SURFING IN CLASS: Boy, this topic is generating the email. Here’s some more — none of which, I hope, was actually sent from a classroom. Certainly this first one — which comes from one of my former students — wasn’t:
To quote Woody Allen’s famous aphorism, “Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.” As a 1999 grad of UTK law, I was quite happy to see my classmates playing Solitaire in class, as I knew that they might as well have stayed home. We did not have wireless Internet in those days, but I suspect that the end result is about the same: those who do not show up (whether in mind or in body) end up paying the price with their class rank and their job prospects. Incidentally, I did extremely well in law school (mostly by showing up and sitting in the back row), notwithstanding the fact that you gave me my lowest grade. : )
Oh, well. Here’s another observation:
I’m a 1L at the University of Virginia Law School.
I deliberately avoided the problem you mention by purchasing an ethernet card with a cable. While many of my classmates feel tempted to surf, I can’t.
At Virginia, few people complain about others surfing, because (like many schools) the class rows are placed on steeply inclining levels, as one would find a sporting event.
Two other points: (1) Females are much worse than males about emailing, instant messaging, and surfing during class. (2) Only a tiny percentage of our students do it at all (maybe 10% at any given moment), even though students in the middle or bottom of the class have an excellent chance of getting decent jobs. The academic culture here harshly punishes the unprepared. It’s a matter of honor.
I was a visiting professor at Virginia (loved the school, but as a then-single guy found Charlottesville deadly) and they do take their honor seriously, though I actually found the students there somewhat less studious than the ones at Tennessee, perhaps because of better job prospects for those in the middle. But that may well have changed since then. Here’s more:
I am a 1l at the Ohio State University College of Law, and most classrooms are equipped with a wireless network. I sit in the back of the class in most cases, due to alphabetical seating, so I get a good perspective on the laptop habits of my classmates. I would say that in terms of distracting neighbors, the larger culprit is the games. Solitaire of course is popular, but more and more I see people playing web based flash and java games, ROMs of old nintendo and genesis games, and even internet games through the MS or Yahoo gaming service. If people think that someone checking their email or reading CNN is distracting, they will have big problems when sonic the hedgehog is running across their neighbor’s screen. That being said, I have no problems concentrating or ignoring the distractions, and fail to see how someone who has made it all the way here cannot possess the mental dicipline to not spend the whole class period staring at their neighbor’s computer.
As for cheating, I have yet to see anything that even smells of cheating with the net or with laptops. Part of the reason is that the school appears to have disabled the wireless network in the classrooms, yet not in the whole building during exams. The result is that the network connects even in the hallway, but when you enter the classroom, it disconnects. Even during earlier tests however, when the network was working during the tests, I never saw anyone with explorer open, let alone cheating. In the end, our tests are open book, and so cheating would be near impossible anyway, unless one opened an instant messenger conversation with another student or something like that.
Yes, law school exams don’t lend themselves to cheating, which has the unfortunate side effect of making them harder to grade (and we don’t use graders, unlike people in some other disciplines — we plow through all those bluebooks ourselves.)
Where surfing is concerned, the blame-the-professor angle surfaces:
Having just graduated from UCLA (and done quite well), I can positively state from my own experience that in-class websurfing usually has little to do with any particular student’s desire to learn. Law school professors have not been chosen for their ability to teach, especially the professors that have been around for awhile. In-class websurfing is a survival tactic designed to keep the student awake as the professor explains for the fourth time the policy implications of granting ex-parte TROs in highly unlikely hypothetical situations.
Well, speaking as someone who is generally regarded as an “entertaining” teacher, I do have to point out that entertainment isn’t the test of good teaching. One of my best professors in law school was deadly dull, but things that he said still bubble up in my brain from time to time. But several readers felt that way. Here’s another:
I am no longer a law student, thank God, but when I was reading your blog and the posts on the subject of web-surfing in class, I was shocked that law students were doing that. Here at the University of Memphis, we just don’t have that capability. However, I have noticed more and more laptops in the classroom. One student in particular used to pound the keys of her ancient laptop with the fervor of Jerry Lee Lewis in concert. It was very distracting. The newer models of laptops have much quieter keys, but their presence is still annoying when you see people playing video games during class. However, I think this problem of not paying attention in class could easily be solved by teachers at the university level actually teaching and not just droning on and on at the front of the class at a lectern.
