by Rick Ostrander

Recently I attended a teaching conference with several Cornerstone University professors. One evening as we discussed our triumphs and tribulations as teachers, the conversation turned to the challenges posed by those Dell laptops that one finds everywhere around campus. While these machines create lots of exciting possibilities educationally, it’s also no secret that a perusal of classrooms will reveal plenty of students who are not crunching numbers with their accounting software but instead surfing Facebook or YouTube.

In other words, these laptops that hold such promise as teaching and communication tools also create a potential obstacle to learning.

Of course, as long as schools have existed, students have been devising ways to avoid paying attention in class. When I was in high school, a half-finished crossword puzzle was an essential part of my class notebook. It’s just that laptops have made the temptation to wander far from the confines of World Civilization even more alluring, especially on a wireless campus such as Cornerstone.

So are computers evil? Of course not. Like so many things in our world, however, the internet expresses both the goodness of human creativity and the corruption of the fall. I love being able to check the weather forecast on my Blackberry before a bike ride, or e-mail my son at college.

But sometimes technology can get in the way of having meaningful interaction with other people or with our world. Playing real tennis on an outdoor court under the hot summer sun is a lot more fulfilling than Wii Tennis. When Facebook keeps us from actually speaking to and touching other human beings, then technology has fallen from its good purpose of enhancing relationships to obstructing them.

So what does a wired, hi-tech Christian learning community do with our technology? For starters, hopefully we have some good face-to-face conversations about the impact technology makes on our lives and our learning. For example, next week Cornerstone professors are having a workshop in which they share their struggles—and productive solutions—surrounding the use of laptops in class. Some professors love to find challenging and creative ways to use computers. Others prefer to have students leave their laptops at home and use good old-fashioned pencils and paper. Both approaches can be valuable.

Furthermore, in our quest to combine learning and technological innovations, we should be wary of the notion of “multi-tasking.” Neurologists tell us that when we think we’re multi-tasking—doing e-mails while listening to a lecture, for example—what we’re really doing is task-switching. That is, our poor, RAM-limited brains are being forced to rapidly switch from writing an e-mail to catching a snippet of a professor’s lecture and back again. And each time, the brain has to back up and recreate the context of the situation. In the process, we hamper our ability to engage in deep, significant thought and conversations.

Recently, the Atlantic ran an article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” They concluded that while we have become adept at multi-tasking, our constant web-surfing, channel-switching and texting has hampered our ability to focus and think deeply on a text or a topic. In the author’s memorable words, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

As Christians, we are called to go below the surface and dive deep into ideas and relationships. Technology can be a great tool to get us out on the sea. But when technology gets in the way of real, tangible experience of God’s creation and other humans, we should have the fortitude to toss it aside and dive in head-first.