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+--- Thread: What happened when students are barred from their phones (/thread-4399.html)
What happened when students are barred from their phones - C C - Oct 26, 2017
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-happened-when-i-made-my-students-turn-off-their-phones
EXCERPT: [...] Given the myriad deleterious effects of phones – addiction, decline of face-to-face socialisation, deskilling, and endless distraction, for starters – I want students to think carefully about their phone habits, rather than to mindlessly follow (or not follow) a rule. [...] Initially, 37 per cent of my 30 students – undergraduates at Boston University – were angry or annoyed about this experiment. [...] For some, putting their phones into cases seemed akin to caging a pet, a clear denial of freedom. Yet by the end of the semester, only 14 per cent felt negatively about the pouches; 11 per cent were ‘pleasantly surprised’; 7 per cent were ‘relieved’; and 21 per cent felt ‘fine’ about them.
Workarounds emerged immediately. [...] In previous semesters, some students would leave the room for 10 to 15 minutes and take their phones with them. With phones pouched, there were very few bathroom trips. A quarter (26 per cent) of my students predicted that YONDR [the pouches] would make the classroom ‘more distraction-free’. At the end of the semester, twice as many (51.85 per cent) said it actually had. I can’t tell if this is a grudging admission, as though conceding that broccoli isn’t so bad after all, or an earnest one....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-happened-when-i-made-my-students-turn-off-their-phones