A sign of the times?

May 4th, 2006 Stewart

More Professors Ban Laptops in Class

Hard to say whether this indicates a trend of any kind, though I certainly understand the motivation to take laptops out of the equation. I’ve also heard plenty of stories of profs who ask their students to fold their screens down at certain points during the lecture, to keep distractions to a minimum when they are trying to make a particularly salient point.

Also, a Pew Internet study from several months back indicates a tendency among teens to go online from libraries, schools, and other locations. (In fact, fifty-four percent of teens in the 2004 report say they have gone online from a library, which is up from 36 percent in 2000. Go libraries!) Comparatively, laptop use among teens is low, with only 18 percent reporting that they own one.

I’m trying to use stats like these to prove a hypothesis of mine: Millennials will use laptops if they are available/forced to, but have a definite preference for desktop machines. Anecdotally, I see students lining up to use our library workstations this time of year — Some of them *must* have their own computers, laptops or otherwise, but our workstations are somehow more enticing, maybe because they have printers, big keyboards, actual mice instead of touchpads, etc. Still, I’m going to need a lot more data to prove anything here.

So, ultimately, will it be such a hardship on the students to not allow laptops in the classroom, in much the same way that some profs don’t allow cell phones, pagers, or food? Will students trend away from purchasing laptops anyway, in favor of a combination of technologies that will be made available for them in libraries, information commons, labs, dorm rooms, and in their own apartments? Not sure I have a strong opinion on this one yet, but I’m continuing to look into it.

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