Being plugged in

Do you remember the days when, if your phone rang in class, you would be thrown out of lecture for the day, or your professor took five points off your exam, even 10?

Well, at certain universities that policy doesn’t exist anymore. If you transfer to Duke, Abilene Christian University or Harvard you will get a new iPhone for free and, in fact, be encouraged to use it.

Why? Because according to Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at ACU, who has bought more than 600 iPhones for students entering this fall, “this is the way the future is going to work.”

And perhaps he is right–21st century education is no longer about teaching students how to be critical thinkers, but instead, sharp gadget-users. As university students become more “plugged-in” with the increasingly advanced technology, I wonder if there will be any kind of verbal communication at all in a few years.

Seriously, why bother going to class when you can audio tape it? Or even so, why bother learning when you can download it on your brand-new $300 iPhone.

I guess it will not be a problem for students in some of the top universities, but if I, a student at Portland State, was given a free iPhone, I would sell it in a heartbeat to help pay for my tuition and high textbook costs.

Shouldn’t the schools focus more on lowering tuition costs, rather than getting handouts from corporate sponsors who are already promoting a wave of stupidity upon the United States with the use of cell phones? This manipulation of the education system through technology is second only to television.

If only these schools would spend as much time figuring out ways to provide better methods of actively engaging students in critical thinking, learning and creating their own perspectives rather than selling their efforts to Apple for more money, the United States would probably have smarter students graduating. But sadly, this is not the case.

Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, is worried because students who will most likely be multitasking are less likely to participate in class, with technology replacing analysis.

Not only does this worry professors of classic studies, but also those who teach law. Robert S. Summers, a contract law professor at Cornell Law School, announced two weeks ago in The New York Times that he would not only ban laptop computers from his class, but he would also ban iPhones.

“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class. What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.”

You would think that integrating technology with education would be a bad idea, but perhaps U.S. corporations want to make necessities such as education even easier. While that is good news for entering freshmen at participating colleges and universities, students at PSU are still figuring out how to afford textbooks to complete their majors.

In a few years, the students who rely on technology to do their work for them won’t have to go to college at all, because they can use their laptop and cell phone to purchase their diploma online! Besides, who wouldn’t trust an iPhone-educated brain surgeon?