time spent offline

I wrote this article back in 2018, fresh out of school, after reading Susan Dynarski’s Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting. Back when I was just beginning to take my time spent offline journey seriously. Five years later, I reflect fondly and with gratitude on the small and big changes, inspirations, and lessons that got me here.

Susan Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, has banned almost all electronic devices during her classes and research seminars. Dynarski’s rationale for the ban is the growing evidence that overall college students learn less and earn worse grades when they use computers or tablets during lectures— I have got a story to tell about this!

The reason? 

Laptops distract from learning. Not everyone is in agreement with Dynarski’s rationale. There is an on-going debate over the negative effects of laptops on learning and for some, banning electronic devices altogether from lectures halls and seminars seem like an extreme measure. From my experience, however, I’m with Dynarski on this one.

Story time: The time I broke my laptop 

In fall 2014, I entered my third-year of undergraduate studies with a dream and a laptop that accompanied me to every class and lecture. I never once questioned why I needed a laptop to take notes: It was a given. Like most students, I carried my laptop to every class and spent half the time frequently checking my email and Twitter feed and the other half frantically typing lecture notes. It was hard to follow a lecture when you missed parts of it throughout because Twitter is just so much more enticing. This distracted mode of learning meant I retained very little of the lecture.

One lucky day, the inevitable happened.

On my bike ride home, my water bottle spilled in my bag and destroyed my expensive laptop. I didn’t feel that lucky then. I cried when the repair guy told me I’m better off buying a new laptop. I sobbed over the phone telling my dad what the repair guy told me. I raged when the Apple store guy told me it would cost just as much to repair my laptop as it would to buy a new one: $120 difference. For over a month, I didn’t have a laptop. Without a choice, I went to the bookstore and invested $4 on the fancier notebook they carried and started taking lecture notes,*gasp,* by hand. It completely changed my learning experience. And not to miss the internet too much, in this analog mode of learning, I printed a meme and glued it to the front of my notebook:

Without the distraction of constantly checking my email and Twitter feed, I followed class lectures intently, took detailed notes, and began to participate in discussions often; I absorbed the lesson materials better. As a result, my grades improved, even as the classes got more challenging and my study habits— distracted by boys, booze, and other drugs— remained about the same. I never looked back. My new laptop patiently waited for me at home as my trusted notebook accompanied me from class to class for the remainder of my studies. Of course, there are many other factors to consider for the improvement in my grades. Correlation does not imply causation, and so forth. At the very least, the experience helped me realize a notebook is a lot lighter to carry around campus than a laptop. Here’s a graph of my sessional average* throughout my undergraduate program:

*the point of this article is not about my grades, but rather a contribution to the debate on the impact of technology on learning from my personal experience. In the real world, nobody cares about your grades and that’s okay.