Slashdot Mirror
Lecture Hall Back-Channeling
emmastory writes "The New York Times is running a story on the phenomenon of lecture hall back-channeling - now that many conferences and universities have wireless access, some people discuss lectures via instant message or weblog as they happen. Although the article quotes an instructor at NYU, I haven't seen much of this in lectures I've attended there. I would guess it varies from department to department, but laptops aren't yet as common in classes as one might think. Either way, some people consider the practice rude, others consider it progress, and good arguments can be made on either side."
One upside that can result from this is a refinement in questions that get asked of the speaker at the end of a presentation. Obvious ones can be resolved within the back-channelers, while insightful ones could rise to the top.
/-style solution to accept potential questions and have the back-channelers rate them during the lecture, a la /. Interviews. For larger speeches where the number of attendees is high and the time for Q&A is limited, this could greatly improve the quality of the session...
Heck, someone should develop a wireless
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
And to think Slashdot was a method of "Lecture Hall Back-Channeling". Of course, I trust no ones facts or opionions at face value. Also, I suggest you don't trust mine either without further doing investigation for yourself.
Life is not for the lazy.
academic integrity is their reasoning behind it. Of course all my friends sharing answers through SMS have no complaints...
Not that anuone ever thought of pasing a note around in class, back in the pre-IM dark ages.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
In work we make extensive use of Instant Messaging to allow us to work with colleagues who might be home based, in other cities, or even elsewhere in the world.
It sure becomes very handy when one can have a back-channel chat going during a conference call, or even during a call when customers are involved.
most people I know do this with cell phone text messages. a weblog's just not a messageboard.
If you're sitting in class IMing back and forth, then you aren't paying attention. It's the exact same as talking "very quietly". Sure, you are the only one being affected by the talking.
I had an instructor once who was fond of saying "This isn't like TV, I can see you guys too!".
The keystrokes from students using IM clients or blogging would keep me awake in lectures.
It's already enough I have to put up with that strange guy at the front talking loudly about stuff... sheesh.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Rude? Probably... but anything on the IM back channel was in our heads anyway, so perhaps it's just good therapy :-)
[annoying IM noise]
"Are you passing notes, Mr. Smith? Forward that to me so I can read it out loud to the class... hmmm... a slash s slash l slash pick wan two cyber? What is this crap?"
IAALS.
I've seen this sort of lecture discussion during conference sessions using Hydra (a collaborative editor available for Mac OS X). A group of us ended up having a parallel discussion about the conference topic while the session was ongoing and at the same time the session moderator used Hydra to take notes.
The process was quite interesting and helpful for me since it allowed me to interact with other participants and gain new perspectives on the session topic.
I could see how a lecturer might not appreciate Hydra, blogging or anything else like it since it could basically be a way to silently pass notes, chat, and otherwise not pay attention to the lecture. But, there isn't much the lecturer can really do other than making it important to listen and pay attention.
If the entire class were participating in an online discussion while the teacher was making remarks, then better questions could be formed to help the flow of lectures. However, this isn't any breakthru in my opinion because what could be said during class, could most definitely wait until afterclass.
While listening to lectures, I generally take extensive notes to keep my mind on the lecture topic and attention on the lecturer. Something like this would just be too distracting.
And really, like people are only going to chat about the lecture. Everybody I knew with a laptop in class was playing Quake.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
click here plz k thx.
And that's a good thing? Don't students have a hard enough time paying attention to lectures? I was a student once; I know!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Everyone is talking about how back-channel discussions will allow students to discuss the lecture in real-time, refining their questions and improving their understanding....
...
Come on!
Has it been THAT long since you've been in school?!
Here's a typical back-channel discussion:
"Heh heh the professor said BUTT"
"No, he said BUT, moron"
"Check out the rack on the girl in the third row on the right"
"Sweeeeeet"
"Yo, that guy with the stupid hair fell asleep. HAHAHA look he's drooling on his desk!"
"HAHAH! Thats awesome! Hey is anybody on this channel near that guy? Throw something at him"
"Yeah I'm behind him. Watch this."
"HAHAHA"
"Hee Hee Hee Hee"
"Score!"
"Yeah! ROTFL!!!"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
4th article in a row that michael hasn't added some dumbass note at the end.
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
Hear, hear! If I ever find myself teaching again, anyone doing that in my classroom will leave.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I've seen laptops being used for a wide variaty of things. Most of the lecture halls I sit in have wireless internet, and my in my computer science classes, there tend to be around 5 laptops for a 50 person class.
I've seen people IM'ing while in class.. but I've also seen people watch movies or play games in class. There are many classes people go to because we might have a pop-quiz or something along those lines, and the only way to stay away is find anything to do besides listen to the instructor.
I'd prefer to have a laptop and play Counter-Strike against one of my roommates while he's at home, and I'm in class. That'd rock.
Its not what it is, its something else.
It seems to me that this could be great; I just finished my second year of school and there is nothing worse than listening to truly bad questions being asked in the midst of a lecture or missing something small and not being able recover in the midst of the lecture and thereby losing the value of the remainder of the lecture.
If one could set up a system whereby an ongoing dialouge relating to the lecture is occuring so as to ask those stupid questions that are of limited value and to increase the overall understanding of the material at hand while being inconspicuous enough so as not to distract from the lecturer then the way large classes are conducted could, potentially, be revolutionized.
K00lDude: God this is boring. Anyone wanna cyber? I'm sitting on the end of row 24
Wikkid84: asl?
37337: Dudes, my warez server is up, some and get some pr0n!
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Heh. When I was in university, about 15 years ago (ack! How'd that happen?!), I needed to point every single brain cell at the lecturer in most of my classes. (And then there was 'introduction to statistics,' which was where we played poker under our desks. :-)
Maybe it's a matter of course material. I don't honestly thing that University is getting any easier--probably the opposite in fact--but laptops and wireless might be leading the charge away from frantically taking page after page of notes with a cramped hand, while trying to absorb the information at the same time. If so, it's probably a Good Thing. (Of course, some fields are harder to move to the computer. Writing out the formulae in phys. chem. and quantum mechanics strikes me as still a pen-and-paper exercise)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Also as previously mentioned, real-time interaction potentially with the teacher would be great! Have certain people in the class be mods so the teacher doesn't get tons of anonymous "you suck" messages.
Also, it would be great to get WebEx or Netmeeting or something like that working with it too to provide interactive whiteboard/diagram support. Perhaps even interacting with Smart whiteboards like are installed at my University, perhaps the whiteboard could be input realtime to each of the laptop clients logged in. This would make it easier to see diagrams from longer distances, allow students to save the diagrams for studying later, and would also allow realtime feedback if a student had a question. (i.e., they could draw a circle around the trouble area momentarily.).
Neat stuff!
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
And there are some people who consider progress in general to be rude.
Some may call it progress however what is the difference between watching it on my computer and buying it on tape or DVD and watching it later. One of the things I enjoy about a personal lecture is you can see the individual interact with the environment where as in videos and such you are many times left guessing. That is only a personal preference though.
