Ball State University students who get in trouble for ringing cell phones or improper laptop use might be less able to plead ignorance of university policies.
David Pearson, University Senate chairman for Instructional Media Support Committee, said the Senate passed a bill in March that would add a line to the faculty handbook to clarify the policy for technology use in classrooms. President Jo Ann Gora needs to approve the bill before it is enacted, he said.
The policy gives professors control of whether students are allowed to use electronic devices in class and to what extent they may use them, Pearson said. There will be no change in the policy, only a change in wording, he said.
"The only reason this sentence was added to the faculty handbook is for clarification," he said. "There's really nothing the faculty didn't already have complete control of. It was asked of the Senate to clarify that faculty do in fact have the ability to limit technology, but they've always had that ability."
History professor Nina Mjagkij said she banned laptops in class because students were using them for the wrong purposes.
"When I talk about the Holocaust and the students start laughing because they're looking at the screen, I know they're not listening," she said.
Mjagkij has caught students with inappropriate material on their computers, she said.
"One disturbing reason [for banning laptops] is one day I was passing out handouts and I was walking along the aisles at the beginning of class," she said. "One guy was putting up his screen with a very lewd screen saver with a half-naked woman in a suggestive pose. There were two young women next two him who didn't look too happy."
Mjagkij makes special exceptions for students with disabilities, but she bans most students from using laptops to avoid any problems altogether, she said.
"It's sad because it's a nice technology if you utilize it for the right reasons," she said. "Students in previous years have led me to the conclusion that this is the only way possible."
Bruce Hozeski, University Senate chairman, said the idea for the clarification came from students' Writing Competency Exams.
One of the questions for the exam asks how the use of technology in classrooms helps or hurts education, he said. Many students were responding with negative remarks about students misusing electronics in classrooms, he said.
"Graders were a little overwhelmed by the sheer numbers that wrote about the use of technology for cheating and other inappropriate uses," he said. "They were asking 'Why isn't the university doing anything about this?'"
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