Teachers contend with digital distractions

SALT LAKE CITY — A few weeks ago, a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma stood at the front of his class and poured liquid nitrogen over a laptop. Then he threw the frozen computer on the floor, where it shattered into little pieces. Finally, his voice rising in obvious frustration, he delivered the punch line: "Don't bring laptops and work on them in class. Have I made my point clear?"

Digital distractions are to the classrooms of the 21st century what doodling and daydreaming were to the century before. So today's teachers, faced with students who surf, text and post status updates in class, are trying to figure out how to fight back.

Visit a random college classroom and you might come upon a scene like this recent one in the University of Utah's Behavioral Sciences building. As the teacher led a spirited discussion at the front of the crowded room, a half dozen students near the back were scrolling through their Facebook pages, checking their e-mails and giving their thumbs a workout on their phones.

The double-edged sword of electronic devices, however, is that they can also be learning tools — an efficient way to take notes, find data, and look at downloaded reading assignments in class. So most professors allow them, and some even encourage them.

"I've gone back and forth on the issue of laptops in class," says Utah Valley University professor Mark Jeffreys. "After a few flagrant problems in which laptop use was disturbing to other students" (all that noisy tapping, all those "luridly bright and shifting screens"), he banned them. But he has since relented.

"For one thing, students seem to be acquiring a kind of homegrown laptop etiquette," he says. "For another, I enjoy being able to challenge my students to look up information, even to fact-check me during class time."

Some professors, like the University of Utah's Randall Boyle, who teaches information technology in the David Eccles School of Business, have come up with strategies. Boyle's includes letting students know from day one they'll be graded on class participation and that if they're caught surfing the Web they'll lose points. Like an increasing number of teachers, he has also become a wanderer, moving up and down the aisles as he lectures so he can keep an eye on computer screens.

He also divides those lectures into 30-minute chunks — about the length of a sitcom, he says — with the equivalent of a "commercial break" in between. These include funny YouTube videos relevant to the lecture topic.