Debates over smartphones continue conversations college campuses keep having about student device usage and its impact on learning. Image via Pixabay.
It’s the last week of classes here at Stanford, so students are lingering in the hallways outside their instructors’ offices. Almost every student I see here has a smartphone out, perusing, scanning, skimming, and waiting until they can wrap up their quarter. I’m not sure what each student is reading or writing on their smartphones exactly. I’m sure a good chunk are reading text messages, scanning Instagram, or otherwise idly passing time while waiting. But I suspect another good chunk are reviewing questions they have for their instructors, re-reading an essay that they are about to discuss in a last-minute office hour, or re-orienting themselves to class policies listed on their class’s learning management system.
As an educator, it doesn’t really matter to me how our students are choosing to use their phones. I trust students, and I really want no part in monitoring or surveilling student device usage. What does matter to me is that a lot of other educators are quibbling over whether students’ phone access is a problem, with many itching to dismiss smartphone usage as something purely extraneous to student learning and success.
This week, there has been a flurry of conversation about whether smartphones are a student necessity for learning. Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of education and sociology at Temple University, studies social and economic income equality in education and engages in public advocacy and policy work on behalf of low-income students. In response to a critic who claimed that students may struggle to pay for college because they choose to purchase expensive smartphones, Dr. Goldrick-Rab responded by expressing how mobile Internet access is an increasingly critical need for college students, especially those who work and/or have long commutes, and who may benefit from reading class content or completing homework on the go. (Linsday McKenzie at Inside Higher Education recalls the entirety of the exchange in recent coverage).
Jess Calarco, a sociology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, also released a blog post this week detailing recent research that she and her co-authors, Dr. Amy Gonzales and Dr. Teresa Lynch conducted, about what they term the “new digital divide.” Through surveys and focus groups, Gonzales et. al found that students who do not have up-to-date or functional technological tend to struggle more in their classes as they cannot access critical information to complete their studies. The researches report that low-functioning or lower-cost technologies tend to disproportionately impact low-income students and students of color, widening the access and privilege divide among our students even further. In her blog post, Calarco suggests that universities consider offering students who qualify for financial aid even more direct resources for purchasing and accessing new, up-to-date and functional technology for accessing schoolwork.
Skeptics have been responding to this flurry of research, however, by suggesting that it’s not access to the devices that’s the problem: it’s students’ priorities on which devices they’re choosing to use for doing their work. Respondents to McKenzie’s IHE, Goldrick-Rab’s tweet, and Calarco’s tweet (with her blog post link) commonly ask why students don’t just buy low-end laptops rather than smartphones, citing increasingly low prices for Chromebooks or other low-end PCs. Other critics are turning back to the tried-and-true debate over whether all digital devices are bad for learning anyway (deep sigh).
So, DO students NEED smartphones for their learning? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure the answer to that question really matters.
Our students are doing their own calculus anyway on how they need to spend their limited budgets, and many are already choosing smartphones as an essential component to living a connected life to access everything from their banks to their health insurance plans to, yes, their classroom environments. As instructors, educational technologists, or administrators in higher education, I’m not sure we get much say in answering this question.
Here’s what I think the better question is at this point: how do we SUPPORT our students in making our course content accessible in multiple media and spaces?
If we know that our students are using their smartphones to access texts and engage in their learning, we should continue to be attuned to techniques and resources that they can access in those spaces. If we think that some of our students benefit from reading certain materials on paper, we print out those materials for them. If we suspect that our students could benefit from having access to keyboards or laptops, we direct them to appropriate resources on-campus. In other words, we advocate for them, trust what their needs are, and design our courses with learning options in mind.
The debate over whether are students need smartphones for learning is so reminiscent of the “device ban” debate in large part because the calls from skeptics suggest one thing: a need for control over students’ learning.
As an instructor, it is easy to feel insecure at the front of the room for an in-person class or behind the web camera for an online class. We are in positions of authority, yes, and that can put a lot of pressure on us to maintain a certain amount of control. We should, of course, facilitate conversation, but that doesn’t mean that we have to control every students’ engagement with the material. In fact, we can’t control our students’ engagement even IF we create draconic policy that limits what our students can use and why.
It is valuable to have some guidelines for engagement, but the bottom line is this: we can only go so far in setting the right tone for our students, in crafting an engaging learning experience for them. At a certain point, student motivation is critical to the learning experience, and the most that we can do is to make students feel motivated into entering learning spaces. I can’t imagine anyone feels too motivated to learn if they don’t have any choice about what their engagement in that learning looks like.
Anticipating the need to be punitive over device usage, limiting the choices that students need to learn to make about how they can best learn, seems like a troublesome way to build trust and engagement in class. What device debates continue to be about is power and control. The more that we can see ourselves as facilitators for our students’ learning and as stewards into critical thinking rather than the Most Important People in the Room, the less that the devices themselves will matter, and the more that the choices for learning on those different devices will matter all the more.