The vast majority of students rely on laptops – and increasingly AI – to help with their university work. But a small number are going analogue and eschewing tech almost entirely in a bid to re-engage their brains
While browsing Insta and Tiktok on a cellphone in class. That word does not mean what you think it means.
I really like this idea, but its difficult. when I used to attend uni it was more feasible but in 2025 all of my courses require online submissions, discussion, and materials. I can rent a laptop from the library, but only for 4 hours at a time. Of course there are desktops, but realistically if you want work from home you need a computer/tablet. That said I still just borrow my partners and haven’t bothered to buy one.
That’s not what being a Luddite means
In your defense, the statement specifies “modern-day Luddite” which compares it to the historical Luddite bands and excludes the first meaning of the Oxford dictionary.
Also, avoiding is not the same as opposing.
Got a better word?
What does it mean then?
“He goes to the library with nothing but his “pen and paper,” and stays there until his essay is done. “Then I’m free to doomscroll Instagram on my phone without any guilt”
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He doesn’t seem very opposed to technology if he just goes straight home and doomscrolls
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Are laptops really new technology to this kid if they’ve existed for his entire life?
I thought it was some kind of church denomination at first
$5 says it’s the “what’s a computer” kid from like a decade ago
“‘laptop’? it’s like a foldable but with half a screen??? and why is this keyboard broken, all the keys move?? how do I get an overwatch skin for it?? this is awful”
It’s important to recognize phrasing in þe definition. It’s
… opposed to new technology
not
opposed to a new technology.
People opposed to nuclear power are not Luddites. People who don’t like computers are not Luddites. People who are opposed to a hypothetical cancer vaccine are not Luddites. People opposed to autonomous murder robots are not Luddites.
Refusing to use some specific new technology because you believe it’s harmful (wheþer you’re right or wrong) does not make a person a Luddite. Þe connotations of “Luddite” is a person who opposes broad swaths of technology, and it was originally because of economic concerns. Like, opposing all automated manufacturing, because it takes jobs away from people. Þat’s literally where þe term came from.
Þese kids oppose a new technology, not all new technology, and not necessarily because fucking stupid, incompetent decision makers are replacing people wiþ LLMs, but because using LLMs has been shown - in studies - to make people more stupid.
Yeah: if you use LLMs, it’s making you more stupid. You - you vibe coders. You’re getting more stupid. You’re not going to believe me, no matter how many studies I throw at you.
Þese kids are þe smart ones.
Oh shit I remember making fun of you a long time ago for the pretentious use of thorns. Respect for using it for this long but like, is this some type of autistic hyper fixation? Why are you cosplaying a Jute
Naw. I just started doing it when I created an account to try out Piefed. I don’t do it in any of my oþer Fediverse accounts.
I read somewhere it throws LLMs off, not sure if that’s the reason.
I doubt it boþers LLMs parsing text; my hope is þat it’ll poison þe trainers a little. Social media is a rich source of training material, and you can’t fuck wiþ þe training data too much or you destroy its value.
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What a pedantic (and incorrect) take. Luddite can absolutely mean a person who purposefully avoids technology.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but words can have multiple meanings and take on new meanings over time. Luddite is one of them. This article used it properly.
And anyone who disagrees with me can kiss my linguistics-degree-holding ass.
“Modern day” Luddite. It’s not just using the word isolated! Tittle clearly mixes the meaning with the historical reference. Plus, the one being pedantic were you… But thanks anyway for pointing out the word has two definitions.
Yeah, there’s this stereotype that professional/qualified linguistics are like super prescriptive but in reality most either don’t give a shit or are interested in informal language
What a pedantic […] linguistics-degree-holding ass.
Indeed
We must stop using devices that use Abominable Intelligence.
They will be our doom
Going to school with a book instead of a phone is way more enjoyable.
i think its mostly AI that was the problem. we all used notebooks even last decade, you just cant concentrate with a laptop writing notes.
Speak for yourself, I’ve taken typed notes successfully just fine.
I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.
As such, it’s completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D’n’D notes, maps for games that I’ve been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you’re meeting someone - they can see you’re just making notes and writing to-dos.
As “someone who gets distracted very easily,” he made the change to reclaim his attention span. Ditching his laptop gave him an environment where “YouTube isn’t around the corner” and he can focus on his reading.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
Reminds me a lot of fellow classmates at my college who I discovered hate online classes because they say they can’t stay focused. So I don’t know how these “luddite” students plan to not get distracted when their job will most likely involve sitting in front of a computer.
Attention span is cultivated, so is discipline. Reading about it is theory. Forcing oneself to do it, in increasingly sizable chunks, is praxis. I’m talking to myself here, too.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.
That sounds like he’s just not going to be well adjusted for the modern world where distractions will always be available. You don’t get over a love for a drug by making it unavailable, you get over it by having it everywhere, yet refusing it.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
I used to be easily distracted during online lectures yet had little difficulty following live lectures. It’s a fundamentally different experience, for whatever reason.
