Video made by NYU Law students

“Please Repeat the Question!”

This is very entertaining look at what students are doing in class on their laptops rather than paying attention- http://vimeo.com/3508179 .

It was referred to me by a law school.  I passed it on to a professor here who remarked: “I have watched it a couple of times! I think it’s interesting that the students are the ones who produced it.”

This video is uploaded to Vimeo and has been played 16,200 times as of today.

Results of the Laptop Ban

There’s an an article in the ABA Journal online about faculty banning laptops in class. According to this article, law students reported a positive reaction to a no-laptop policy.  One professor who banned laptops (UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh) posted the results to a student survey in a memo to his collegues (PDF).  Another,  Howard Wasserman, an associate law professor at Florida International University, noted in Prawfsblawg  that his own classroom laptop ban was going better than he had hoped.

The comments to the ABA  Journal online article also support a laptop ban. 

This one, however, hit me:

I had a laptop in law school.  In the classes I was engaged and challenged in, I paid attention.  In the classes where a professor lectured about minutia that would never come up anywhere in the world again, I zoned out and facebooked or IMed.  It had nothing to do with the computer, it was about the materials being taught and the way they were presented.

 Fortunately, it ties in with the previous post and how important it is for a professor to engage students in the classroom.

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Here’s another post related to this article – http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2009/03/interesting-report-on-a-laptop-ban-experiment-.html by Doug Berman of the Law School Innovation blog.

New Survey on Law School Students’ Thoughts on laptops…

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published a piece entitled  “Survey Gets Law-School Students’ Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics.” 

Click here for the complete article.

Noteworthy from this article:

Law-school professors are fed up with students using laptop computers in class to surf to Facebook, eBay, everything but LexisNexis. And some have even banned the distracting machines.  But results from a new survey show that an outright ban might not be such a good idea.

The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, suggests that, when used wisely, laptops can actually enhance student engagement.  The survey found that class-related laptop use correlates highly with reported gains in several areas, including critical and analytical thinking.

Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found….

Again, of course, I am in total agreement.

Albany Law Professor Bans Laptops

In the recent edition of the Albany Law Magazine, Professor Nancy Ota shared her thoughts on the use of laptops in the classroom.

Last semester, she experimented with banning laptops in her 1L Contracts class.

Her conclusion:

From my perspective, the laptop ban improved attentiveness and class participation was better than in the second semester. Since I cannot attribute these benefits solely to the ban, after the one semester experiment, I am working toward a compromise for the upcoming school year that will begin to integrate laptops into the classroom experience.

Click here to read her article.

 

Macs and ExamSoft

            

This was our first semester of exams with many of the students using their Mac laptops.  In the past past, we have only allowed PC users to take their exams on the computer.  Last spring, we allowed Macs but there were only 2 that dared.

Besides the complaint that they had to purchase Windows, there were NO problems.  It couldn’t have gone smoother. 

I believe that we are sticking with ExamSoft and I predict that we will have more Mac users in the future.

The No Laptop Argument is back again!

Susan Kuo, guest blogger in Concurring Opinions recently posted a poem entitled, Shiny Happy Laptopless Students:

How much do I like it? Let me count the ways.
I like it to the depth and breadth and height
Of my classroom, when marveling at the sight
Of 1Ls engaged in class discussion.
I like it to the level of my students’ gaze,
With which I now have a direct eye connection.
I like it freely, as the students set discourse ablaze;
I like it purely, as they turn from malaise.
I like it with a teaching passion once deflected
By the tops of student heads bent over their PCs.
I like it with a like that I formerly rejected
When looking out over a laptop sea, — I like my shiny
Happy, laptopless students! – and, unless otherwise directed,
I shall but like it better even after course evaluations skewer me

Jana R. McCreary from Florida Coastal School of Law has published an article entitled: The Laptop-Free Zone.  In it, she suggests:

 …that laptops not be banned from law school classrooms. Instead, I argue that professors must do their best to teach to all students – to those who feel they learn best by using a laptop as an aid and to those who complain of the distractions caused. I do this by implementing a laptop-free zone, restricting the first or first few rows in my classrooms to no laptops. This creates an area where students who are distracted by neighboring screens and nearby typing are free (as possible without an all-out ban) from those distractions. Further, doing so still respects those students who have learned to use a laptop as an educational tool.

Sounds like a great idea to me!

A No Laptop Policy

Eugene Volkh explains in his blog about his no laptop experiment – http://volokh.com/posts/1219262733.shtml#417668

Here’s his rule:

(1) no laptops in class

(2) one student per day will take notes [on a laptop,] which will then be circulated to the entire class.

