I find myself at an interesting place just apart from the debate some of my colleagues and some figures in the overlapping Higher Ed/BigTime Social Media Venn Diagram region have been having about laptops in classrooms. Alex Reid's post is one of the more recent ones in the thread (and he points to several others in his opening 'graf, helpfully).
I say I'm just apart from the debate because in my own point of view, I actually see a lot of overlap between the position of the two "sides" as they are sometimes constituted: allow laptops (and cell phones and ipads) or don't (or, maybe require them to be not in use some or most of the time) during a f2f class meeting.
When set up this way, the two sides will differ about whether it is possible or desirable to have students' attention with or without the machines involved. Clay Shirky doesn't think it is either desirable or, really, all that possible. My colleague Steve says "meh" (he always says "meh") it's possible if you engage students more and if you do it in a way that acknowledges the technology rather than tries to prohibit it.
Pushed to choose between these two, I'm more in alignment with Steve. And the reason is that I have a very low opinion of class discussion time as an effective intervention for most of the things that I want students to learn (writing, web authoring, interaction design, and even graduate seminars like research methods or...ta da...Teaching with Technology!). This low opinion is informed by very strong evidence that learning in these areas is achieved through practice, and that while talk is a very important part of the practice, it is a particular kind scaffolded peer interaction that does the most good. Better than expert critique, even. The reason is that students learn from participating not just from being in the room when others are talking. So what matters most is that students - all of them - participate as much as possible. What also matters is that they have some guidance to stay more or less on target when it comes to offering one another feedback. If not, then the talk is not so helpful.
In my experience, the full-class gabfest is really far less full-class and far less about sharing feedback than it should be to be a very effective technique. It is more often about teachers than students. And it probably does more harm than good to the degree that it wastes valuable high-bandwidth opportunities for students to work together and learn from one another. As often happens, new technologies and the attempt to evaluate their effectiveness can reveal blackboxed issues with the underlying pedagogy that they have evolved to support. So one way we are seeing the frayed edges of "class discussion" these days is in the work being done to evaluate "clickers" also known as Classroom Response Systems. The consensus so far: clickers aren't good outside of an explicit strategy for using them to help students offer one another good feedback as outlined in the link I included above.
So...that's why I stand apart I guess. I think few teachers can pull off the live-action experience that is really required. I think they need some help to do it. And I think that technology can play a role if its used well.
And as you no doubt know by now, I helped make some that does just that for writing and design-oriented classrooms. But I don't think this way because we made Eli Review...we made it because we think this way (and the evidence backs us up).
One more thing: Alex Reid's thought experiment imagines a feedback rich space for learning. Read his entry!
