By Max Kyburz
You’re sitting in the back of a classroom. Two seats down from you, a fellow student is clicking away at their laptop or tapping at their iPhone. Between the occasional jotting down of notes on their word processor, they’re primarily checking their Facebook, updating their Twitter or just generally goofing around on the Internet.
If this has happened in your classroom, be forewarned: it may eventually become a thing of the past.
In some east coast universities (to avoid embarrassment, I shan’t name names), the accessibility of social networking sites in academic buildings and computer labs has started to dwindle. Authorities have attributed this to the distractions caused by surfing the popular networking sites. They fear that students are spending more time keeping up with their news feeds rather than their lectures, which squelches their ability to learn.
Having gone to a high school that bans sites like Facebook and Myspace from being accessed, I know a thing or two about how this factors into study habits. This may be a surprise to school officials, but students have been getting distracted long before the personal computer was invented. People will find a way to get distracted, Facebook or no Facebook. If it’s not on their laptops, they’ll find distraction in their cell phones. Hell, even pens are distracting enough. Some of the best minds were daydreamers.
Plus, if a student decides to surf the Internet instead of paying attention in class, what does the school stand to lose? The students have already shoveled in their money to pay for their courses.
Another issue with this rule is that people depend on Facebook to connect with fellow students on group projects and other important activities. Facebook allows the ease. E-mail and cell phones are viable options as far as making connections, but when a university starts dictating their students’ social life, it’s pretty unfair.
Some professors may find it in their best interest to place regulation on laptops altogether. Not ban them, but definitely keep tabs. Professor Burlin Barr keeps an eye out for unnecessary cases in his English and cinema studies classes; he says, “I currently have a few students who specifically requested to use their computers for note-taking; they say they are much better students that way. But I can think of one or two exceptionally obnoxious cases in which students looked up something lame from Wikipedia to find something to contradict what I was saying.”
Could this all happen on Central’s campus? According to IT specialist Beverly Gordon, it’s entirely possible. “All we’d have to do is make a call,” Gordon says, “and the sites could be blocked.”
This is not to say it will happen anytime soon, but who knows what the tide will bring? For now, as a wiser Sicilian than I once stated, it would be totally, utterly, and in all other ways inconceivable.