Even more interesting is this comment:

This is what I love about blogs. 138 comments on a subject that no one who isn’t in Prof. Volokh’s class should care about at all. What a country!

 

Today’s Law School Innovations blog also has a post on Volkh’s experiment – http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/08/experimenting-w.html with a great comment from Prof. Michael L. Perlin of New York Law School:

The world has changed. We need to accept that and move on.

Laptops in the Classroom

In a post on the Best Practices blog, Alfred Mathewson explains:

 …In Contracts this fall, I plan to experiment with bringing my laptop to class rather than using the big screen for Power Point presentations. I will use a TWEN course site. They will be able to annotate the PowerPoint but they will have no need to spend course time copying the slides. They will, however, have to use the laptop to see the PowerPoint. As I see it, we must prepare students to practice in an era far more technologically advanced than the one in which we were educated.

and Jaime comments:

This is a good attitude. Like calculators or anything else, I think the key is to sift good uses from bad…

as well as Rob Schwartz:

…Of course, I applaud Alfred’s truly creative efforts to find out the best uses for these and other forms of classroom technology. Should he succeed in finding such uses, it won’t be the first time that my teaching practices will change as a result of his innovation.

The key is to find GOOD uses for laptops rather than just banning them.

Day 3 from the CALI Conference

Session 1 – Laptop Encryption – Rutgers School of Law

• recommends encryting ALL staff & faculty laptops
• do it before delivering the laptop
• recommends 2 different software
• CompuSec – http://www.ce-infosys.com/english/products/free_compusec.html
  • on the fly full disk encryption
  • pre-boot authentication
  • pre-boot decryption if needed
  • free
  • can encrypt CD or removeable storage
  • single encryption
  • network stroage encryption
  • easier to encrypt after you ghost the laptop
  • takes TIME (40 GB 3-4 hrs, 80 GB 6-7 hrs)
  • you can customize your log in screen with school logo & info
  • can use the same key for multiple laptops
  • easy to administer
  • additional programs are available
• TrueCrypt
  • free – open source
  • in the settings, you can select full hard disk encryption
  • assigns a random encryption key
  • different for every laptop
  • have  to create a backfile disk (in case there’s a problem) – makes you  buurn a cd and then re-insert the cd before you can continue
  • time consuming
  • this is recommended for an advanced user to do on his/her personal computer 

Session 1 – Can you hear me now? Social Networking – Chicago-Kent State

Slides – http://wiki.cali.org/calicon08/uploads/Sessions/CanYouHearTP.ppt

• myspace, facebook (more popular), linkedin (good for job searching)
• Ning – small social network ex – loudlawlibrarians – can password protect your ning or have students answer a question
• http://lawlibraries.ning.com – join to discuss social networks
• can add widgets such as law library searches
• facebook interface for iPhone
• http://twitter.com – follow and update people
• http://diigo.com – share bookmarks, built-in slide show
• http://tinyurl.com/6bvazw – law librarian in facebook
• http://tinyurl.com/5oo6uv – law groups in linkedin
• beta invites – mashable.com and techcrunch.com

Session 2 – RSS & Widgets – Catholic U

Paul Maharq’s Liveblog – http://zeugma.typepad.com/zeugma/2008/06/cali-day-3-rss.html
Slides – http://wiki.cali.org/calicon08/uploads/Sessions/Widgets-CALI2008v5a.ppt or http://www.slideshare.net/len2day/cali-2008-len-davidson-v2

• they have created a widget for library catalog, library database, ask a librarian
• also installed at Penn State but only .4% have installed the widget on their own site
• recommends using widgetbox.com (but facebook app is poor)
• google gadget only runs in igoogle
• box.net allows for file sharing
• meebo.com allows for chat
• Westlaw has its own widget – go to http://watch.westlaw.com (modules, single source monitor, CLIP)
• other software – yourminis, sproutbuilder (free flash presentations), rockyou.com & slide.com (music slide presentations)
• DuKe, Harvard, Nova Southestern, Santa Clara Law schools have facebook pages
• AALL has a article  by Behrens -”Abouot Facebook”

Session 3 – MacGyver Computing – Brooklyn Law

discussed ingenious ways they solved seemingly unresolvable problems – intersting but not very useful

Closing

Paul Maharq’s Liveblog – http://zeugma.typepad.com/zeugma/2008/06/final-reflectio.html

More Macs in Law School?

We allowed Macs to be used with Examsoft on final exams this spring for the first time.  No problems to speak of.  But I only saw 3 students who dared…

But now Apple is offering  a new carrot :

This offer is good til September 15, 2008 and is available to all students, faculty and staff.