I had a teacher at the University of Tennessee who constantly moved around the class as he taught and he asked the students questions and most of the students were attentive.
I had a law professor at the University of Memphis who lectured from the lectern and never moved. He always called on students in alphabetical order, so the rest of the class never paid attention. I, myself read the paper, did crossword puzzles, and passed notes with my fellow students. It did not matter as far as grades went because I knew people who studied hard and paid attention, but made C’s and people like me who did relatively nothing and made B’s.
However, my point is this: college professors who are researchers and not teachers will not demand or keep students’ attention. Professors who are dedicated to teaching will demand and keep their students’ attention. A little fear is not a bad thing for a teacher to instill in their students. I was terrified of Robert Banks throughout my law school career, but I studied harder for his classes than any of the rest.
By the way, I had you for a BARBRI session and you were pretty good at keeping the attention of burned out, jaded law school graduates.
Thanks, though the fear of flunking the bar (BAR/BRI is a bar-review course) probably helped hold people’s attention, too. . . .
Then there’s this example of how wireless networking can produce a “smart mob” that the professor isn’t even aware of:
As a recent graduate of Harvard Law (’02) I would like to report that having the internet in the classroom built a collegial atmosphere that stayed with my class for our three years in the school. As you may know, our first year is spent divided into sections each with its own schedule. This meant that we went to every class with the same group of 150 students for basically the entire year. With many of us having seen the Paper Chase before coming to school, imagine our collective relief when we say the numerous Instant Messages that would pop up as the professor bore down with questions. You could pretend to be looking at your notes or materials as you searched the IM’s for the consensus answer or to find messages from those you trusted. No longer was it the harsh professor against the lone, scared, student. The entire class helped clandestinely fight every battle, it was all of us against him/her and the professor didn’t even know it. Perhaps the positive job market at the time lessened the urge to compete mercilessly, or maybe we were really relieved to find the classroom stocked with normal easygoing people instead of the arrogant cuthroats we heard so much about, but this experience brought our section together. The only danger was that occaisionally, as the Professor kept you on the hook, someone in the class would send you a remark by IM that could never be said aloud. It would take all your effort not to openly crack up, and I distinctly remember at least one time when even that effort wasn’t enough. It’s kind of hard to explain to the prof. what is so funny about an “easement in perpetuity.”
Yeah, it’s only the “easements by necessity” that are really funny. Finally, an observation from the pedagogical side about computers in general from a University of Texas faculty member:
I’ve been reading–with parochial interest–the discussion of students surfing the Web during class. Our school also has a ubiquitous wireless system and my take is similar to your own: a student who fails to pay attention in class, for whatever reason, does so at his own peril. (Or as our technology dean put it, before they were surfing the web they were doing crossword puzzles in my class. Same difference.)
But since I teach the research and writing class, I figured I throw in an observation about another way that law students’ affinity for computers can damage their legal education. I’ve been teaching this class for 10 years and as you would expect students have become far more computer-literate in that time. I now rarely encounter students who are afraid to use online legal research services (Lexis and Westlaw) as I did 10 years ago. Also, because students are familiar with search engines they pick up the mechanics of Lexis and Westlaw searching much more quickly.
On the down side, students in my more recent classes have a much harder time mastering the analytical side of research because they assume that they already know how everything there is to know about online research. In fact, mostly what they’ve learned to do is enter a query and get a more-or-less relevant hit. There may be more relevant sources out there and there may be better quality sources, but for their purposes those distinctions haven’t mattered. When they begin doing legal research, however, suddenly relevance and quality matter a lot and getting just ANY hit isn’t enough. Furthermore, legal research often requires them to research slippery and abstract concepts that don’t lend themselves to keyword searching. In this environment, if they confine themselves only to what they already know how to do, they aren’t likely to get any hits at all. My conversations with practicing lawyers tell me that as a result a lot of new law-school graduates are almost “research-illiterate.”
Over the past several years we’ve been revamping our teaching of legal research to completely integrate use of online services so that students better understand their power and their limitations and are able to rationally choose between print and electronic resources. I can’t really say at this point whether we’ve been successful: it’s a work in progress.
That’s very true. I have to constantly remind students that just because electronic research is easy doesn’t mean it’s sufficient. There are many things still to be found in books that are not available on the Web or on commercial services.
The email continues to pour in. I may post more on this later.