The medium is the message, but…

A recent study suggests that laptops don’t make students smarter. The report compared students in typography classes, some with access to laptops and others who had to use computer labs for their work. One report (originally available at: http://pdc.cvc.edu/common/newsdetail.asp?idx=4544) on the study suggests:

Students with laptops tend to spend “significantly more time” working on assignments than other students do. But that extra time is not reflected in their finished products: Students with laptops get roughly the same grades as those who trek to computer labs. Instead of saving time, the report argues, laptop users are often killing it — firing off e-mail messages, sending instant messages, and surfing the Web.

What’s more, students with laptops may grow overly reliant on them, as instructors in one typography course at a Midwestern university found out. “Students reported spending long periods of time searching the Web for pictures rather than sketching and then scanning what they needed,” says the report. “Instructors had to sometimes tell students to use paper rather than their computers to store ideas.”

Now, to be fair, the researchers were quick to point out that the study doesn’t show that laptops are bad, but that “it depends on how they are used.”

Which matters a lot. Media scholar Marshal Mcluhan famously argued that what you do with a new technology matters less than whether or not you use it–and in terms of large social effects he is likely correct. But for individual users and specific uses, that is clearly not the case.

If we use new technologies to do the same old thing only better and faster we may (or may not) see important and worthwhile effects. But the point is that we can–and must–use new technologies to prepare students more effectively for the world those technologies are creating. That means figuring out what new technologies can let us do–and then trying to make those activities part of the educational process.

Whether laptops are good for education isn’t really the right question. We need to ask: What kind of education can laptops make possible?