How can one really absorb what is being discussed in the lecture? You are busy trying to dictate every word the prof sais, or being sidetracked by other students blogs/IM's -- Not exactly the best way to learn.
stop him! he's trying to learn for free!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
At least where I work (a Fortune 5 company), IM is frequently used for back-channel communications during meetings and conference calls.
...)
It works better than older forms of non-verbal communication (e.g. glaring, kicking shins,
Thus sprach higg.
Dude, the other day I was like back-channeling in this new-age general education requirement class when HOLY SHIT Shirley MacLaine starting typing through my fingers. I was back-channeling channeling. It was like, woah.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Have you made any money off the amazon links in your sig?
This year at WWDC this happened all this time. Take 3500 Mac developers with laptops and wireless and add zero-conf IM and you get instant mass discussions. Plus Apple threw in free Sights... ;-)
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
*frantically raises hand*
Yes! Yes! I think it is a great idea. I'm all for IM in class. It is probably one of the few reasons I stay awake through class. The only persistent problem is the professor's droning voice which keeps distracting me from my engaging conversation with Blondebomb25 and Super_gal22.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is indeed progress, in my opinion. I think students should be able to discuss lectures as they are occuring and better understand what is being covered. But what it means is that the instructor isn't doing a good enough job discussing it himself, or isn't keeping the environment open enough to encourage open discussion in the class.
Certainly, there are some people who will just abuse the ability for the purpose of joking around and waste time, but I know that I would personally use the same idea in some of my classes where the professors aren't very good at teaching.
KappaStone
Plus you can go surf /. if you get bored off your ass (read: pure teaching from the book). =p
Let's see, there is another use for these laptops: blue screen the speaker's Windows box, or better, change its desktop background to somethin, uhmmm, more interesting. Should teach him to use Powerpoint!
Also useful if the speaker accidentally types passwords in the wrong field (visible) during a demo: now you can make use of these passwords during the lecture, before the speaker has a change to change them to something else!
Uday and Qusay got ackedwhay.
As long as noone in the chat or IM is writing diatribes of information, and keeping thoughts in small bite-sized chunks, it's not difficult to keep your eyes, ears and mind on the speaker and your eyes and mind on the chat/IM.
That is only if you can handle doing a few things at once...
In a former company (dot.com that went dot.boom) our tech department included a bunch of hackers (gee, whadda surprise) who had played a lot of MUDs during their college days.
Since we were spread out across several floors & buildings, we had a telnet chat server running, basically doing IM functionality.
We got into the habit of holding tech-only meetings via this server, with following benefits:
- Less waffle, it's harder to digress on a keyboard
- People actually thinking before "saying" something
- Instant meeting minutes (a GREAT bonus)
Unfortunately, this only works if ppl can actually type more than 5 words per minute, hence I don't forsee this reaching the mainstream anytime soon.
Only very few of the managers understood the benefits, the natural assumptions was geeks+network+server = "this can't be work, they must be playing"
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
In one of my classes the professor would bring in a wireless access point so people with laptops could use them online during the class. She also brought in a few wireless cards that people could borrow. The point of doing this was to see how this affected the class. At the end of the semester she asked people who had been using laptops regularly what effect it had on them. I for one found it distracting at times since I would be browsing the web or chatting. But the nature of the class was to talk about current issues in the tech world and such so reading slashdot was kind of like doing classwork anyway =)
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
As a full time computer engineering student, I believe that instant messanging would be a terrible thing for the classroom. People would talk about what they will be doing the upcoming weekend, play games, talk abotu other classes, and genereally not pay attention. Only two or three students in a lecture of 120 people usually have a laptop in my electrical/computer engineering class. The real value of IM/email/general internet connectivity comes after class when people need help, need to collaborate, or need to communicate. IM is an invaluable tool for this.
Some classes have mandatory message boards (read: graded) where you have to post your own opinion, then respond to someone elses.
I think if you were to run a real-time system during a lecture, you should have a chatroom where the professor can see what people are typing, so he or a TA could clear up points of confusion. This would avoid the problems of the people who ask questions that everyone in the room already knows. Too often people ask questions that are redundant, time consuming, and can be easiliy anserwed by someone sitting near them. A chatroom would be all inclusive, and that would keep people from feeling excluded.
But, most teaching trends are heading away from the lecture model. The lecture is highly ineffective becuase many professors can't relate to the students, who are seeing the material for the first time. A chat room would allow professors to receive some realtime feedback (like many in class voting systems do without the added distraction). This keeps the professor from teaching to a level that is above most students capabilies.
but i'm all for any system that keeps me focused on the material (read: not on a laptop) and keeps the professor down to earth.
-n
At the University of South Dakota (USD, not in San Diego!) School of Law, most classrooms are outfitted with electrical outlets and network jacks at each seat. This enables even folks with weak batteries to make use of our laptops for note taking et. al. The most amazing adaptation this has caused, however, is not among the students but rather the professors.
Our faculty has in recent years discovered how to pace lectures by listening to the sound of keystrokes in the audience. If it gets too quiet they can talk more quickly, too much keyboard noise and it's time to pause.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Modern day note passing. I doubt it will help students.
I remember, back in the day, when we would sit in the back row and sleep.
Kids these days...where are their priorities?!
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
As said elsewhere this is a good thing. It should help people think what is going on and ask questions. Better than whispering but not sure about the key presses of laptops. Now if there was a silent method of data entry that would be cool
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I'm part of the summer student program at CERN, and every morning there are three 45-minute lectures on particle physics. Most of the students don't bring laptops, but those that do are rarely doing anything related to the lecture. While it's certainly okay to drop attention from the lecture (especially if it's tedious or over one's head), doing so by using a laptop generates distracting keystrokes/moving images. Much better to bring along a book to read. Just MHO.
A comp sci class I was taking last year had wireless access, and the instructor was enthusiastic about students using laptops during lecture. Since all of her lectures were available in powerpoint, you could follow along on your laptop without having to strain to see the projection screen up front. Furthermore, she set up an AIM account so that you could ask her those "obvious" questions that people are often too embarassed to ask mid lecture, but are more comfortable asking with a degree of anonymity. It was funny, because sometimes she would briefly mention a concept that everyone pretended to understand, and you would hear the speakers on her laptop chime like crazy as about 30 new IM's flowed in. In my case, this greatly improved the quality of the lecture, and I learned quite a bit more than I would have with the standard paper and pencil, raise your hand approach. Granted, there was a fair degree of screwing off as some students found their computers to be more of an attractive nuisance than a study aid.
It seems that in the CS and EE classes that I take, the profs are pretty glad to see students taking an active role in the lectures rather than just sitting and obsorbing information. However in my general requirement classes (sociology, history, blah blah blah) I've found that instructors HATE the concept of deviating from the time-honored teaching methods. Pulling your laptop out in class seems to get the same reaction as if you pulled out an assault rifle.
Is it more rude than profs whose lectures are so utterly useless that the only way they can get people to attend class is to count attendance or have random quizzes?
:: I know the answers. Unless the professor has something insightful to tell me, I have better things to be doing.
