Case for the Classroom
“Claire, do you still think you may want to be a professor?” my friend asks me as we pick at our lunches in the dining hall. We planned to have lunch together, but we’re accompanied by our laptops. I’m vigorously typing away at a paper, while she’s live-streaming her history lecture. “Possibly. Why do you ask?”
My friend goes on to explain her latest theory: the Internet is going to totally disrupt teaching and eliminate the need for in-person university classes taught by professors. “Look,” she begins, “as I sit here listening to my professor analyze the role of women during the Civil War, I’m simultaneously on Wikipedia looking up individuals he references, a different scholar’s opposing ideas about how women were involved in the war, and even clicking through another lecture by another American history scholar from another university…while eating my lunch. And even if I went to class, I’d probably be doing the same thing. Why do we even have to include official class times and lectures when I have access to all of these materials and can just engage with them on my computer?”
My visceral reaction to my friend’s suggestion involves me scrunching my face in disbelief, but she has a point. It’s true, the Internet provides troves of information beyond anything that one professor can offer in one hour time
slots over the course of a semester. Whether videos as MP4s, notes as PDFs, or thoughts as Reddit comments, these digitized bits of information in all their glory combine the knowledge and opinions of individuals from the
entire world, all in one place, wherever and whenever I want to access them.
So why did I have my visceral reaction to my friend’s question? And the more I thought about my friend’s theory in the context of my own education, why was it that I rarely watched lectures retroactively or live-streamed? And
why would I try to use my laptop without WiFi while in the classroom attending lecture?
“Just because technology can be used to solve some problem or make something better, doesn’t mean that it should be.”
Perhaps it is because there is something very different about witnessing a professor’s passion for his or her subject in person, communicated through vocal inflection or behavioral subtleties, that can’t be experienced the same way through a video as in the actual classroom. Or it might have to do with the fact that when my friend’s history professor realizes he used a pun when describing the Battle of Fort Sumter and the class realizes it too, the students in attendance who are focused purely on the lecturer in front of them experience it very differently than my friend who is simultaneously eating and researching amidst the bustle of the dining hall.
A quote offered by Dan Geer, the chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, to my computer science class provides perspective on the fusion of technology and education: “Just because technology can be used to solve some problem or make something better, doesn’t mean that it should be.” Agreeing with Geer in the context of education by no means labels one a Luddite, just an individual aware of the potential negatives of technology in
higher ed. While it is true that MP4 videos and Wikipedia articles can supplement my learning experience in the classroom, they should not detract from or totally supplant traditional teaching methods that developed without
more sophisticated technologies.
Research has further supported my classroom observations. Just because I can e-mail and Wikipedia search all of my professor’s journal articles during a lecture — whether in person or while live-streaming — doesn’t mean that this will truly improve my knowledge. A 2003 study out of Cornell University suggests that regardless of the kind or duration of computer use, students who disconnected from their laptops did better on post-lecture quizzes perhaps relating more to the hazards of multitasking than the unique way the Internet will change teaching, but still an important conclusion. So whether my friend peruses her Facebook News Feed or attempts to learn everything there is to know about the Civil War thanks to Google, she would do better disconnecting from these tools while watching the lecture, in person or live-streamed.
Call me old fashioned, but research and my experiences imply that technology should be integrated into the classroom with caution. There is something unique about the in-person classroom experience, whether due to a professor’s mannerisms and insights or the shared interaction with peers, that should be enhanced but not replaced by technology. So yes, I still may want to be a professor. And I would hope that one day my students come and pay attention in class, because there is a lot more for them to learn from me than what is conveyed through a video, lectures slides, or published papers.
Claire Leibowicz is a senior at Harvard University. This piece was originally published here.
