Star Trek Times

I have my cellphone in my hand non-stop. I admit I may have a problem. I try not to play with it during class. I’m usually successful. I’ve mastered not looking at it during dates, thought doesn’t seem to help me any… I digress. I am not alone in this. The smart phone is an important part of most people’s lives today. While I completely understand how inappropriate it is to stare at Facebook while your professor is lecturing, I was taken aback the first time an instructor declared an outright ban of their usage in the classroom. I was even more horrified when a professor declared we weren’t allowed to use internet sources on our papers. This was in 2013.

When I was seven years old I sat in my grandmother’s living room and watched the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as it aired. It was rare that I missed an episode until the day it went off the air. While they got the time frame quite wrong, they widespread use of the handheld computer decades before it happened. It was even called a “PADD”. The idea of having an encyclopedic wealth of information at your fingertips was literally science fiction when I was growing up.

With that in mind I think we should take full advantage of that every chance we get. Many professors I’ve had have cited the need to “do the legwork” as the reason for banning cellphones and internet sites from being used for classwork. Tedious work doesn’t “build character”, but less tedious work does allow us to get better information faster. Instead of worrying about how things were done in the past, they should be thankful for the advantages of the present. With that in mind they can hold student work to a much higher standard than ever before.