I'm a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and class lectures are largely not worth the time. The profs either parrot what we've already read in the text, or they spend their time answering inane questions from students of dubious intelligence. (Whoever said that there's no such thing as a stupid quesiton obviously never attended a tech school. When a 4th year IT major asks (no joke) what a subnet mask is, there is something wrong!)
I've almost never attended lectures in my major, yet I manage a high GPA and IBM is all over hiring me when I graduate. I read the text
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I've heard some fairly good arguments to suggest that the lecture itself is a mediaeval form of presenting information and is now out of date as a way of transforming knowledge. What do students gain by sitting listening to the great master spout his wisdom?
Several lecturers I know have moved to providing their "lecture" online (e.g. hypertext document) and use the allocated lecture time for a follow up workshop, requiring the students to have already read and considered the "lecture" and to come along with some sort of academic response. Seems a far more effective use of teaching time to me, far more likely to be of value to students.
I've given several conference presentations and briefings and seen a few changes in technology. Those changes, however, have not created anything new in the lecture hall, however. Those people who are going to pay attention to every word I say are still going to do so. Those people who drift off into their own world now can save the effort of daydreaming and surf the web/chat instead.
As for meaningful discussion via backchannels, I have yet to see it in action. The audience members would have to communicate beforehand to set up the channel, I suppose. Maybe if the somebody, to include the speaker, set up a chat room for everybody to join, you could get a useful quorum of people...
At technical meetings, like the IETF, pretty much everyone has 802.11 connectivity and it is very common to send emails or IM about what the speaker is saying.
I think overall that this tends to improve things, however, in a classroom it might be too distracting and I can see Professors banning it.
How about a cellphone with a camera? You could be in your dorm room watching the lecture, copying it down for later review, and ask questions (via proxy) of the professor.
If you were in class with some of the pre-med gunners, you wouldn't be wasting your time chatting... you'd be watching your logs like a hawk for the hack attempts from your classmates, trying to delete your lecture notes.
I don't know how it is these days, but back when I was in the pipeline, half of all qualified med school applicants just plain didn't get in. The fierce competition really turned some people into boneheads.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
This kind of backchannel is common in the workplace as well. Most professionals carry laptops to business meetings, and in a wireless environment, IM and email is always there. It doesn't take long to notice that the use of laptops in this setting is disruptive to the meeting. Anyone attending a meeting, or class, should be focused on the speaker, not on email or IM. It's not about the person reading email. It is about being polite to others, the speaker and to have an attention span longer than 5 minutes. I know this is a hard lesson for the MTV generation, but realise that nobody becomes successful because they were not paying attention.
So students discussing the topics in class and helping each other to learn are not allowed?
No wonder our school system is so great!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
While working as an instructor for Sun I'd often have students using IM on the workstations while I was lecturing. The tip-tap typing wasn't all that much of a problem. And probably if they were only IMing each other about the lecture it wouldn't be that bad, but the students didn't confine themselves to IMing only in the classroom. They'd IM people at work, their wife/husband, their gf/bf etc.
The result was repeatedly dumb questions being asked. And before you start with that non-sense of "there is no dumb question" let me define it. If I say "X is a Y", then you stop your typing and ask "Is X a Y?" then it is a DUMB question. And there was lots of that while there was IM access. Students would hear something [me] in the backround mention some idea and when they were done typing their after-work bar crawl negociations they'd have an itch to ask a question about that idea.
I resolved to doing two things. I'd often ask other students to answer the question -- hoping to make it obvious that I just went over that. Or I'd disconnect the room from the firewall. Since most IMs aren't P2P this worked fine. The typing stopped. Attention was back on the guy in the front of the room.
Unless the class is huge, I don't see the point of back-channeling as helping the students get questions answered. Most professors hope to hear questions from the students, because the question is a good indicator if the prof has gotten his point across. Wthout that feedback lecture quality deteriorates.
--
For good mental hygiene, shave with Occam's Razor twice daily
I learned about my 3rd year of college that even taking notes was difficult. Its best to pay very close attention to what the teacher is 'saying.' And ask the TEACHER any questions you have. writing notes is a distraction, though you have to do it. Sometimes good teachers will pass out notes at the beginning of class.
Of course that was undergrad at a Historically Black College (HBCU). I went to grad school at a regular American University. They are very different. The teachers don't provide nearly as much assistance or guidance. They believe in difficulty through quantity. They let the TAs do all the work, and the lectures can be simply tiresome. I could see dozing off their since most of the comprehension was not in the class room but in the study groups...Seems like kids in regular universities are scared to ask questions or challenge the teacher, so they waste time chatting with each other.
(The teachers can still be helpful once you pin them down in their office and make it clear your not leaving till they explain this sh!t clearly.) not likely from your average american student at the average US institution. - In my experience at least.
...but laptops aren't yet as common in classes as one might think.
Nor should they be. If all you need a laptop for is to take notes, it becomes more of a hindrance than an advantage, especially in lectures on mathematics or lectures with many diagrams. You just can't quickly record mathematical symbols or graphical diagrams with a computer. Classroom use may become more justified when handwriting recognition software matures, but currently there is no good reason to bring a laptop to class.
Good note-taking has nothing to do with the medium on which the note is recorded, and recording everything said in lecture (which may be possible if you type faster than you write) is often not desirable. You need to filter what you hear and discern the important points from a lecture, not record a dictation. A simple notebook and pencil are perfectly sufficient.
Here
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circu its/24mess.html?ex=1059624000&en=5552cf1240514e43& ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
I attend Rochester Institute of Technology, in the Information Technology department.
Our entire building (three floors, just recently expanded) is covered with 802.11b connectivity. Many of the students, including myself bring laptops to class. Sure, some kids abuse them, and surf or play games during lecture (I've been known to do the former during a very boring Intro to System Administration 1 class), but there are some excellent uses.
I think the best is checking on something taught in class. More than once in that System Administration class the teacher has mentioned something, I doubted it, googled for it, and either learned it to be true (there was a use for the sticky bit to keep programs memory resident, but in current linux the sticky bit's purpose has changed), or false (Windows 2K does NOT require NTFS to do software RAID -- you can use FAT just as easily). This is an excellent way to reinforce information being taught. Had I not had my laptop in class I would've gotten sidetracked, forgotten about it, and never learned the truth about these and other things.
In another class I took, Network Administration, the teacher, Bill Stackpole, would often take advantage of those in class with laptops. If he brought up a topic and wasn't sure about something he mentioned, he'd encourage those of us with laptops to research it quickly, and let the class know the correct technical data. If a student would ask him a question in class that he couldn't answer, he'd encourage anyone with a laptop to help out and find the answer. From even those few excellent uses of wireless connectivity in the classroom I feel its been a great addition to the technology classes at RIT. If someone is going to goof off using a laptop, then they are the same person who was going to goof off doodling in their notebook, nothing lost, nothing gained.
I could go on and on about the times the Wifi access has saved my ass in one way or another in the GCCIS building. (and maybe I will later) Come out of the wood-work RIT students -- I know you have more stories!
