Social Networking as a School Distraction

The modern technology available to college students today can be either greatly helpful and beneficial, or it can be a detrimental distraction.  For the sake of this argument we are going to elaborate on the later of the two.  The portability that a laptop computer offers gives it potential to be a great tool for students.  At the same time however, it gives the students easy access to other sources that are not exactly dealing with the “curriculum”.  Whether it’s Social Networks, YouTube, Email, etc., students have a tendency to get off track during college lectures.  Here is a great link to an article that elaborates more on this issue.

In many college campuses , Professor's encourage students to use their laptop’s to take notes and turn in assignments.  This is not only because of today’s environmentally safe practices, but also because of how much more quickly and efficiently work can be done this way.  What these universities are not accounting for is the ease of a student to be checking his/her Facebook profile instead of typing notes on the lecture.  This creates a mentality amongst students that they don’t need to listen in class.  They know that they can get the class notes later from a friend or off of a campus oriented website such as Blackboard like we have here at NDSU.  This leads to another problem; Cramming for exams.  With all the course materials online, students don’t necessarily have to retain any information prior to the exams.  Students will study for a couple nights before the exam, and once the exam is over, the information is forgotten.  This is one of the primary reasons that college students have proven the inability to retain and learn and significant amount of information.  To the right is a great graph showing the increase in use of Social Networks from college students

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that we change back to pre-laptop college campuses. That being said, there are a few things that can be done to improve the statistics for college students.  The first is that Professors should not put there notes online (with the exception of online classes).  Instead, it should be the student’s responsibility to get the notes from a classmate if they don’t attend class.  Second, an increase in the amount of “pop-quiz’s” would make the student cover the material more diligently than just studying when they know they have a quiz. Overall, I believe there needs to be a better use of computers in the classroom, which will in turn increase class participation.