The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

The perennial debate has reared its ugly head again with reports of a professor having banned them from her class. I'm with the commenters here who have criticized the policy. It's paternalistic, over-reaching, and counter-productive. The professor is basing her ban on a series of assumptions about how she believes students learn, with little data to support her view and a blind eye turned to the data that doesn't.

One argument she made is that laptop typing inhibits eye-contact. More so than hand-writing? If I don't look at what I'm scrawling on the page, I end up scrawling it all over the page. Whereas with a laptop, I can touch type.

She also asserted that there was a pedagogical harm in students transcribing the lecture. Man, I would LOVE it if I could really transcribe a lecture. My best notes, the ones that are the most helpful when I study, are the ones that most thoroughly recreate the lecture. The more word-for-word they are, the more useful they are as a learning tool.

She also talked about how the diversions afforded by a laptop are somehow dishonest. "Dishonest?" Perhaps there's a tenable argument for "rude," but not dishonest. And even so, more rude than doodling or passing notes? Students have found ways to not pay attention long before the advent of laptops.

But to the extent that students do take care of other things while they are in lectures, so what? Law school is incredibly demanding, and there's just not enough hours in the day to take care of all the things that need taking care of. Multitasking is a necessary survival tool. If this is a problem because our attention may be split, the remedy is to address the systemic demands on us, not further incapacitate our ability to take care of everything we need to.

Now, I did spend a semester taking notes by hand. It is possible that I may have even done a smidgen better, since, yes, it did force me to pay a little more attention so that I could get everything down. (It's a lot easier to catch up on something I missed when typing, I think.) But I think a lot of that was just due to the novelty factor of taking notes differently than I had been. And it was not without negative consequences, like my inability to share my notes with classmates. Not only did my notes have to be manually xeroxed, but my handwriting also had to be translated. Thus as a study tool, handwritten notes were vastly less helpful than typed ones.

Also, there have been several occasions where I have indeed used the Internet connection to research relevant material pertaining to the class discussion. Even in small seminar classes this has happened several times. But a pre-emptive "I know better than you" policy like this would obviously preclude that benefit.

The professor also fails to recognize that people use technology differently. For people who grew up during the days of handwriting, typing may seem like something optional, something apart from the study experience. But for people who have grown up with laptops, they seamlessly integrate with their lives. In fact, depriving them of the tool they've come to depend on is much like what it would have been to force a notetaker to use pen-and-ink for their notes rather than a ballpoint, just because for older people that's how it's always been done. For people who have pre-existing work patterns adopting new technology may in some way seem like a burdensome switch. But for those younger people who have never known it any other way, the burden is to be forced to live without it.