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
I took a physics class last semester where everyone except me, it seemed, brought in theirl laptop and messaged but it wasn't that productive - it was more commenting on stupid things the professor did or said and then everyone with the laptops would start laughing all at the same time. While kind of amusing, it was also just eerie. I'm not sure that they provided any useful purpose although it would be cool to be able not to go to class and still enter these discussions. Imagine the fun of not having to leave your dorm room and to still sort of know what's going on.
The fact that the school will not install WiFi should not limit the students. Simply set the WiFi card to ad-hoc rather than structured, and use the 169.254.x.x/16 address space (Windows and some linux dhcp clients will configure for this if they do not find a dhcp server) and start communicating.
If you really need access to the Internet in class, a single ethernet-WiFi bridge should connect anyone in the classroom if both a ethernet and power jack are close enough or in the room.
-Rusty
You never know...
you know it much easier to state a point when all you have representing you is text, rather than a face to face confrontation. This is the reason Bush has avoided such turmoil and likewise why Tony Blair is in such hot water now. At least Blair has the balls to face his antagonist face to face. Here in the states, no one can touch the 'imperial' President.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
That's been part of the teaching style of the humanities for a long time now: go read this paper or book by some smart dead dude (readings), then I'll tell you what I think about it (lecture), then we can discuss (tutorial).
It's pretty obvious that a lecture can be converted to a meta-reading and put online, but the big question right now is whether tutorials can also be as effective online. Of course, never underestimate a university student's desire to be passive: many would rather snooze through a two-hour lecture than spend that time reading. And tutorials at anything below an advanced level are pretty dismal, at least at my alma matter: two students team up with the professor to mock the one student who will actually voice a minority opinion, while the rest snooze.
If the Internet can fix any of this, I'm all for it.
What is the sound of 1000 freshmen failing?
p tap-click-click-click... :)
Clickety-click-click-click-tap-tappety-click-ta
The best lecturers will factor time into their lectures for questions and interruptions on difficult points or particularly relevant tangents. Lectures are intended not only to impart knowledge but to solicit interaction from the class, engender debate, encourage learning from peers and to allow interaction with the material.
I am glad I didn't have to deal with the noise of the keyboards in my day. It was hard enough to sleep with the professor droning and the students taking notes. OTOH, it would have been fun to connect to the mainframe and get in a few round of trade wars.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I was at university from 1992 through 1995, (Computer Science and Information Systems Design).
I can remember hearing about one guy who had a laptop computer which he took to every lecture.
This was so unprecedented back then that he was nicknamed "Laptop". We're talking the days before mobile/cell phone proliferation and the days before widespread use of the World Wide Web.
This machine used to "bleep" regularly, royally pissing off some of the lecturers.
One day, it bleeped in the middle of a lecture about Industrial Relations (don't ask) and the lecturer shouted, "If I hear that thing make one more noise I will break it over your head!".
Laptop retired from the course shortly after this incident.
Don't know what happened to the lecturer, but if he's still there, he can't be enjoying life too much in these days of mobile device proliferation. Either that or he's suffered a few apoplectic fits...
...one sentence at a time?
1) you can choose to do it at 2 in the moring and
2) you can talk with others and do homework during it without being rude.
Is IMing during class really necessary?
They can enlighten the whole class with their discussions on the topic. That way, everyone benefits. If they want to have a conversation amongst a few of themselves, they can do it after class, avoiding disruption of the learning of all.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
hehe, and it works with that partner:u its/24mess.html?ex=1059624000&en=5552cf1240514e43& ei=5062&partner=REGISTRATIONBLOWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circ
I recently met a group of people who are developing an application for just this purpose. It allows for communication throughout the classroom as the lecture is going on. Further, it allows for the instructor to stream his notes to his students as they come on the screen, students can add voice or text annotations to the notes as they see fit, and part of the chat feature allows students to type in questions to the prof while he is lecturing, such that he can read them as they come in and address them without disrupting his lecture.
The software is called silicon chalk and is being developed in Vancouver BC. It has a pretty impressive development team, most notably the founder of WebCT.
Check it out.
And if the prof is so useless that he does petty things to make you attend his lectures, I can imagine how well he takes to students tapping on laptops during them.
~~~
At Virginia Tech, we have a 802.11b wireless network that includes several buildings and the coverage is growing. Only certain degree programs such as Architecture and Engineering require laptop computers. These programs offer courses that require students to interact and use their computers in the classroom. The number of courses is small at the moment but is expected to grow exponentially in the future.
Well i'm writing and reading this post on my laptop while watching a lecture right now!
What's rude is sitting in a 200-person echo chamber of a lecture hall and clacking away on your loud-ass keyboard. It doesn't matter whether it's your voice or your typing... if I can't follow the prof because of your noise, you're robbing me of my tuition and time.
I started writing a WML portal (using perl, and a perl module I wrote).
Maybe it's time to target the professors. The portal comes with a message board, multiple chat rooms, news, links, gallery, admin, stats, etc...
It's just been a fun little side project that I thought no one would ever want anyhow...
if you have an Opera Browser or WML - WAP Enabled Device
Point it to http://www.mcarterbrown.com/index.wml - WaPortal (Wireless Access Portal).
and let me know what you think. I'd like to get some feedback. Thanks.... Who knows... Maybe I *CAN* start a new WML Revolution... heh...
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Hm... attached to the wrong comment... Oh well.
You never know...
A couple of my friends at Caltech and I all have Powerbooks and we have found it very useful to take our notes together in Hydra. It's really nice because it allows each of us to concentrate on some of the things the prof says so we can get notes that are more comeplete and in better detail. The other plus to using Hydra is that it doesn't matter if we have internet access or not because we can just form an ad hoc network.
The reality is that technology will cange the way we learn stuff. The problem is that there are so many people entrenched (dependant) on the old way that the paridigm shift will be fought tooth and nail. Physically going to a classroom (school at all for that matter) is a waste of time and money for students. If someone built a colaborative learning tool (or used one of the many available tools) I'm confiden that we could develop an educational system that would develop knowledge much more efficiently.
Someone should earn some karma by providing some googles on the following:
1. open source collaborative education tools
2. virtual universities that push the technical envelope
The other issue is that our current educational system does not teach people the skills they need to survive in the business world. It seems based on an idealistic view of creating well rounded "renaissance" minds, which is neat and all, but seems like a rich kid luxury to me. When I realized this I blew off school and focused on making money and never looked back. When I am retired, I will go to school to learn cool stuff because it is fun.
I think that we need more "trade" oriented schooling for kids filled with classes like: powerpoint 102: how to impress the PHB without doing any tangible work
I do feel your pain about your fellow students. I had to deal with a lack of intelligence and creativity when I was doing a more technical degree, which is why I moved to a real University Degree Program, i.e. humanities, science, arts. I really began to enjoy hanging with people who were at University to learn rather than just get a piece of paper so they could make lots of money.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Now, we sit in the FRONT row and sleep.
( and you KNOW I snored through my DiffEq class! It was at 10 am! It didn't help that I was also the ONLY ONE in the front row...)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Can you at least mention one?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I used to use a laptop in class, but found it ultimately more trouble than it was worth. It worked fine for the English elective (waste of time) or the History of Science courses I took, but not for my core Math & Science classes.
