Majority of students at Kookmin University support the use of laptop computers during lectures

Kookmin Review has recently conducted a survey to find out whether students agree or disagree with using laptop computers during lectures. The results of a week-long survey using survey-boards show that out of 256 participants, 155 were supportive, 98 were against, and 3 were neutral.

An article in Washington Post by Professor David Cole of Georgetown University Law Department stated that by taking note in old fashioned way, by hand, is much slower and that gives time for the brain to analyze the information. Furthermore it is more likely that students tend to note down key points of the lecture while students using laptops for taking notes just type off everything they see without analyzing the lecture thinking that they would read it later, which is not likely to happen.

Due to various laptop issues in classrooms, some major universities in the United States have already taken action against students using laptops during lectures. At Georgetown University, Professor Cole and few other professors announced banning the use of laptops in the classroom in the beginning of the semester. Bentley University even created special software that allows professors to be in control of enabling and disabling Wi-Fi internet in the classrooms.

The Review has interviewed one foreign professor and one Korean professor to understand different opinions on the use of laptop computers during lectures.

“Using a laptop during a lecture has many bad effects on student’s academic performance as the laptop distracts student’s attention away from the class to what is in the computer or what’s on the internet. Students using laptops can be so self-concentrated that they barely participate in class discussions. However, use of laptop computers in class are acceptable for me because university students are adults and they should know what they are doing and what’s better for them”, says Professor Louise Patterson of KMU who is from Canada. Also Korean Professor, Albert Park, at KMU noted that “It’s reasonable to accept the use of laptops in class as long as students do additional search on the internet and takes lecture notes.”

On the other hand there are some students who don’t like the idea of using laptop computers in class. A sophomore student Kwon Yeo-Jung thinks that “Using laptop computers in class is a bad manner to other students as well as to the professor and the sound of typing on computer makes an irritating noise.”

Some other students agree with the idea. Serena Chae, a sophomore, said that “I support the idea of using laptops during lectures because it is easy to write down long notes and save it in a file on my laptop. When it gets to exam periods, I can just combine and sum up all the note files in my computer and print out as one file to prepare for the exam. Computer makes my exam preparation way more organized than digging through tons of papers!”

So the final question that all Koominians should ask themselves is, for professors, can you trust your students? And for students, can you be trustworthy to your classmates and professors?