Banning Laptops and Beating WiFi

We are reminded of the early, heady, days of the internet when university campuses were just beginning to provide WiFi access to the school network instead of requiring a tethered Ethernet cable.

Students, of course, abused the new wireless freedom by bringing their laptops to class and surfing the internet when they should've been taking notes.

One Ivy League professor, fed up with the inattention of several of his students, would start each class by picking up a push broom and whacking at the WiFi repeater node attached to the wall above him to prevent his students from wireless surfing.

When the WiFi node was reinstalled by the next class, the professor would, once again, pick up his stick and beat the repeater off the wall.

The fight between wood and ether continued all semester with the professor getting a weekly repair bill from the university IT department for replacing the damaged WiFi node.  The professor religiously fed that dunning notice into his paper shredder.

We cannot help but leap for the heavens in admiration of that sort of well-intentioned university Luddite fighting against the inevitable wave of change.  We have always loved our Paper Tigers, our windmill combatants and those that choose to save the village by poking a finger in a dike to prevent the flooding of history.

Here's how one professor at Colorado University currently handles the indelicate negotiation between student performance and tempting technology:

Associate Professor Diane Sieber led a seminar last month for her colleagues at CU on how to handle laptops in the classroom, so that professors have options beyond banning laptops or changing their teaching methods to try and compete with Facebook.

Sieber lets her students write "social contracts" each semester to help govern the classroom. She is the director of the Herbst Program of Humanities for Engineers, which teaches writing, ethics and "digital citizenship" to engineering undergraduates. Technology-related rules are consistently high on her classrooms' lists, with students asking that laptops be used solely for academic purposes and cell phones be banned, Sieber said.

"They ask their classmates 'Please don't watch movies on your computer, because if I'm behind you I can't focus," she said.

Last fall, Sieber had 96 students in one of her courses and she took note of which ones were frequently using their laptops. After the first test, she alerted the 17 students who used their laptops intensely that, on average, they performed 11 percent worse than their peers who weren't glued to computer screens. The number of students on laptops eventually dwindled to a half dozen, and the test scores of students who stopped using their computers during class shot up, according to Sieber.

We cringe at that example of Colorado University coddling of student feelings when instructors know in their bones it is better for everyone involved in the classroom to ban laptops outright and to always beat WiFi nodes into bloody bits.