By Brian Zbysenski
Published: March 23, 2010

In a recent article published in the Daily Titan, a story stated that laptops have been banned from a few different colleges in the east coast. While it may just be the beginning of a laptop-banning movement across the school systems, I hope that it is not.

Judging off the original research from the Washington Post, 17 students that utilized a laptop in the classroom were studied. Of those 17, they averaged a 71 percent in the class. They also added that this was the same result for students who often didn’t show up to class.

This is quite an assumption.

First of all, if students are passing classes without showing up, then laptops are not as big of a problem as we think. But in all seriousness, a study with 17 test subjects can’t be all that accurate. We don’t know where these students were coming from. Seventy-one percent may have been a great grade for them, and without the use of the laptop, they may have scored worse.

There are many great uses and distracting ways to use a laptop. Many do use their laptops to follow instructors’ PowerPoint presentations and type follow up notes. There are those who surf Facebook, MySpace, read the news and play games while in class. But let’s let those people suffer the declining grades.

In this day and age, we are all making an effort to be a little more “green” in our lives. The use of laptops can drastically cut down on paper and help reduce the massacre of our beloved forests. Google has a great way to share papers without having to print anything out. Google Docs, which is available through everyone’s Gmail and campus e-mail accounts, is a way to upload your work online. You can then invite whoever you wish to view and/or edit your work without touching a piece of paper. When professors begin to realize how powerful this software really is, classes can operate through this alone, all without having to cut down a precious tree.

It seems as though the internet is what the true distraction is, and not laptops themselves. So maybe we can find a way to temporarily disable the internet within a classroom. However, the Washington Post also stated that disabling internet access entirely might create a raft of new complaints from professors who routinely ask students to go online in class. But assuming we can find a way to disable internet connections, I would imagine we could enable it when needed.

Laptops should not be banned, but perhaps internet capability should be looked at more sternly throughout the school system. Schools should look into modifying our technologies, rather than restricting them. This way those who abuse them won’t ruin this privilege for the rest of us.

By Juliana Campbell
Daily Titan Staff Writer

When walking around campus, it’s common to see students carrying laptops along with an armful of books and folders. When in class, as soon as a student sits down, their laptop screen flips open with a glow that can be seen from across the room. Along with this glow, the tapping of keys can be heard while students look at Web sites that don’t pertain to class.

Laptops in class are nothing but a nuisance to the people behind and/or on the side of you. Some lecture topics can be extremely boring to some, but for others it may be intriguing. If a student with a laptop knows a lot about the topic being lectured, then it’s a given that they will most likely browse the Web or log onto their Facebook account when they feel it’s not important to listen, all while distracting the student behind them who is trying to take notes and pay attention.

Not only is the glow and the size of a laptop irritating, but the tapping of the keyboard is also distracting to hear when others are trying to concentrate on the lecture. More often that not, the student frantically tapping on the laptop keyboard is trying to finish his/her homework before the class is over.

Some students feel that they take better notes while typing instead of writing, but some instructors lecture fast and have a lot of information to go over. At the end of class or mid-speech, the student is checking for grammatical issues and some sentences they write do not even makes sense. It is better for a student to write information down rather than distract the person next to them with the hard tapping of the keyboard. Writing down notes with paper and ink also helps to retain information better.

What is the real point of bringing a laptop to class? Honestly, I never see any students following along per page with the instructor or researching what the chapter is about. If a student needs to use a computer, there are computer labs available to them. The university has close to a thousand computers for students to utilize. Many students have computers at home or at work they can use and do not have to bring to class their laptops just to Tweet, Myspace or Facebook their friends.

Understandably, instructors can not spend the whole time in class to peak over students computer screens to see exactly what they are doing, so they have become passive about it. It is a shame that students cheat themselves out of a greater education that few are able to obtain by surfing the Web and not paying attention during class.