Laptop Exams?

Orion316 asks: "One of the classes I am in just had an open laptop, open Internet examination with us e-mailing the answers to the prof. This is an open laptop examination. You may bring your laptop to the examination with its wireless modem. During the examination you may search for and read materials from the course Web site or from other sites on the Internet. I was wondering what thoughts people have on this." This is one of the cooler things I've heard of in a while. It was only a matter of time before the new technology started to affect us in ways we might not have predicted before. Who would have thought that the spiral notebook would ever become obsolete when it came to schooling?

Comments

More money = better grade at the end?

[Ewan]

What about the fact that 99% of people out there can't afford laptops, or who could only afford a much less reliable laptop than others?

Surely until such time as everyone could afford a suitable laptop, or the school were prepared to provide the laptops, then this would be an extremely discriminatory practice?

While the idea is kinda neat, the fact is in an exam like that the person with the better laptop who could (for example) view more information on screen or get audio data along with plain text, would have a distinct and unfair advantage?

Just seems that way to me...

Calulators in math class

[Money__]

I can vividly remember my father (who was a slide-rule toting engineer) being utterly discusted with my school when they asked parents to buy their kids a calculator for math class. I even remember my father taking me down to meet one on one with the math teacher, and my dad getting up on the board to show the teacher a thing or 2 about the subject he was teaching, then going on to argue that the subject of math requires not only the solution, but the means of acquiring that solution.

Interestingly, one of the other students in the class took it uppon himself to memorize the button locations on his calculator that produced the desired result. When his calculator broke and was replaced with a new one (one of those old TIs with the row of red numbers) he was lost, and had to learn the interface all over again. The problem there was, he was concentrating on the answer instead of the process (the what, not the why).

The same problem still exists today with the use of internet gateways in the learning process. It can speed things up a lot, but the emphisis should be on the content, not the means of aquireing it. Supose little johnny builds himself a well anotated bookmark file of content rich sites that provide him with the answeres being posed in the class. This may get him through the semester, but without understanding the relationship between those answeres (the why behind the what) nothing is learnd. Sure, little johny has learned how to query his favorite search engine and filter content, but after graduation, when he's asked one day to come up with a presentation on the subject he's majored in from a hotel room, with no net access, the depth of his understanding will be tested.

Everyday, little johny will be relied upon from his co-workers as a source of knowledge on the topic he majored on. Being able to provide the team with the answers they need (on the fly, every day, all day )is a the key to a successfull team.
_________________________