Basically, by the time you copy out a diagram or complex formula, it will take you so long (especially if you have to switch to Symbol to make half the characters), that it's simply not worth it.
Now, some profs distribute their lectures in PDFs/Word Documents/HTML files, which makes it much easier, but then many students just download the lecture notes and skip class, which professors tend to hate.
I think a great solution would be for all students to have wireless laptops, and have the prof stream the lecture to students as he goes. That way, there's an incentive to go to class still, and laptops become a worthwile tool.
I'm thinking along the lines of a custom program that feeds one page at a time into a PDF or something.
Alternately, documents with blanks spots to be filled in during the lecture can also work.
Or, finally, something like the Mimio would also be very cool.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Lectures are an archaic form of teaching. Having a person preaching about how things are to be done is an inefficient way of learning, can be quite boring, and is VERY difficult to take. I say this after 3 and a half years at university.
I have had a few different lecturers over the past three and a half years, some I remember fondly, others I remember in pain. I have suffered through hours of lecturers from people who I cannot understand (that was not intended to be racist, and anyone who takes it that way is a moron) I just cannot understand what they are saying due to their accents... it makes it very difficult to learn.
One of my favourite lecturers, teaches by making the students THINK. This is a practice that is uncommon in the university world. A student is more likely to pay attention and learn if they are involved in the lecture. He would tell stories from industry, teach the course material, and then in the lecture would ask the students questions. What a novel idea... why don't more lecturers follow his example? I can tell you all with absolute honesty, that I have retained far more knowledge from his classes than from all of the other classes combined. He has found a way to make his material interesting to the students. This encourages them to learn... to think... many lecturers just expect you to absorb the information, and then spew it all back to them verbatim. Thought appears to be disencouraged.
I must apologise now for the seeming randomness of thought there. I feel rather strongly about this, and can get a little excited and begin to ramble.
I am not stubborn. I am right!
There's a difference between IT programs (useless, nobody needs a degree to do IT work) and CS programs.
May we never see th
Even if this was being used in a productive manner such as asking other students what the prof meant on something, I don't see it working well in the context of a realtime lecture. You could get absorbed into the conversation about your question, and the look up to realize that you haven't been paying attention to the lecture and don't how much you've missed or where the prof is now - so you'd have to ask more questions and end up getting further behind.
I *never* took notes in class because I found that when I did would end up getting behind in the lecture, just like is the senario explained above. Because of this I found it far more benificial to spend my time in lecture listening to the professor's every word and making sure I understood it - asking questions if I didn't. In a couple classes the prof's lectures were particulary dense, so I made sure to read the book ahead of time to decrease the amount of thought I had to do in class. In a few rare cases where most of the lecture was not in the textbook I brought a tape recorder to class. But in general, anything that would take my mind off the lecture, would be a bad thing in my opinion.
Then again I'm a little slow at parsing. Often times someone will explain something technical to me and I can't inerpret their words real time. I have to buffer them in my head and then read them back to myself visualizing what was said before I understand it. It's kind of annoying - I can understand just about anything that I read from a book, but real-time human input can be a stuggle sometimes.
The only time I could see this as useful is as a divergence when a class is very easy and boring, but attendence is mandated. But I would suppose that those profs would not allow laptops.
It really depends entirely on the method of delivery. I've had a few classes with an outstanding professore here who makes every effort to tailor his lectures to the students he's teaching. He has won several awards for his methods of pedagogy (sp). Like anything else, the addition of laptops to the classroom is a tool which can be abused, misuesd, or manage to become very benificial.
:)
If implimented correctly, all that clickety-tatp-tap-tappety could be no more distracting then the sound of pens scratching across the paper and calculator buttons being jammed to the contact pad.
I still can't shake the image I have of the first laptop I saw in a class... The guy was looking at porno on the second row of a C programming class on his new dell. After a little while, and due to several laughs from those behind him, the professor came over and walked up behind him.
After that, the embarresd student was given the task of being the note monkey at the front of the class for the slides. The proff never let him live it down. I don't think that kid will ever look at porno again without remembering the look on the professors face.
No, the kid was not me...
-=fshalor
> IBM is all over hiring me when I graduate
so, let us know how living in india works out for you...
It's been a while since I've attended college in the traditional lecture sense... so my comments may be dated, but that doesn't stop me from making them :-)
Way back when--prior to the abundence of wireless networks on the campus, people always found other ways to screw off that were probably more distracting.
I always brought my laptop to class and I was always typing away notes. It didn't seem to bother anyone. If the professors are bothered by the fact that people might be "Chatting about them behind their backs", that's really their problem. I look at it this way. I paid for the class, you are grading the class. You tell me how well I did based on my performance. How I achieve that performance, or whether I achieve that performance is up to me provided that I'm not being a total distraction for other folks who are spending their wages trying to learn.
I wonder what types of classes are the most affected by people "screwing around" and distracting others. Way back when, it was always those classes where attendence was manditory. You'd get a bunch of people who didn't need to show up every day, showing up and making class difficult for those of us who didn't have such a great grasp of the subject matter.
I can completely see how IM would be very useful in a learning environment. It's very useful in my work environment, but there are many in IT who would ban it--not because of security risks, or snooping risks (our e-mail system is just as prone to snooping)--but because they're concerned about how much time people who don't appreciate the importance of their paycheck are wasting.
It's unfortunate that whenever a new *something* comes our way that has positive benefits, the attention is always paid to those individuals who misuse it. It's another example of making rules (or Laws) based on the Least Common Denominator elements of society.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
I sympathise. However, let me tell you that teaching a mix of geniuses and dunces (which in my experience is the typical student population today) is no easy task. No matter what you do, somebody is going to feel that they learnt nothing, and they'll be right.
Not that there aren't poor and disinterested lecturers...
If you never attend lecture, how do you know if the professor has anything insightful to tell you?
Nevermind, you sound like you have everything figured out, so you probably don't need this. But I don't want other (perhaps less talented) students to get the idea that skipping lecture is a good idea.
Here's a quick guide to how to get the most out of lecture:
- Write down everything the instructor says -- even if it is 'wrong'. The prof only takes the time to lecture on what he thinks is important. If he thinks it's important, it will be on the test (even if it's 'wrong').
- Sit in the front of the class. Not only will you not not be distracted by the antics of the other lecture victims, but the professor stands a better chance of remembing your face come grade time.
- Pay attention. Fer cryin out loud, you're paying for that damned lecture. Get your money's worth out of it. Plus, since you're sitting in the front of the class and the prof knows your face, you don't want him remembering you as that guy that draws pictures of naked chicks during lecture.
