It used to be that students in a classroom were a captive audience for the professor. To the extent that they had to attend lectures, and the professor gave lectures as opposed generating discussion, the students had to sit and listen for the duration of class time. The only competition for the professor was the students’ own minds, which could wander freely but were still self-contained (barring some kind of telepathy, but that’s a different discussion. Now students have technology. Through this technology they can access a world of information, talk with friends, watch videos (without sound), and so on. It’s true, they’d have to be discreet about it – continually taking out and checking one’s phone, for example, tends to be obvious and clearly disrespectful. However, most students have laptops, and use them to take notes, and it’s very easy for them to do other things on those laptops while taking notes or instead of taking notes with little indication to the professor that anything different is going on.

This is the world we live in, and I see four ways for professors to deal with it:

1) The professor could ignore the problem and continue as s/he always has – standing in front of the class and giving a lecture. This is not uncommon, I think, especially among older professors who maybe aren’t familiar with the potential issues with technology in the class room. And it might be a perfectly fine approach. It just means that the students would have to get the information for the class either by paying attention intermittently – focusing on the relevant information – or through readings, assignments, or other coursework. Clearly students in these kinds of classes are still passing them, the question is what are they actually learning? I suspect that most of them are learning how to parse out the important information, and apply it to please the person in charge (i.e. the professor). These are good skills to have in the world today, but it’s not what we usually think of teaching when students come to our classes. It’s actually probably not that much different from what happened before technology in a lot of cases.

2) The professor could ban technology in the classroom. This would be a difficult sell, since one would have to ban not only cell phones – the most commonly banned devices – but also laptops, and tablets. Given that most students prefer to take notes on these devices, it’s difficult to say that they shouldn’t be allowed at all. Nevertheless, it is possible, and if a professor is willing to deal with the likely backlash, then it’s certainly a viable option. However, the question of what are we teaching remains.

3) The professor could compete with technology in the classroom. This is where the options start to get interesting to me. Here the teacher allows technology – makes no or only very limited restrictions – but chooses to attempt to make class itself more engaging so that students won’t be as tempted to zone out on the internet. I can see a number of ways of doing this. One I’d call the Sesame Street approach where the professor engages in antics or tells stories, or uses videos or music in order to draw students’ attention to the lecture material and away from the internet. It’s a tall order for most professors who are not particularly gregarious, and willing to engage in such displays. It’s possible, though, but what would students be learning here? That they need to be entertained to be informed… that life should be entertaining all the time… possible – I don’t know for sure.

The second approach here would be to engage the students in active learning. Here it’s not that learning is entertaining, but that it’s demanding. By demanding, I don’t mean that it’s difficult or lots of work – just that it makes demands of the students. For example, if students are asked to stand up and move around, to talk to classmates, to write some thoughts, to answer questions, to engage in discussion, etc – then they won’t have as much opportunity to zone out on the nets. Hopefully it would be enjoyable (as opposed to entertaining, which I see as largely passive) too. This changes the dynamic of learning in the classroom. Now it’s intentionally not so much about passing on knowledge from professor to student (which results in the scenario described above where students gather just enough information to please the professor), and instead it becomes intentionally about getting students to think about the issues and come up with their own ideas. This is much more interesting to me than any of the above options.

4) The professor could embrace technology in the classroom. This is actually a subset of #3 where the professor – instead of trying to compete with technology – openly accepts technology in the class and uses it to her advantage. This could be done in two ways just as described above. It could be entertaining – having students watch videos, listen to music, etc. in order to attract them to class and pass along the material. Or it could be engaging – having students use their technology as resources to add to discussion and thought. I personally don’t have a preference for either #3 or #4, but I think #4 would tend to win out in practical situations simply because they will use technology whether the professor intend them to or not – assuming it’s not banned.

In other words, I think the primary issue that needs to be considered is what we are trying to teach students, and what they are actually learning from the class. Only after we’ve addressed this question can we begin to think about how we teach and the role of technology in our approach.