Academic

Web Free Zones: Should Schools Ban Internet Surfing In Class?

By Dan Filler

The University of Chicago Law School announced this week that it is now blocking student web access in classrooms.  Not everyone is on board.  Doug Berman argues that:

I have never thought that my experience in the classroom, rather than the experience of my students, is of paramount importance.  Thus, unless and until my students tell me that they prefer a classroom setting without laptops or the Internet (or alumni/practitioners tell me that a web-friendly classroom was not helpful training for their future careers), I will keep trying to create and improve a 21st-century classroom experience for students rather than self-servingly conclude that preserving a 20th-century teaching environment is needed "to help [students] concentrate on course instruction."

I agree with Doug.  When I was in law school, students always found ways to avoid paying attention to the professor.  First among them, in that pre-technology age, was the New York Times Crossword.  (Now, of course, students do crosswords on line.)  I think that professors do need to find ways to engage students.  And I also think that web access offers benefits to professors who figure out ways to incorporate it.  I haven't always been successful in this project, but the few times that I've used the TWEN polling function during class, I've found it to be quite useful and interesting.

At the same time, however, Doug does ask a question worth further inquiry: is this surfing starting to bother other students?  My recent conversations with some first year students suggest that the answer to this might actually be yes.  Students are reasonably tolerant of surfers (and the real action: IM) but prefer that these folks sit towards the back, so everyone else doesn't get distracted by the action.  Students are essentially battling their own capacity to ignore visual noise in the classroom.  Which leads me to wonder whether an anonymous TWEN poll might yield some interesting empirical results on the issue of student support for web access.  Rather than doing some comprehensive national survey, a bunch of us could poll classes at our law schools.  And I'm not even sure we'd need IRB approval!

Any takers on organizing a TWEN polling project, across law schools, on this burning web access question?

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).