Inga Carboni, an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary Mason School of Business, has banned laptops and mobile phones in her classroom. She finds that students are surfing the web and texting during her lectures, but she embraces technology in other ways.
Prof Carboni, who teaches organisational behaviour, regularly uses video clips and audio files to illustrate points and stimulate classroom debate. To introduce a lesson about different leadership styles, for instance, she shows a covertly recorded half-time “pep” talk by the bombastic basketball coach Bobby Knight on YouTube.
“Far from being simply a classroom diversion, I find that these materials deepen learning for this generation,” she says.