Fighting Fire with . . . ACME Dynamite

Please make welcome the newest "weapon" in the cat-and-mouse game between professors, students, and students' laptops: software called SYNCHRONEYES (it's seriously written in all capital letters in the marketing information). The web site boasts that the software "enable[s] you to keep students focused on learning and redirect their attention if they go off track. " Apparently, it allows a professor to monitor what every screen in the room is tuned to. From what I've heard, this kind of thing isn't new. This has been a tool available for computer lab-centered courses for a while. But it seems that it's now being used to manage laptop use in non-lab courses by making any classroom a laptop computer lab and allowing the professor to monitor everyone's . . . um . . . monitor.

Inside Higher Ed's University Daily describes SYNCHRONEYES this way:

Synchroneyes marks a major escalation in the classroom technology battle: The professor as spy-master.

With Syncroneyes, the professor can “view all the computer screens in the classroom and redirect the student’s attention if they digress from the lecture topic.”

“The professor is also able to control access . . . to the Internet or to specific computer applications by blocking students individually or as a group.”

While UD lectures and leads discussions and writes on the blackboard and reads texts aloud, she also, once Synchroneyes is installed, constantly scans all the screens in the room, judges each screen’s pertinence to the class, and shuts down the impertinent.

SYNCHRONEYES is brought to you by the same people who brought you SMART Boards (and let's be honest -- about half of every law faculty thinks that the "dry erase" technology is what makes it "smart") and Clickers (the pricey software and remote control system that has been replaced by free classroom polling Internet apps). And SYNCHRONEYES almost sounds cool until you remember that our job description is not "frustrate foil's attempts to do what they want with increasingly ridiculous solutions."

I have some questions about SYNCHRONEYES:

• If students who've used computers since infancy can't surf the web and pay attention in class at the same time, how is someone who played Frogger in an arcade supposed to monitor 30+ computer screens while conducting a class? And what about the chances of someone who doesn't even know what "playing Frogger in an arcade" means?
• Isn't watching a professor manipulate a classmates' screen going to be more distracting (i.e., more fun) than whatever the classmate was originally doing?
• Isn't it cheaper and faster to just say, "screens down"?
• Won't students just respond to SYNCHRONEYES with Invisibility Shield Technology?

Ultimately, I think that "solutions" like this are tempting because they play on whatever fears that laptops evoke. For some, the fear is that they're really not very good teachers after all, and now students are going to be able to finally just sit and watch TV instead. For some, the fear is that they're letting students down if they let them believe that they can do two things at once. For some, the fear is that they're being left behind. For some, the fear is that students are somehow mocking professors with their laptops. But like all fears, the real solution is rarely to manipulate the situation so that we don't feel the fear anymore. The solution is to face it head on.

Thanks to pal and former South Texas colleague Prof. Andrew Solomon for forwarding the University Daily post.