I go to a small liberal arts college in NY and I work for the technology department as well as run the RESNET program. Needless to say, I have known the second every wireless point has gone up at school and I use them when I'm in range. I can say that I've seen the changes in the waves of people who use them. The first semester, when it was myself and about 15 other kids in my major, we did this chatting about the lecture, because most of us were truely geeks and either already did the reading for the lecture, or didn't need to listen quite as attentively as the other students. Anyway, it's 2 years later, and now there are a bunch of kids who just got laptops and wireless cards for the sole purpose of being on IM in thier classes. THESE are the students that are being rude about this. They never had any intention of using their computers for academic reasons. Here's the giveaway....Students that are typing furiously on their laptop, and taking notes on their notepad next to their laptop. Also, for those of you who think it's rude, there are some people that can simply type faster than they can take legible notes...and most laptop keyboards are just as quiet as a pencil scratching away at a pad.
=Palewhitemale
At Vassar betwen 1993 and 1997 I was teaching the occasional hypertext class in the media lab in the English department, and one of the biggest challenges was getting the students off of Broadcast (an IM-like app before AIM for Mac OS ... ehm, 7, or so) while you were lecturing.
The way we usually caught this stuff (besides walking around the room in between the tables of computers) was that invariably someone would forget to turn their sound down, and the distinctive BroadCast blurp would give it away.
On a slight tangent, we had some excellent, and very productive classes when we all jumped on either the VassarMOO, LambdaMOO, or one of the other MOOs at the time, where students were allowed to wander into other rooms to discuss... well, whatever, really. The lecture, MOO-space, or, as I said, whatever.
_m
While I have no basis to make this broad generalization, I'd imagine that it's no different at RPI than anywhere else.
;)
They were still phasing in the 4x4 curriculum and Total Laptop Domination while I was there, so my experience was probably somewhat different... but if it wasn't laptops, it was (gasp!) reading something other than the text or notes during class, or (GASP!) writing messages on paper to the person next to you. And this was WAY back in 1999!
In some ways, the latter was even more instant than this so-called "Instant" Messaging technology, because you could snicker as soon as the person was half-done writing their snide or humorous comment to the point that the punch line was understandable.
Another benefit is the longevity of such comments - I have many notes between myself and the guy who sat next to me in class in my Human Physiology I notebook (the paper kind) that still refresh my memory of specific lectures. Class was made memorable by the daily choice of attire by the professor (they didn't call her "Jane, the Lion Tamer" for nothing) and subsequent note-taking on non-physiological topics.
I'm in a different kind of school now, and find that the frequency of laptop use/abuse in class is inversely proportional to the communication ability of the lecturer. There are some classes that I assume that I need to take a few notes and otherwise sit there, learning by osmosis. The rationale that everyone uses isn't one of "keeping back channels open to discuss classwork," but "staying awake and surviving through this class so we look alive and don't get called on." It is something of a survivalist response, but there have been times where the majority of the class has been in an AIM chatroom, and the victim of a random-assed question directed at one student by the prof has been assisted by classmates via AIM. This helps the student in saving face, but is it really helping learning?
The most disturbing comments I heard were from a student who visited another school and noticed that a few students were watching DVDs on their laptops during class. When she asked the prof about it, the response was a flippant "hey, at least they're coming to class."
There are certain classes in which I don't dare plug into the ethernet jack - not out of fear of the prof, but because I might be distracted and miss a good point by the lecturer or another student. I actually enjoy this environment more, since I don't feel the need to distract myself to stay awake.
I do feel somewhat guilty paying $234827539438579348573945834.56 a year (+/-) in tuition just to chat in class, even if some of the profs are begging to be talked about with classmates in real time to catch the humor of their phrases and mannerisms. I'm going up to my eyeballs in debt to learn; I an chat on AIM (iChat, really) anytime I want to - for free.
Perhaps it will force the issue of recognizing talented, engaging lecturers versus those who read off whatever's on the podium. Maybe schools should start using "percentage of time I was chatting on AIM during class" as a new criterion in faculty course evaluations...
Lecture Hall Back-Channeling
:)
So, this doesn't have anything to do with sex in the back of the classroom?
OK, go ahead... waste your modpoints
I remember seeing when Microsoft visited my University some time ago a video about the TabletPC in academia.
:)), asking the professor a question over Messenger.
There was a lecture, and the lecturer had his TabletPC wirelessly connected to MSN Messenger. Students sitting maybe 20 feet away would tap in IMs to him to look at while lecturing, rather than actually speak!
I thought it was incredibly stupid, like people sitting next to each other and using Net Send rather than talking. Jesus, just stick your hand up and ask!
Later on, one of the students was sitting in his very nice room (you could tell it wasn't real just from that
Much jokey banter about "hey, it's so great how you love my lectures, but how about waiting until tomorrow!?". I'd never seen a lecturer use a smiley until then, which only added to the false feeling.
Ah, Microsoft. Dig yourself a market.
How is someone silently typing away on their computer disrupting others? Not all keyboards are loud you know.
Furthermore asking a question aloud that others already know the answer to wastes THEIR time. So simply asking one person about it is much more efficient.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Historically, at least at my school, we've seen again and again that this just doesn't work.
Of course the school says that they look at the evaluations and everything, but the fact of the matter is that there just aren't enough teachers out there for them to weed out the bad ones by actually following through on any of the student's recommendations.
> You're the one paying money for an education.
Student = Revenue Generating Unit
That's it. Unless the school is faced with hundreds of students willing to leave because of the profs (and not just complain about profs) they won't do anything about it, it's not worth their time.
...and I just finished my first semester of "online" learning. I am 3/4 of the way through my Bachelor's in Comp/Info Science, and just wrapped up my mid-spring semester. I took two classes that were completely online because I now have an awesome full-time IT job. Granted, I did well, but Internet classes take much more discipline than the "traditional" lecture and/or lab; plus, there is something to be said for the classroom environment - no matter how we try to emulate it via technology, nothing can take its place. I am all for incorporating instant messaging, chats, etc. into the classroom, but in my opinion, there is no substitute.
Assuming you've got a quiet keyboard, it's definitely progress. Especially if the chat were shared with the lecturer afterwards as feedback. If you're passing love notes via chat, that would be rude (but fun!).
As long as the student gets the grade they desire why does it matter if they come to class or not?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...at the programming conferences I have been to. I thought it was a cool idea until I junped on irc and saw what people were saying.
Basically a lot of adolescent, rude, mocking comments. I felt real bad when I found out that there were so many jerks in the audience. I suppose it never even occured to me that people could still be like that even after they "grew up".
I never did irc again during a conference
If one student has the question, chances are, others do, too. And if it really is an elementary (or excessively involved) question, the prof can defer answering it until after lecture.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Typing in questions to other students might work in arts / essay subjects. But I don't see it working for maths courses - nobody can type the squiggly symbols, unless you are all lightning-fast TeX or MathML gurus, and even then stopping to type would probably be too much of a distraction from what the lecturer is saying. Anyway, the response you got back from other students would probably not help much to clarify things, since explaining mathematics takes time and is hard to do if you are only just learning it yourself.
Still, there could be a single red 'WTF?' button on the keyboard; when many people in the audience press it at once, you know you have some justification for interrupting the lecturer and asking him or her to explain.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Then don't do it. But for many people, this is a great way to resolve questions without bugging the speaker and to generally enhance the presentation.
And really, like people are only going to chat about the lecture. Everybody I knew with a laptop in class was playing Quake.
