[cbfrench]

Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.

My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.

It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.

Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

[ninalanyon]

> my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.

That's just weird. Why would you bother. These are young adults paying to be taught. But teaching is only half of it, learning is the other. If they can't be bothered to learn the surely they will just fail the course and you can kick them out to make way for someone who actually wants to learn.

Perhaps it's just a difference between UK (and other European unis) and US unis. When I studied applied physics in the UK (half a century ago) attendance at lectures was not even compulsory. You were expected to behave like a student, that is one who studies, and if you wanted help all you had to do was ask. Those who didn't work simply failed the end of year exams and the finals.

[cbfrench]

The tech ban was not just about trying to create better individual learning outcomes or whatever; it was also a matter of respect to one’s colleagues in the class. I was teaching a discussion section of a larger class, so there was a minimal expectation that one would be attentive to what one’s classmates were saying. Allowing students to retreat into their screens effectively undermines the whole project and is, quite frankly, extremely rude to everyone else. That doesn’t strike me as overly “weird.”

If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).