Berkshire Eagle, MA
11-11-07
The student suffers from technology
By Clarence Fanto
LENOX
Blackberries, cell phones, iPhones, laptops, any and all electronic gadgets
should be banned from the classroom. It seems like a no-brainer, but from middle
schools to universities, teachers are struggling to impart knowledge and
information against a high-tech flood-tide of distractions.
At Williams College, the noted authority Thomas C. Jorling is teaching
introductory environmental studies this semester — he came out of retirement
after a distinguished career in public service and the private sector — with 10
years at Williams along the way.
"Trying to get students engaged is still a challenge," he acknowledges. In fact, he
was apprehensive about returning to the campus — more so than when he first
joined the faculty 35 years ago.
"Part of that is because the expectations of student, faculty and the institution are
very different now with respect to everything that's encompassed in the electronic
revolution," he said during a recent interview.
He told the administration that he would prohibit students from using laptops,
Blackberries and similar devices in the classroom because "when they're in a
wireless environment,
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they're all over the world."
He encountered no opposition from students or from the college to his
requirement.
Another source of anxiety preceding his return to Williams, Jorling noted, stems
from the students' access to "an unbelievable amount of information, instantly."
The major challenge is helping students sort through the deluge of information
available electronically. He's also concerned about rapidly shrinking attention
spans — students are accustomed to a deluge of stimuli from different sources,
leading them to require a rapid-fire approach in the classroom.
"I think there's a tendency to be too uncritical of the information flood; they tend
to believe almost anything they read or gain access to," Jorling observed.
Elsewhere, some professors have resorted to extreme measures. At Roanoke
(Va.) College, professor Ali Nazemi ordered a student to surrender a cell phone
that went off in his classroom just after he had declared a policy of zero tolerance
for such disruptions. Nazemi proceeded to smash the device with a hammer,
according to an account in the New York Times. His students turned pale.
As it turned out, the entire incident had been orchestrated ahead of time, with the
offending student playing a supporting role in a charade designed to dramatize
the zero-tolerance policy.
As Columbia University journalism professor Samuel Freedman commented in
The Times: "Nazemi's act of guerrilla theater attested to the exasperation of
countless teachers and professors in the computer era. Their perpetual war of
attrition with defiantly inattentive students has escalated from the quaint pursuits
of pigtail-pulling, spitball-lobbing and notebook-doodling to a high-tech arsenal of
laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries and the like.
As the defiant professor Nazemi put it: "There are certain lines you shouldn't
cross. If you start tolerating this stuff, it becomes the norm. The more you give,
the more they take. These devices become an indispensable sort of thing for the
students. And nothing should be indispensable."
Let's be clear: For instant information from authoritative sources, you can't beat
the Internet.
Those of us who grew up in the Dark Ages remember how we did our research in
the pre-computer era — many painstaking hours in the library.
But all too many in the so-called "emerging generation" seem to view the Web
primarily as a place for text messaging, social networking, dating and displaying
highly personal, electronic diaries online (also known as blogs).
As professor Freedman described the current generational divide between
teacher and student: "This separates those who want to use technology to grow
smarter from those who want to use it to get dumber."
Harsh, perhaps, but realistic.
Let the last word on this subject today go to professor Michael Bugeja, director
of the journalism school at Iowa State University.
"We're not here to entertain. We're here to stimulate the life of the mind.
Education requires contemplation. It requires critical thinking. What we may be
doing now is training a generation of air-traffic controllers rather than scholars."
Clarence Fanto is a former managing editor of The Eagle. He can be contacted
by e-mail at cfanto@yahoo.com.