This was probably only the case for mandatory-attendance classes. I've always felt that mandatory attendance in college is ridiculous. If the student can get a good grade in a class they don't attend, there's no reason for them to go. And if the prof does make them go, don't be surprised if they play Quake. I never did that in college, because if I wasn't getting anything out of the lectures, I didn't go.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
One of the required gen-ed classes at my school is Writing, which is taught in a computer lab. To give the professor credit, she really did try to integrate the technology into her class - for example, all her lecture notes were made available on the message board, there was a message board which was used for graded in-class discussion, and a couple times she had us use an IRC room for an in-class discussion. None of this really added anything of substance, though - and conducting a large-scale class discussion on IRC seemed to be more awkward than just having people use full-duplex analogue audio transmitted/recieved using built-in biological components.
On the plus side, I was able to browse slashdot during lectures. That was cool.
I'm the stranger...posting to
We all learn in different ways. You and I learn well from books, others are more comfortable with spoken language and interactivity. We should make school more palatable for all types. Classes should not be mandatory. This gets the book people out of the class, as well as the lazy people, leaving people who care about the lecture. As a result it's a better learning experience for everyone. This should be the case in highschool and probably middle school as well. Also, homework should be optional. Already the case for most college classes, but I'd like to see it adopted in public schools as well. You should be graded based on your performance on examinations, not how much busywork you can do. Furthermore, general prereqs need to be eliminated. Well roundedness is desirable and should be encouraged, but not required. If I know what I'm interested in and where I'm going, forcing me to waste time on your pet interest is only going to piss me off. However, specific prerequisites
should be enforced strictly. I don't mean banning people without the right credits, but if someone takes a class they're not prepared for they should get no sympathy. To spend half the class time bringing these people up to speed only holds everyone back, and then the next professor has to bring everyone up. There's more, lots more. But I'm not sure anyone is listening anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If the lecture is boring I just talk on AIM and read ESPN.com (assuming I've exhausted ./ for the time being).
I just always liked having a laptop because I could type my notes and didn't have to worry about readability later.
Now if I could only afford a tablet PC...
See IEEE computer society 4th annual international design competition for the winning team's project report. They (from National Taiwan University) had a system which did this, but allowed two-way interaction with the lecturer and facilitated collaboration. I think something like this could actually be useful.
I'm wicked fast at LaTeX and take all my engineering notes in it. They come out as beautiful, book-quality PDF documents when I'm done. Worth it to me because I can type nearly twice as fast as I write, and can actually read it afterward. The only disadvantage is for diagrams, which I usually describe in words rather than drawing...
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Any lecturer who bans this is hopelessly mired in one given way of doing things, and is one of all too many unfortunate parts of the academic profession.
If I could actually guarantee that all my students would have computers in a lecture, the number of new things I could do with a lecture would be mind-blowing. First of all, I would immediately set up a chat room for the lecture to go on while the lecture is taking place. I'd have a computer in that room as well, both for sending out supplementary material (Weblinks in place of handouts) and for reading over the conversation when I'm done.
Will people have useless discussions on the side, surf the internet randomly, and/or play Quake?
Without a doubt. However, it's not as though someone really hell-bent on not paying attention needs anything more than a notebook. Or the ability to close their eyes.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Ludicorp showed an application called Confab at the O'Reilly Etech conference that was specifically designed for this. It mapped the layout of the conference rooms to a shared discussion space so that as people moved from room to room they could chat about what they saw. More fun was that you could listen in on the discussions happening in the other parallel tracks. Not much on their site about it, but here's the Google search for it.
I know I should have left it at that, but the look on people's faces when I told them I didn't know what they were talking about when they asked me "wasn't it funny when..." was even funnier!
Of course, we called it "whispering" back then.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
That's cool but creepy. A professor must feel like he is lecturing to a Borg collective.
Networked lecture rooms were part of Acadia University since I began attendance in 1997, and this was common practise when the professor/presenter in question allowed laptop use - most did.
Of course, the subject of conversation wasn't always the topic of the presentation, but this has been around for a while, at any rate.
University - a box of academia nuts.
>> It seems based on an idealistic view of creating well rounded "renaissance" minds, which is neat and all, but seems like a rich kid luxury to me.
... that's EXACTLY where the "University" concept came from.
Yes, that's right
Back in the 'good old days', if you were learning a trade, you'd go to a trade school. Back in the REALLY old days, this was an apprenticeship, and you'd start as a child. This assums you were not tied to the farm or village that your father was, and his father before him, etc. etc. etc.
The university was meant to do exactly what you described -- teach the student a rounded course of a bit of everything -- to teach about "The Universe" (which I believe is where the term "University" came from).
The only ones who could afford to burn that much time and money *were* the rich.
This mind intentionally left blank.
> nobody can type the squiggly symbols, unless
> you are all lightning-fast TeX or MathML gurus
Hmm...I don't know. It's always seemed pretty easy. Anyone who's ever programmed or used Mathematica would probably recognize something along the lines of:
Integrate[x^3, {x, 0, Pi}]
to mean "integrate x cubed over the range 0 to Pi". This can also be represented in even shorter (read: easy to type with a stylus or quick keystrokes) notation, such as:
int x3 0 pi
Quick messages in a lecture hall could easily be phrased as simple interrogatives:
x3 or x2 ?
Most people learning any new language (in both the linguistic and algorithmic senses) *do* have a steep initial learning curve, but then quickly learn those elements that they use every day. This might exhibit the same phenomenon.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
"open source collaborative education tools"? "push the technical envelope"? What are you, in marketing?
That doesn't actually *mean* anything - give me 2 concrete examples of "collaborative educational tools", even conceptually, that could provide as much information in as accessible a way as a lecture with a Q & A session would, please.
"The reality is that technology will cange the way we learn stuff."
Will it really? Calculators don't appear to have improved the average American's math. Most computers are used as an extension of rote learning.
"Physically going to a classroom (school at all for that matter) is a waste of time and money for students. "
Depends on your method of learning, and what the subject matter is.i.e CNC & PLC programming.
"1. open source collaborative education tools "
The problem isn't the tools (open or not) but those who use them. HINT:Collaborate
"2. virtual universities that push the technical envelope "
Already moved to India.
"The other issue is that our current educational system does not teach people the skills they need to survive in the business world."
1-How to back-stab.
2-How to lie without drawing suspicion.
3-How to kiss-ass without leaving a bitter aftertaste.
"It seems based on an idealistic view of creating well rounded "renaissance" minds, which is neat and all, but seems like a rich kid luxury to me. "
Being well rounded will always be a rich kids thing. The peasants will have to settle for less.
"When I realized this I blew off school and focused on making money and never looked back. When I am retired, I will go to school to learn cool stuff because it is fun. "
Just as long as you never end up with a job requiring those "cool things".
Granted, but there's a huge difference between the neolithic option of physically passing pieces of paper between adjacent people and the modern one of effecting an instantaneous network permeating the lecture and allowing greater than two-party discussions to happen in real-time, at the speed at which its participants can type. This is new, this is exciting, and this makes me disappointed that more students don't bring laptops to class.
