The other day in class, I was majorly dis­tracted. No, it wasn’t the sun­shine stream­ing through the win­dow or cov­et­ing my classmate’s cup of cof­fee that pre­vented me from con­cen­trat­ing on the class. It was the com­puter of my neigh­bor­ing class­mate that kept grab­bing my attention—my eyes couldn’t help but turn to his screen as he sort of took notes, Googled terms rel­e­vant to the class, com­mented on friends’ Face­book pho­tos, checked the weather, and e-mailed another pro­fes­sor that he would not be in her class due to car trou­ble that kept him stuck in upstate New York. Just to be clear, this was from a class­room on M Street in George­town. Ai yi yi.

To be fair, I real­ize that not every­one who uses a com­puter to take notes in class is quite this spread out across non-class activ­i­ties. Nev­er­the­less, since more and more lap­tops started crop­ping up in my col­lege and now grad­u­ate school classes, I’ve had to won­der if it’s actu­ally such a good idea to swap in the tra­di­tional pen and paper.

For one thing, it’s kind of annoy­ing and not par­tic­u­larly edu­ca­tional when stu­dents look up extra infor­ma­tion online and then share it as if they knew it all along. Whether it’s the cap­i­tal of Malaysia or some­thing a lit­tle more in depth, I hon­estly do not think that it helps any­one if the infor­ma­tion came straight from Wikipedia. Of course the Inter­net changes the way we per­ceive and process infor­ma­tion, but I think that rely­ing on com­put­ers in class can hin­der impor­tant learn­ing processes. For exam­ple, it’s become quite com­mon for stu­dents to ref­er­ence some­thing in the read­ing not by actu­ally remem­ber­ing or mark­ing down its loca­tion, but by search­ing for it on the com­puter. Sure, that might be eas­ier, but I also think that rely­ing too much on tech­no­log­i­cal tac­tics dilute tra­di­tional meth­ods of learning.

Fur­ther­more, I think that it’s really dif­fi­cult for even the most focused stu­dent to avoid the dis­trac­tions that come with using a com­puter in class. Why invite unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions? Don’t get me wrong, access to tech­nol­ogy greatly enriches edu­ca­tion. But this doesn’t mean that we should allow it to dis­tract us from the basics or replace impor­tant learn­ing processes.

As this arti­cle notes, the simul­ta­ne­ous use­ful­ness and poten­tial for dis­rup­tion of com­put­ers in class make them a “dou­ble edged sword.” Use­ful, but dis­tract­ing. Enrich­ing, but med­dle­some. It will be inter­est­ing in the next few years to see how more pro­fes­sors and pos­si­bly even uni­ver­si­ties estab­lish computer-in-class rules and regulations.

What do you think—are com­put­ers accept­able in class? Or are they more trou­ble than they’re worth? Do you take notes on a laptop?