Also, the attention span has to be trained. And training it by working without a distracting computer sounds like a good idea.
I had the opposite experience, in person lectures drove me crazy as an unmedicated adhder, I’d be constantly chiming in and answering every question, my legs would be going wild under the table and I’d usually be just doing something else most of the time on the laptop. Online is much much easier to listen to and get invested in at your own time and pace because you can be eating or vaping while watching at 3AM or whatever and nobody gives a fuck
Doodle. I always doodled in my notes. Repeating patterns worked for me, because I am no artist.
I am still unmedicated, and method helped me a lot with lectures using pencil snd paper for notes.
Everyones different, I failed my online college courses. In person, I do alright. You may like online better.
But if you’re forced to sit in lecture, fuckin doodle.
Nah, that shit woulda never helped me and I wouldn’t even know where to start and I never have, we had laptops open on lectures so I just wrote small programs about whatever concepts the lecturer talked about but to sit in the same place for 2 hours it was borderline impossible.
After entering the workforce it was just pure torture sitting in the office waiting to die 8 hours a day, I went through like a full character arc from arrogant to humble to desperate to hate at others to hate at self to finally worldly and gradually radicalized against the onslaught of alienation.
I came back for my masters in 2020 and it was fairly sweet all online.
Thankfully now many years later I WFH. Uni is far behind. Haven’t handwritten anything in years, I’m almost curious to try it
sitting in the office waiting to die 8 hours a day
That is exactly why I absolutely thrived in manufacturing. Well, the right type of manufacturing. I’d rather die than work in an office. I lasted exactly one month at my one and only desk job before I had to quit and find something different.
I don’t write often anymore either, but recently tried to write a letter to someone, wow after a few sentences could I notice how out of practice I was. I ‘jot things down’ all the time, but a letter, paragraphs, whew.
I think it’s tough, because many degree jobs are all desk jobs, so it’s like, you want the degree and good money, but the work, doesn’t sound fun. Im glad wfh has helped though, thats great
I haven’t been to school for a couple decades. Do they no longer teach how to take proper notes in your first year (paper or computer or otherwise)?
First year… In college? No, that’s pre-requisite knowledge that they expect students to have from secondary school.
I really like being able to
Ctrl+Fthrough my book.
But there just seems to be some kind of feel to flipping a page that makes me feel more focussed.I think it’s the mental work of “I don’t have to do anything, it will find it for me” and “I have to find it myself” and I think it puts you in a state mentally and keeps you there. You don’t have to disengage because there’s something else doing the work.
Your book does one single thing, you cannot be distracted by other functions.
Plus the tactile feel and responsiveness of a book us unmatched, it’s lightweight and portable, you will never run out of battery, and flipping back and forth through pages is much more intuitive that jumping between bookmarks in pdfs and ebooks, the only thing that comes close is e ink readers but those have their own tradeoffs
That’s only going to affect me if I am reading something particularly boring and don’t really want to read it.
But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be reading it in the first place.I don’t feel the need to rid myself of distractions, because when I am not in the mood to read a book, I don’t read it.
Also, this “distracted by functionality” logic is what parents seem to use to get rid of stuff with a screen.
I can say for sure, that people being loud in another room is a much bigger distraction.
If your OS is distracting you, you have installed the wrong one.Okay.
Engagement. I’m a teacher and using all of your senses to look for information makes you remember that said piece of information more.
It’s funny, most studying comes down to that… And motivation, which is also something you have if you prefer books over laptop.
The trick is to buy dead tree and also download the same book from the usual online libraries.
Is taking notes by hand really that exceptional? When I went to college ages ago I only typed essays on a desktop computer, studying was done with textbook + lecture notes, maaybe with a handful of online resources.
I graduated college a few years back and can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) how many times I saw someone hand writing notes in class
I can kind of see this right now. I’m in a first year course and almost everyone has a laptop in front of them. I’m in a fourth year course and most people use paper notes. It could be survivorship or a result of differences in the desks, or it could be generational.
I just have a hard time picturing things being so different from when I left academia only a couple of years ago. Everybody still had pen and paper notebooks
i much prefered writing notes on paper but i’d cry if i had to write an essay by hand, i hope those students aren’t torturing themselves this way
When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.
Every English class at my uni has huge, like 10-page essays (can you even call them essays at this point?) where we cover scientific developments in our field we discovered in that month.
Everything is handwritten because “there were students who used LLMs, and they need to be sure at least some effort is put into admission”. Like, just to spite on LLM users and all of us just in case.
o.o holy shit- i mean that’s a valid move, using AI for a handwritten piece sounds like a pain in the ass, but so does just writing 10 pages by hand, AI or not!
i’m glad i got through my higher education marginally before the AI boom hit (i graduated 3 years ago). i only had Turnitin yell “PLAGIARISM???” at me when i used a common phrase that another student used at some point somewhere (think - “The research suggests…”, or sometimes even the page numbers), good times good times
LLM boom has certainly affected education - complicating things for honest students and at the same time empowering cheaters.
Having studied both pre- and post-boom, I can say the amount of times I was offered to use LLMs overall and ChatGPT/Gemini specifically to generate answers as a student has gone through the roof.
And as a soon-to-be educator (I currently pursue PhD and aspire to teach others), I collect ideas on how to combat it, as it tanks the quality of education so much it may as well be nonexistent. But in any case, students that genuinely complete their assignments should not be harshly affected.
my best idea would be going old school with in person written & oral testing, since clearly nothing digital is of any help anymore. or perhaps require multiple digital WIP versions to be submitted? would also be getting the students into a good habit of making backups of their work. or maybe every essay should come with a director’s commentary (a more loose style reflective essay on the research and work done)
These are all good options! In person testing is certainly on my list, and I like the ideas with WIP versions (especially for larger submissions) and commentary.
I also think of more presentation format submissions where I could ask quick questions to see if the person actually understands what is written. Sort of a small defense.
On technical means, I welcome different forms of AI poisoning in tasks: these don’t always work, but they can catch the least attentive.
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Laptops are extremely useful. It really doesn’t make sense to avoid them.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
Just remember to back that shit up.
Nothing like forgetting your brain on public transport and getting instant amnesia for the past five years.
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Ever read Stross’s Accelerando? Not far off plot there.
Hmm. No, got to look into that. Thank you for the suggestion.
Oh it’s available for free as well. Like on purpose.
Cheers. Read some plot overview or smth seems cool yeah got to read that/those
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html
eh. i prefer desktops. i see the use of laptops, but i prefer to use as little disposable tech as possible.
Maybe something like a Framework would be appropriate?
it’s closer to my wants, but basic spreadsheets are all my clients need right now and that really doesn’t need any more processing power than a phone has. i plug a keyboard and a mouse in and i’m able to work off of there. if i really need to i can cast to a screen, even got a couple usb-C male to hdmi male cables.
i’m always going to need some kind of non-pocket computer, and the desktops are so much cheaper. and modifiable! my last one lived 16 years as the main PC. I tend to ship of theseus them.
Getting an old thinkpad is probably better, way cheaper, and fits into the reuse to keep something from going yo the landfill.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
Withering away your first brain in the process.
Not really.
As someone who studied without laptop through an entire bachelor’s degree - it is a valid option, and I still often make handwritten notes of study materials.
When you write things down by hand, you process information for longer and use more parts of your brain to do so, which genuinely helps to memorize study materials.
It also allows for more focus. Personally, I found that when I moved, eventually, to using laptop in my studies, it has reduced my attention span and added unnecessary distractions. When all you have at your fingertips is paper and a pen, there is nowhere to get astray.
Good for these kids. It’s a wise move!
I did that in uni, too. Everyone brought their laptops to the lectures while I took notes on paper. Writing by hand makes your brain absorb the information better I think
It does, but in my experience, it’s way worse for recollection.
Electronic devices are superior when it comes to storing and organizing data, which makes it a better tool if you prefer to use active recall as a memorisation method.
I had literal books worth of notes until switching to a tablet (a stylus keeps the benefits of writing, btw). And going over them when preparing for exams was an absolute nightmare.
Not just what you think. Hand writing is scientifically better for memory retention and more https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/
It’s undeniably better for memorization. But I think it has diminishing returns for comprehension.
Perhaps it’s just my learning style. I found paying full attention to lectures instead of splitting my attention between dictating and listening, allowed me to absorb more of the material than if I went back to look at notes.
Further, my career best final exam score was 99% on a biology final. I literally re-wrote my study notes out 7 times during the week prior. When I got the test back the following week I couldn’t recall any of the information I had memorized.
You get the best of both worlds if you have a pad and just, kind of, “doodle” -draw pictures, write short sentences or words while primarily paying attention to the lecture. They help you process, and then place the content of the lecture when you do the reading or assigned work.
Me too, but that’s because my parents bought me a laptop with like a 19 inch screen thinking it would be helpful. That fucker was heavy.
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Same for me. Also I sat in front, becouse in the back I would be disturbed by all the not-lecture related stuff people had open on their laptops.
It does. I vastly prefer writing notes by hand than typing em. But my handwriting sucks when I have to write quickly, and I also don’t like lugging around giant stacks of paper. And so I settled on a digital writing pad, and just do the work to type my notes later. Acts as revision too.
so I settled on a digital writing pad
Which hardware/OS?
Back in university, it was an iPad mini 5, using Notability. Notability has enshittified badly though.
These days (I’m no longer in university so I do write a lot less), I write on a Kobo.
I thought kobo only had readers, TIL.
