Professor Of New Media Banned Technology Use In Class

Posted: 9/28/2014

Trigger

Just read “Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class”. This Washington Post blog post is about Professor of media studies Clay Shirky at New York University. “He is a leading voice on the effect technology has had on society — and vice versa — and has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade. … For years Shirky has allowed his students to bring laptops, tablets and phones into class and use them at will.”

The Professor explained in a very long letter why he resorted to this drastic measure. It is not very convincing.

Notes

First, I think, this professor is quite stupid, authoritarian, and condescending. The best a professor can hope for is that some students pay attention and he or she can work with or engage these students.

I would also surmise, this professor does not have the guts to show  those students the door who distract or disturb other students. Thus, he resorted to a punish all measure.

Prof. Shirky claims:

1. “I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor.”
2. “I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom.”
3. “Then there was the competitive aspect. It’s my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones. Time management is their job, not mine.”

What changed:

1. “Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time.”
2. “The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year.”
3. “The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves”

Was the professor becoming outdated and boring and students noticed?

Or was he a laissez faire professor before, because he got good ratings from his students?

He expressed his deep condescension for students like:

1. “We’ve known for some time that multitasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.”
2. “This effect takes place over more than one time frame — even when multi-tasking doesn’t significantly degrade immediate performance, it can have negative long-term effects on “declarative memory”, the kind of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what they learned from earlier studying. (Multitasking thus makes the famous “learned it the day before the test, forgot it the day after” effect even more pernicious.)”
3. “People often start multitasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded.”
4. “On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t even exercise task-switching as a skill. A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, …  Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.”
5. “Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on.”
6. And he goes on and on adding more embarrassments ...

Is it possible that young people are quite capable of multitasking and much better at that than older generations despite possibly flawed scientific studies to the contrary. Should students not find out for themselves how far they can go with multitasking and not be told by their professor?

In Conclusion

This is reportedly a leading professor of new media! That is laughable! He does not have a clue, he is so prejudiced like a fogey! Does he not realize that the exponential progress of technology questions all past approaches to education and learning?

How much tuition pay students for this crap? How much debt do they incur?