In January, I provided a guest lecture at the University of Thessaly in Greece. As I walked into the lecture room, I immediately noticed that there weren’t any laptops or smartphones in sight.
During the lecture, I felt a great joy. It was suddenly much easier to interact with the students, the students asked good questions, made comments and as the lecture proceeded, I felt their growing understanding of the topic at hand. That feeling is why I love to lecture.
Here in Groningen, I grow increasingly sad with lecturing in front of walls of open laptops. At any given moment, a large number of the students are looking at their screens. This makes it difficult to make contact. Asking a question often results in a sudden rush of confused heads popping up from behind the screens, sometimes even in slight panic when students realize that they do not even remember the question just posed.
Continuous distraction
I do realize that my feelings are my own problem. But I sincerely believe that the learning environment suffers as a result of the continuous distraction offered by laptops and smartphones in the lecture room.
When I invite guest lecturers to teach, I often go and sit in the back of the lecture room. The movement on the many screens on the rows in front of me automatically draw my eyes in, and often I feel despair at what I see: The latest news, live coverage of sports results, online strategy games, intensive chat-sessions filled with animated GIFs. Last year, a student in the front row was even watching American baseball during a lecture of one of my colleagues.
Both laptops and smartphones are disastrous to learning if they are not used with care. If you think about it, the so-called social media applications they feature are even designed to be highly addictive. But if the students in question would only distract themselves by this obsessive multi-tasking behaviour, I wouldn’t even mind it that much. When all is said and done, I consider my students grown-ups. It is their own choice how much time, effort and concentration they are willing to invest in their education.
Missing out
But if I am distracted at what is happening on those screens, everybody else sitting behind those students might be as well. Possibly, they might even feel the urge to check whether they are missing out on something ‘important’ on their own timelines. And if it is not the famous fear of missing out, it most definitely is the growing incapability of being bored without seeking immediate entertainment.
It is not unusual to hear spontaneous fits of suppressed laughter resulting from a particularly funny app erupt somewhere in the lecture room. And something funny on your own screen is even more funny if you show that screen to the student next to you. After all, that’s “social” isn’t it? Not really. You’re diminishing somebody else’s ability to concentrate and focus. And this is the problem in a nutshell. This is where it becomes everybody’s problem.
Never-ending stream
I do realize and appreciate the fact that most students bring the laptop with the purpose of taking notes. However, it looks like it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to resist using it for other purposes. The never-ending stream of alerts, messages and updates are spreading from the smartphones to the laptops. But even those who manage to avoid all of these temptations are still not learning as much as they might if they’d leave the screens in the bag altogether.
Maybe it is time that we as an institution of higher education take more responsibility for the learning environments that we provide? Possibly by enforcing a digital detox in lecture rooms, and only allowing laptops and smartphones when they add value instead of distraction?
Martin Boisen teaches geography and urban planning at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences