A York University professor is asking students to “snitch” on one another if they are found to be using technology for anything other than classroom-related activities.
When he found that students were not paying attention, professor Henry Kim’s original goal was to ban laptops completely from class.
But Kim didn’t want to “out” students with learning disabilities for whom laptops were directly necessary, so he had his students “pledge to their favorite device” to only use laptops for uses directly relevant to classes, and to tell him whatever they saw when asked to look at someone else’s laptop.
When students are caught sneaking a peek at Facebook or Twitter he asks them to leave for the rest of the class. Kim said he’s only asked students to spy twice since he had his class take the pledge.
“They’re not obligated, I don’t expect them to snitch at the end of class,” he said. “It’s really there as a reinforcement.”
“I think that many are still being distracted but I bet that they are less distracted than in other classes.”
Kim, who often uses YouTube and other technologies during his information systems classes, hopes to address the issues of technology with this policy.
“You have to separate what happens inside the class and outside the class,” he said. “What works really well and is useful outside, people forget about how harmful it is inside the class.”
Kim said he wants students to take the lessons learned in his class and apply them to their life, whether avoiding Facebook at work, or simply not texting while driving.
Franny Nudelman, an American culture and literature professor at Carleton University, has gone a step further and has a technology-free classroom, with the exception of a student volunteer that she has take notes every class.
“It was really distracting for me both seeing that they were doing these things while I was lecturing . . . and other times just sensing in a vague way that I didn’t have their full attention,” she said.
However Nudelman said she would never ask students to spy on other students.
“It is like the whole classroom becomes a students-policing-students kind of environment. That would not be agreeable to me.”
Dylan Haggart, a fourth-year communications student at Carleton, agreed.
“I don’t think I have the right to call someone out over what they are doing with their own money. I don’t like to lie, but I’d lie,” he said.
Haggart admits he occasionally uses Facebook in class, but mainly uses his computer to take notes.
First-year Carleton finance student Gryphon AuCoin-Power disagrees.
“I don’t think that students should be asked. I think students should be calling each other out,” he said.
“If you are sitting on your computer doing whatever, than you ruin the experience for everyone else.”
