Technology gives us the world at our fingertips. It can be both a powerful and dangerous thing. Although it can provide us with a lot of good resources, its abilities can also be abused. After reading John Warner’s article “Rethinking My Cell Phone/Computer Policy”, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with him. He believes that the network is a greater distraction than a pencil and that students shouldn’t be using devices unless he advises them to do so for a class activity. Although I agree that technology can be a distraction, I feel like we’re at that age where if that’s what we decide to do during class time then that’s our own problem to deal with. I totally get it from a teacher’s perspective but at the same time, we’re adults now. We paid to have these devices with our own money just like we paid the school thousands of dollars to be able to attend classes in the first place. So it almost feels like teachers don’t really have the right to tell us what we can and can’t do with our own items.
Plus I feel like teachers think they’re fixing an issue by removing technology but if your class isn’t engaged with you and what you’re talking about to begin with, they’re still going to be distracted with or without technology. I had a class last year that had a no technology rule which I really didn’t mind at first but the teacher just didn’t make the class intriguing enough. It basically went like “I need all of you to sit here in silence while I talk for the entire next three hours.” There was no fun or connection, we didn’t ever get to work with our peers, and I constantly found myself staring at a crack on the wall and drifting into space even without my devices.
I don’t really think there’s a solid solution to distraction. But I do know that taking things away from your students is not the way to fix it. We grew up using technology and implementing it in school for almost our whole lives. It is what we are accustomed to. I genuinely feel like the best way to go about something like this is to create the syllabus together as a class, like how we did at the beginning of the semester. I’ve never had a professor do that before and I found it almost shocking how willing Professor Friend was to hear all of our ideas and go along with them. But the main point of it was that it’s something we all agreed on that would work best for us. Times have changed and teachers need to stop playing by their old rule books.
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