The blame, if that’s the right word, doesn’t belong with technology but with the professors. I recall my salad days when classmates asked the professors whether they approved of students using calculators for exams. They all said “Yes!! Because we can now give more comprehensive exams to really test whether or not the students understand the material.” In prior years there would have only been 1 problem per test because of all the math required to solve it, we had the pleasure of 3 to 5 problems per test.
Laptops are just a tool. The problem that faces professors, and the one that seems to be lurking in the shadows of this article, is how to use the technology to improve the students ability to think rather than merely encapsulating the material to sound bites of “what to think”. The problem with using PowerPoint is that you have to really understand the material before you can build meaningful slides. If all the students see are the “key takeaways” then they may well not understand why they’re the “key takeaways”; consequently, exams would have to be restructured with more emphasis given to the underlying material. However, that’s a good bit of work if you’ve already built the outlines and the exams over the past 20 years.
