something, I go pick up a book and read it myself, at my own pace. On the socialization side, a 30-to-1 forced conversation that takes 3 hours (or 1 hour, depending on the length of the lecture) is silly. Besides, I&#x27;ve seen very few professors who come to class to engage their students in a conversation; most just come with a set of slides and do a 3-hour slide-assisted monologue. I have always found the latter boring.<p>I think universities need to get rid of lectures, and start to focus more on dynamic, spontaneous interactions between students and professors. For example, instead of having a 3-hours lecture every week, the professor could have 15 10-minute office hours sessions in his office.

As many pointed out, its a lack of motivation, flexibility and etiquette.<p>* Instead of stoking motivation and interests, teachers often go the easy way and squeeze knowledge into students. Which leads to even more bored students with no chance that they start to learn by there own motivation.<p>* There is a lack of flexilibity. You must learn specific things in specific time. Not even free courses can handle the temporar interest of the student and the students own specific interest.<p>* And bad etiquette. When its up to you to visit a lecture or not, many students go anyway, because thats what society expects. Even when its a big waste of time and motivation.

Having both used &quot;technology&quot; (laptops, phones) during classes as a student and taught to students which used them, I still can&#x27;t make up my mind about this debate.<p>Arguments for technology use:<p>- There are legitimate uses of computers to take notes, so banning technology overall seems misguided, and it&#x27;s hard to ban specific usages meaningfully. (A better approximation would be to block Wi-Fi&#x2F;phone in rooms. It takes much more dedication to get distracted with no connectivity, and arguably connectivity isn&#x27;t necessary if you want to remain focused. That being said, people could still legitimately want to look things up during the class...)<p>- It is each student&#x27;s choice to pay attention or not, it doesn&#x27;t look like you would want to force them. (The article does a good job of justifying this claim, though it goes a bit far in saying that students just cannot help but get distracted. Having just a text editor to take notes requires some discipline but it&#x27;s not entirely impossible either.)<p>- It is a valuable lesson to figure out that multitasking is a sure way to both not get anything done and not get anything out of a class, and maybe you need to experience it yourself. If everyone prevented students from realizing this, maybe they would still need the time to figure it out later. People who were adults when laptops and phones came around are now figuring out about this at the workplace.<p>- Sitting in a class and not paying attention is not even necessarily a mark of disrespect. As a student, sometimes if I had one free hour with nothing better to do, I would go to an a-priori irrelevant class to work on homeworks&#x2F;projects. So I could work if the class indeed wasn&#x27;t relevant to my interests, but sometimes I had pleasant surprises and ended up paying attention. Sitting in the class and working silently on something else would seem disrespectful, but what if I was doing this rather than not showing up?<p>Arguments against technology use:<p>- It&#x27;s a hard lesson to figure out that multitasking is often a bad idea. It may require sometimes kicking you out of the habit for you to realize the difference. (I&#x27;m not yet sure if this is a lesson that we are &quot;getting&quot;, as a society.)<p>- The second-hand distraction effect is real: of course, it&#x27;s harder to pay attention individually if people around you are not. (Although it&#x27;s not clear whether it should be your responsability to not be influenced. The line between passively and actively distracting fellow students is quite a bit blurry.)<p>- Even more viciously than that, even if a student is individually dedicated to paying attention no matter what happens around, a room where 90% of people are listening feels very differently from a room where 10% of people are, from the teacher&#x27;s perspective. When you&#x27;re addressing a sparse group of survivors among a mass of people who zoned out, it&#x27;s hard, you feel bad, and the quality drops. Teaching isn&#x27;t a one-way process where the teacher is not influenced by the students and the students individually retain what they want out of the teaching, so the simple reasoning about students individually doing what they want doesn&#x27;t exactly apply.<p>So I don&#x27;t know what the right answer is. I think a minimal step in the right direction is to encourage people who use computers for other things than work to sit towards the back, and encourage those who want to pay attention to sit towards the front. In this way, second-hand distraction is reduced (you can&#x27;t see the screen of someone sitting behind you) and the teacher is motivated by what they see in the front row.

