Laptops in the Class -- Take 2

OK. I guess the post below on laptop free classroom was not quite accurate. For one thing, the video is not really my class – although it would be nice to think I could somehow generate the same energy level in class discussions that legendary Argentina rocker Indio Solari generates in his concerts.

For another, I haven’t yet banished laptop computers from my classroom – although I can understand why, given the lure of Facebook and other Web sites for plenty of people, laptops are viewed as a threat to class engagement (and a distraction for some students who have to struggle to ignore what others have on their screens). But I found having a laptop invaluable as a law student and so am very reluctant to ban them as a law professor.

But I also think there’s another reason why banning laptops is an unsatisfactory solution to the problems they create: it’s at best just a stopgap measure. One day soon -- and the sooner the better – law students will not only be using computers to take class notes, but also to store, access, and study all of their law school reading materials. When that day comes, it will be difficult for us professors to ban laptops or tablet PCs or whatever computers students are carrying around with them – unless we’re willing to make not only exams but law school classes during the semester “closed book.”

There are a whole host of reasons why the arrival of such eBooks will be worth celebrating: Students will be able to update the text with the click of a button (making them much more useful even after the class is over); they’ll be able to keep -- and professors will be able to add -- slideshows, podcasts, computer-based learning exercises and multimedia materials in the same book as assigned cases; and instead of looking deceptively like treasured hard cover books, inscribed with gold font, that are meant to be kept forever and kept in pristine condition as long as possible, e-casebooks will look more like the exercise books that they are – and will comes packaged with the tools designed for ripping them apart and writing all over them (in electronic ink) -- which is what I expect and hope my students do with each of the cases they’re assigned. The eBooks will, in any event, probably come with software that can restore them to their original unaltered condition with a single click.

In an ideal world, they will also **not** be locked up in dedicated eBook readers that allow owners to read them, or manipulate them, only with specialized software (that might become outmoded a few years down the road). Rather, they’ll be in a form where people can and do read them on the same laptops or other computers they take notes and access the Internet from – and this means, I think, that law schools and professors will soon have to find some way to address the many problems that laptop use concededly creates in the classroom **without** stopping students from using computers in class.

I’m a latecomer to this discussion. So I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of many promising proposals that are already out there for dealing with these problems. One experiment is the one I understand that the University of Chicago recently conducted by continuing to allow laptops in many instances, but eliminating WiFi, in its classrooms. (I wondered upon hearing about this, whether it was inspired by Pete Seeger, who is said to have tried to keep the 1965 Newport Folk Festival pure by pulling the cords out of Bob Dylan’s amps, when Dylan committed folk music heresy by trying to go electric there). I’d be interested to hear reports on how that U of C. experiment is working out. It seems promising to me in that it saves student from the sometimes irresistible temptation to check Facebook or e-mail, but, at least where laptops are still permitted, it does not stop students from giving into the (perhaps equally irresistible?) temptation to play video games, or spend class time composing the comments they’ll post to Facebook (or PrawfsBlawg) as soon as they can access the Internet again. It also doesn’t do much to bring down the wall (to paraphrase Pink Floyd and Ronald Reagan) that rises when most students’ faces are partly blocked out by their laptop screens.

One thing I’ve been wondering lately is whether the spread of affordable tablet PCs or (a few years more down the road) of tabletop computing might present some opportunities to find new solutions. Tablets would likely provide a much better interface for reading eCasebooks than would laptops, and I wonder if they would also fit better into the dynamic of a good class conversation – in part because they don’t create the physical barrier that a laptop screen creates. To the extent, they also lead students to write rather than type notes, this also may cause a little more thoughtful note taking and a little less typing every comment down verbatim (which is one of the concerns some of my colleagues here have raised about how laptops affect learning).

Tabletop computing might also allow for the possibility that, instead of hauling computers around to every class, students would simply access their casebooks, notepads, and other relevant class materials from computers built into the desks of every classroom. Like a “whitelist” Internet terminal at a public library, which only allows patrons to access certain selected Web sites, these tabletop computers might only provide access to casebooks and other educational materials, which could then be accessed again by students, and downloaded back into laptops, desktops or other personal computers for outside of class studying, outline building, or whatever other use students wanted to make of them. As usual, I’d be grateful for others’ thoughts or links to experiments or conversations already in progress regarding the topic of how we might – instead of banning laptops in the classroom– try to address the concerns they raise with more or better technology.