I remember it all too clearly, as, no doubt, will some readers who were in elementary school in the late 1940s and early ’50s — the ink well set into the desk and the steel split-nib pen that required frequent inking.
Some of that ink even made it onto the page in the form of cursive writing, which, at least among my elementary-school teachers, was all the rage, a flowing script that joined the letters, a thing of beauty.
Then in 1931, Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian newspaper editor, frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, invented the ballpoint pen, which left the paper dry and smudge-free.
No matter. In our high school, fountain pens were required, and ballpoint pens were forbidden on the grounds that they would almost immediately extinguish several years of invaluable nib-pen cursive training.
Our poor-quality fountain pens still provided ink in places ink was never intended to go.
Fast forward to post-secondary and the fact that nobody with academic aspirations had ever learned to use a typewriter — that was for other classes, other kids.
University undergraduate and post-graduate papers were laboriously written in “longhand,” and then we paid that non-academic class kid (who by now had a job and was driving his/her own car) to type our insightful essay about John Donne and the metaphysical poets into readable form.
Finally came word processors, unevenly available and with assorted different systems across the spectrum of Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, Tandy and a list of other early desktop computers.
Those of us who enjoyed writing could not believe that it was possible to correct errors, even move sentences and whole paragraphs from one place on the page to another without retyping the whole page.
Next to appear were laptop computers. Writers of any purpose could exercise their craft any time, anywhere, edit and rewrite as necessary.
Inevitably, just as it was with quill pens, steel nibs, ballpoints and fountain pens, there is an emerging backlash of sorts within the higher echelons of academia about kids using laptops in lectures.
With laptops, you might have hoped, students can in some ways absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen.
They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material.
At least that’s what you’d think looking back on your own struggling ink-stained scholastic efforts.
Not so, apparently.
Researchers at Princeton University and UCLA claim that students using laptops, especially at lectures, had gained less understanding of the lecture material than those using pen and paper for note taking.
The researchers hypothesized that the lecturer’s words flowed right through the flying fingers over the keyboard without pausing at the brain for processing.
Not that I would ever question research from Princeton or UCLA, but I can remember the ’60s and scribbling my ballpoint furiously to capture some gem in the Psych 2 lecture on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams while the lecturer droned on to some new aspect of the theory of the unconscious.
Sometimes, when I got home or back to the library, I could almost read what I had written. Cursive had failed me again.
The University of Victoria is one university that leaves laptop use to the discretion of its professors, according to Thomas Winterhoff, communications officer at the university’s law faculty.
“There is no formal laptop policy at the University of Victoria,” says Winterhoff on the UVic website. “It is up to the professors to determine whether or not laptops are appropriate for the class.”
But if the commonly expressed concern about using laptops in lectures is that students will drift off into multi-tasking, Robin Kay, an associate education professor and graduate program director at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa thinks he has an obvious answer.
Kay told the Globe and Mail he believes that laptops in the classroom shouldn’t lead to blaming students for becoming easily distracted — it should force professors and lecturers to embrace the new reality and teach more effectively.
And those nib pens? Even if no longer used for taking class notes, the nib pen still flourishes with italic and point nibs, tip sizes for specific uses, flexibility and metals including stainless steel, chrome, bronze — even titanium.
And they probably no longer splash ink.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
