Laptops and their ubiquity
I know I’m not exactly one to talk but…
One pervasive change I’ve noticed in the four years since I’ve been out of academia is the proliferation of laptop ownership on campus. I happen to think that IT does a great deal to reduce administration costs in universities, [as it does in almost all institutions these days] and that the fact that a laptop now costs less than an iPhone will naturally increase the number you’ll see. It also strikes me as a good thing that laptops replace the dumb allocation of rooms full of PCs for students to use, which incur entirely avoidable provisioning, maintenance and energy costs.
However, when I’m confronted by a lecture hall full of nominally attentive students pissing the time away on Facebook you realise that while computers are of proven utility in an academic context, their role in the actual learning process seems to me at best negligible and at worst seriously detrimental.
I think it’d be great if it were considered socially unacceptable to have a laptop open in class; nobody ever got better grades through social networking. But I won’t be holding my breath.