When i was still in school Tablets didn&#x27;t exist so i can only tell from my experience using Laptops (old old shit, like first Intel Celeron generation). It was stupid. Work did not get done and i always felt we are just using them for &quot;HAY WOW WE TECHNOLOGY NAO&quot;, not to actually do anything that increases production.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. There are scenarios where Laptops are a great tool if a teacher knows how to use them, but overall i always felt they we&#x27;re a big distraction.<p>I could be wrong. Things have changed.

This is a tremendously good and well-written piece. I absolutely love the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, and of devices and social media &quot;whispering&quot; to the elephant. Although that is not the author&#x27;s invention, bravo for a great use of it. I know a few young programmers who should read this about six times and have it tattooed on their forearms.

I&#x27;ve found Mike Munger&#x27;s thoughts on this to be wise:<p><a href="http://www.theihs.org/academic/2011/12/19/faculty-debate-should-professors-allow-laptops-in-class/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theihs.org&#x2F;academic&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;19&#x2F;faculty-debate-sho...</a><p>He&#x27;s for it.

I was struck by how this article talks about how hard it is to focus in the modern world while it had annoying advertisements after every few paragraphs.

that&#x27;s just tackling the symptom.<p>In this case it might work, but please teach the kids some self-control.<p>and btw: I dim my laptop down, keep the lid open wide so it makes less of a wall and usually just type plain text black on white or google relevant stuff. Given the lecture is remotely interesting.<p>I&#x27;d come to class with a noisy typewriter there.

I can&#x27;t help to wonder whether the underlying questions isn&#x27;t tech or no tech but class or no class.

My main question is who is Clay Shirky, and why does what he does matter?

I wonder if he makes exceptions for assistive technology.

While multitasking is bad for productivity, most workplaces require multitasking ... Some people even perform better while multi-tasking.<p>So I think it varies a lot from person to person.

Why a leading professor of new media even teaches in class?<p>Teaching in class to a medium-sized set (more than five but less than a thousand) of students is sooo old media.

&quot;I’m coming to see student focus as a collaborative process.&quot; To me, this statement feels deeply condescending. I would much prefer to treat students as people making their own choices - for good or ill - so that they can deal with the consequences. If a student chooses not to pay attention in class to their disadvantage, they have every right to do that! I hope professors aren&#x27;t pressured to become babysitters.

It really is an interesting question, and made me think over the implications:<p>On one hand, I exchanged $X,000 for the knowledge I would potentially gain from the class. It seems like I&#x27;m within my rights to intentionally NOT learn, and thus waste my money.<p>On the other hand, other people also paid $X,000, possibly with the expectation that they would get engaging discussions with the whole class, rather than just the professor.<p>So which is it? When you pay good money for a class, do you expect, in return, that the whole class participates? It seems like everyone would get better results that way, but then again, the whole class isn&#x27;t getting compensated by you, so why should you expect anything from then in return? It is indeed a tragedy of the commons.

My first semester in college, in a general chemistry course, a professor eventually was tired of seeing all the kids on laptops, almost all of them assuredly playing solitaire, etc.<p>So he told the entire class to stand up and turn around, and took every computer and pulled out the battery.<p>Now, let me be clear: this guy was a great educator. I would show up an hour early every class and talk nonsense about chemistry, science, sometimes news-of-the-world. And he was literally the last full time Chemistry professor at the school, so he was invaluable as well -- if he left then they would have to scrap the chemistry major.<p>After this event, I took a considerable amount of effort to make sure the event wouldn&#x27;t be replicated, including a multipage report on failings and missed opportunities to the head of math and sciences.<p>He was fired one semester later, the chemistry program shut down.<p>I have no regrets. I honestly cannot imagine I was even the only one in the class to do anything.<p>This is all by means of saying: be careful about your use of power. In the end, being right or wrong on that one issue is meaningless if your compulsion to exercise control over others is too rough or invasive.