Years ago I read The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard which showed that taking notes on a laptop in a lecture was inferior to taking notes by hand. It concluded that students mostly copied the lecture word for word and thus did less critical thinking and summarizing than students who took handwritten notes. Then recently I came across Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet which replicated the work and at least on the surface refutes the earlier work regarding handwritten notes versus notes taken in digital form.

What the later work showed was that it's not so much the laptop that's the issue, it's the content of the notes. They found that when students did more copying of the lecture verbatim they did worse on the test, even if it was copying in handwritten notes. Unfortunately they used various TED Talks as their medium, which are highly produced and rehearsed and far shorter than a lecture in school. Does this different delivery mechanism lend itself towards a more engaged audience on it's own or does the method of note-taking matter?

Technology is Just Distracting

As I said earlier, Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet, used TED Talks to test the affect of note-taking medium had on test performance, but that misses a vital piece of the puzzle in learning environments. Specifically, it doesn't mimic any type of class interaction. There is no opportunity to ask questions of the teacher, or participate in classroom discussion, because there is none in a 20-minute TED Talk video.

Unstructured laptop use in the classroom results in more distraction even for students that are not using a laptop[^3](https://www2.winona.edu/psychology/media/friedlaptopfinal.pdf). Some writing surmises this is because a laptop screen is vertical and thus viewable by everyone sitting behind the laptop user. This means that the lecturer doesn't just have to compete for the attention of the laptop user watching a video or playing a game, but for the attention of everyone observing this usage1.

As students admit, they regularly are doing things that are not pertinent to the material being discussed. They are regularly switching between multiple activities and that means they're building up attention residue which will impact their ability to learn2.

Ultimately students now expect all educators to be entertainers, abdicating their own responsibility to build the mental discipline to focus on the task at hand. What will these future workers do when they can't sit down for 90 minutes and focus on their jobs because they've rarely trained that needed life skill?

I also have no idea how any one person can be expected to be more interesting than the entirety of the internet and any medium of entertainment/distraction that is available to a student at any moment.

Technology Lets Us Mimic Expertise

Another insidious affect of technology and the ubiquitous availability of online information is that it allow us to mimic expertise with inexhaustible facts3. The simple act of searching for information and scanning titles of any article, even from unverified sources, fools us into thinking we're learning something4.

While some student may feel they understand a subject, it's far more likely that a teacher with decades of experience in an area is correct. That teacher isn't sitting in front of thousands of links and facts though, while the student is sitting there doing just that5. The student is unlikely to have all the knowledge required to evaluate the content they're accessing, but when did the [[Dunning-Kruger Effect]] stop anyone from thinking they're an instant expert?

Technology is a Solution in Search of a Problem

Technology companies want use to believe that whatever they've invented is a solution to our problems. Especially in the education field, this often isn't the case with new ideas coming forward that are a solution that was developed without a true problem that needed to be solved. Rarely was the technology the best solution to any problem that existed in the classroom, it was just the most profitable solution for a single company6.

We often fall into the trap set by these companies because technology is interesting, with many of the studies in the footnotes noting that the mere inclusion of technology increased student ratings regardless of it's affect on learning outcomes. Yes, students would be less successful on learning outcomes and still rank a class better because it had technology in it.

How often does a projector, or other piece of technology not work in the classroom, or at work? Is that 15-minutes spent finding the solution worth the loss of the instruction/meeting time? Sure once things are working the presentation may be interesting, but is it a better way to transmit information than previous methods?

Should Laptops be Banned?

One interesting paper I read was from a teacher that banned laptops in the classroom7. While they were concerned about the backlash from students, most of the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The instructor felt class discussion was better, and students had to read Tax Code and reason out the answers to problems instead of just looking up the answer from previous student outlines. Students had to do the hard work of understanding Tax Code language, and never complained.

I'm not sure we should ban technology, but we certainly shouldn't use it just because it's available and some company says it will benefit students. Technology should be added to learning environments when it's the best solution to an established problem in learning. We shouldn't look at a piece of technology and then find a problem it could solve.

In fact, that's pretty good advice for adding technology to your life as well. What's your problem, and what is the best solution to that problem. It's going to be the latest technology far less often than corporations want us to believe.

  • One horrid story had 2 male students viewing pornography because they knew it would traumatize a student sitting behind them that had been assaulted. ↩

  • https://web.mit.edu/jrankin/www/laptops/adams.pdf ↩

  • The Death of Expertise Page 106 ↩

  • The Death of Expertise Page 119 ↩

  • You remember being a 20-something and thinking you knew everything waiting for any opportunity to show up someone that you didn't think was smarter than you. The internet exacerbates this type of hubris. ↩

  • https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228409088_More_Technology_Less_Learning ↩

  • https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1078740 ↩