BYOD vs. Digital Distractions

Journalist Adrienne Burke profiles Top Hat Monocle, a “bring your own device” (BYOD) classroom response system, in her article for the new website Techonomy, “‘Bring Your Own Device’ Movement Turns Classroom Disruption into Pedagogy.” It’s been a while since I test drove Top Hat Monocle, so I can’t say much about that particular BYOD system, but I appreciate the presence of both a top hat and a monocle in the group photo accompanying the article. I’ll also point out that students using their laptops and smart phones to check Facebook during class is indeed a disruption… but so was the two-inch long cockroach that scuttled around my class earlier today. May he rest in peace.

Burke interviewed me for this article a few weeks ago. Given my work with clickers and my ongoing work with faculty around mobile devices in the classroom, I had a lot to say about the idea of BYOD systems. The quotes that Burke used reflect my basic philosophy on mobile devices in the classroom, that we need to ask more of our students during class than merely taking notes if we want to keep them from wandering off to Facebook or ESPN or shoe shopping. (I’ve noticed that shoe shopping is almost always mentioned as a popular student distraction in articles about this topic.) I’ll often supplement this argument with another one, that the smart phone in my pocket has more computing power than the computers that got us to the Moon, so perhaps we can find some productive uses for these devices. BYOD response systems provide a good option for doing so. (We also have the Internet, which NASA didn’t have back in the 60s.)

That first point of mine, that students who are just taking notes during class are prone to digital distraction, has gotten some pushback from time to time. I’ve had people point out that the distractions available online are significantly more… distracting than the newspapers and crossword puzzles that caught students’ eyes in the past. How can professors compete with live sporting events available on a student’s iPad? Or the constant stream of updates from Facebook or Twitter? I’ve also had people argue that notetaking shouldn’t be something that students can do with half their brains tied behind their backs, that notetaking is an active sense-making process that should engage a student’s full attention.

I know how I’ve responded to these questions in the past, but I’m curious to know how you would respond to them. Are we as instructors competing for students’ attention with digital distractions? Do students take notes in ways that leave them with too much unused mental bandwidth… or am I off-base with that assertion?

Image: “studio,” Conrad Bakker, Flickr (CC)

7 Responses to "BYOD vs. Digital Distractions"

Peter Newbury says:

August 29, 2012 at 10:01 am

I enjoyed the article, Derek, and appreciated how you carefully did not endorse Tophat but instead, spoke about teaching and learning.

With the interwebz and access so easy these days, I wonder about note-taking at all. Is it just a crutch instructors use to keep students engaged, er, paying attention, er, coming to class? (Except in Math. I still believe there is value in practicing how to write mathematics.)

My vision, naive as it sounds, is student-centered instruction so engaging, students have neither the time nor desire to check their phones and laptops. Or even better, require “deliberate engagement,” as Perry Samson at lecturetools calls it, where students aren’t checking fb or ESPN or Nike because they’re too busy using their BYODs to complete the skillfully-written, in-class activity.

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Providing students with a chance for feedback and reflection in class « Science Learnification says:

August 29, 2012 at 1:10 pm

[…] Bruff had a post today talking about digital distractions and wondered briefly at the end about note taking. I […]

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Joss Ives says:

August 29, 2012 at 1:12 pm

In the interactive engagement world I think that note taking is one of a suite of reflective/feedback practices that we can help our students with. After a typical “one correct answer” clicker question, you will have some combination of students that were correct/incorrect for the right/wrong reasons. after some sort of sequence (revoting, class-wide discussion, instructor explanation), the students have now all heard the correct answer. But we know that some of them still don’t understand the answer enough to do anything else with it so it is time to get them to do some reflection or feedback. Options include: writing their own understanding down in their notes, answering a follow-up clicker question, collaborating with a group to answer a question on a worksheet, etc. I see note taking as one of many options in this type of cycle and if we are not getting them to do some other type of feedback/reflection activity then we should at least be giving them a minute or two to reflect in their notes. Of course, I do a terrible job of this AND many students are highly reluctant to take notes so, in general, I prefer the other type of reflection/feedback activities.

Note: I want to help myself follow my own advice so I cross-posted this comment to my own blog.

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Derek Bruff says:

September 1, 2012 at 10:16 am

Thanks for the comments, guys.

Peter, your question about the value of notetaking is an interesting one. I find it incredibly helpful to take notes during lectures, presentations, meetings, etc. But my notetaking process is way different than what it was in college. Back then I did a lot of transcription (of what the prof said, of what s/he wrote on the board). These days I do a lot more synthesis.

I had a guest lecture in my stats course this spring. A colleague from the computer science department visited my class to talk about machine learning. This gave me the chance to sit in the back of the class and be a student. I took notes in the fashion I do these days (sketchnotes, more or less). What struck me was that I only wrote something down if I felt I understood it on some level. The notes became a record of my learning, not of what the guest lecturer presented.

I wonder, for our undergraduate students, is that an approach to notetaking that would be helpful for them, perhaps giving them a minute or two to do so after a clicker question activity, as Joss suggests? Would that be better than having them use the transcription approach? Or is it better, as you suggest, to engage them fully during class in activities, leaving no real time for notetaking?

If I ever get around to cloning myself, that’s the research study I would do. That, and catch up on my Netflix queue.

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Teaching Carnival 6.01 - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education says:

September 10, 2012 at 7:00 am

[…] Derek Bruff explores BYOD vs. Digital Distractions […]

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The LSU Top 5 #48 | lsuvietnam says:

September 11, 2013 at 10:55 pm

[…] BYOD vs. Digitial Distractions – Agile Learning […]

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BYOD & The Modern Educator | Top Hat says:

June 11, 2015 at 9:30 am

[…] higher education classroom, Bruff makes two convincing points worth sharing. We encourage you to read his full post at his blog, but below is the abridged version that aligns with the sentiments of our recent […]

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