How long before we get rid of profs completely. What a racket to charge upward $30K for tuition at the big name schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. Kids that go there are smart enough to learn the shit on their own ... they don't need to be spoonfed by grad students who are bitter they are wasting time in the classroom away from their research interests.
A good first step would be to take the class entirely online. Wake up, log on, and tune in to some canned lecture presented hopefully by someone who cares about teaching and prepared a little bit before jumping on top of his soapbox.
Okay, I'm done ranting.
"some people consider the practice rude, others consider it progress, and good arguments can be made on either side."
//defines course class //defines practice class //todo write othe behavior funtions
// Insert other AI code here, workout complete // virtual student someday
; ;
Here is a simple one:
#include
#include
#include
bool bring_laptop(void);
void main(void)
{
bool laptop_carry;
laptop_carry = bring_laptop();
}
int bring_laptop()
{
if (course.type == "CIS" || course.type == "CS")
{
practice.laptop = "progressive"
};
else
{
practice.laptop = "rude"
};
return practice.laptop_take;
}
You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.
Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.
David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.
Testing to direct content is a great idea. I wish teachers would do that instead of wasting our time with stuff they expect us to not understand...
One of my Computer Science Professor used to anonymously instant message his missing students during lecture. It was pretty easy for him because all the students were assigned a class unix account with a common prefix. He used to ask general questions about the class, the professor, and then he would always finish with a clincher by asking "How come you're not in class right now?"
I'm glad you went to a school where you only had the best lecturers teaching you. I guess that's where all the best lecturers went. They went to your school. In my case, I went to a school where I only had the best researchers/most famous Professors teaching me and only a handful of them happened to be outstanding lecturers.
Since Grand Valley has such a piss poor computer to CS major ratio, most of my friends and I were forced to buy laptops to do our homework between classes(classes are sometimes scheduled with an hours or two between two 400 level classes, leaving 30-40 students hanging around a lab with 12 computers). Fortunatey they finally decided that the Computer Science building might be a good one to add wireless access to, so we all had bought wireless cards.
One of our classes, Programming Languages was taught by a very irritating professor who taught little more than hatred for her. Of course, since some of us had laptops and wireless access.
One of my few memories I took away from that class was when we gave our IRC channel a play by play of how horrible the lecture was, at some point almost bringing epiliptic seizures by flipping through 30 slides at a time. The Lectures were boring, plagerized, and mostly without merit- but we had wireless access and huddled in the safety of our IRC channel.
We often made it a game to try and make the others laugh out loud. Those were some of the greatest memories my time at college.
After recalling all of these fond memories, I decided to go back through my xchat logs and find all of the conversations had from 3pm to 4 pm from Feburay to April. I'll be nice and post some of them so you can see what was talked about. These chats are not complete, and may be edited.
shabbs, morgajel/grog, ogg/darkimage, mors/gronk, had laptops in the class and bill and Gen_G sat next to them. everyone else was usually in the lab, talking to us in the channel.
http://draccus.homelinux.net/cs343chat.log
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The more I read the comments, the more I think this might work. I can remember giving "power sessions" at our last technology fair, and as a whole, we had sessions that ranged from 5-10 people per room. Have everyone log in with Hydra, *INCLUDING* the speaker, so that any questions that come up, s/he can monitor how students are reacting to that, and incorperate that into their sessions.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
My school (Unversity of Cal. San Diego) has a research team that built a system specifically for this from scratch. First, they got HP to donate a ton of older model journads that they had lying around in some warehouse. These are now distributed along with a compact flash wireless card to computer science/engineering students, along with some new incoming freshmen. Using the schools WiFi network, the research team developed a web based question that allows students to ask questions, take polls, and attempt to interact with the professor. The professor can set up polls beforehand, and then open them at appropriate times during the lecture. The biggest problem is abuse, and what ended up happening is that a TA basically had to attend lectures to admin.
... we had Prof. Gene Golub giving a course in our university some time ago. After observing for a bit a girl in the third row with a laptop on her table, he said: "Excuse me, but it's such a shame to have your face hidden behind that screen ...".
I find laptops during lectures so annoying. I doubt you can listen to the lecture (oh well, I cannot), and you can use the laptop somewhere else, if you want to. Nobody has to go to the lecture.
Great, I really want the world run by a bunch of people lacking a sense of scope. I think that every one needs a well rounded education before specializing, so you have a sense of where your feild fits, and the greater impact it has. People going to school just for a future pay check make me very depressed, they are going to lead to our downfall for their lack of perspective and ethics.
And really it isn't a rich kid luxury, I've been attending college level classed for over 5 years now, and am now getting ready to attend my second university, after another breif stint in the Maricopa Community College system. Oh, and I'm dirt poor, living in a one bedroom apartment in the ghetto, working a job much under my skill level. But to me, being well rounded is essencial, I'd much rather be intelligent, than programmed. I'd much rather 'waste my time' on all those 'useless' philosophy courses than go to school for 2 years so I can be some nasty proffesional, blind of everything except on specific feild.
Knowledge needs context.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
my laptop, such as it is is a wreck, so i NEVER use it.
/. at the same time.
a provision for me as an ESE student at my high school, however has given me unrestricted access to "word processing software for note-taking where needed upon student request" i.e. i ask and the teacher has no choice but to hand over a box for my use.
my chemistry teacher was more than compliant by digging up a really old box, a Pentium-120MHz sucker running windows 95. one burned CD and cat5 cable later, i was taking notes, writing up lab reports and surfing
though for the more complex stuff a paper pad and pencil stood at the ready, a computer is little use in math classes, partial use in Science classes, makes better use in English, literature and other classes due to the sheer amount of writing involved.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
I have one professor who absolutely hates any typing during lecture. Yet, other professors have no problem with this.
;)
I have another that doesn't like *any* activity. He locks the display screens while he's talking.... This caused me to buy a laptop
It seems to me that there are so many things to consider here. The NYT article addresses mostly the boring ones. Perhaps the collective consumption of information or teaching is different in some way than individual consumption. In the IM environment people can write their thoughts in real time and have dialogue with others - that may change the way the material is experienced and consumed. Also, it is a semi-public (but private) forum where people can offer up ideas to be screened (or establish the confidence to talk) before disrupting the whole class. (Akin to answering clarifying questions - but much deeper socially). In this particular event (the one in the NYT story), we had one situation where a woman wanted to ask a really good question but was not confident enought to ask it. She vet-ed it in the IM circle and then everyone said "hey great question - you should ask that out loud". She did and it was the most thought provoking question of the day. She said later she never would have asked it without the support she got from the group. The collective aspect of the dialogue is one thing. But also, the dialogue is then supported with rich media. You can provide links to data, other (perhaps opposing) views, the history of the speaker, their other work, their CV, related material. And the collective can benefit from everyone's knowledge in real time. Then you can have a transcript of all this supporting scaffolded thought to reference afterward. Used right - such dialogue can then keep the lecturer on their toes if people start asking pointed probing questions backed up by data exchanged through the IM. It seems having it there in real time is also different somehow than looking things up afterward - the experience of material changes. Sometimes writing helps clarify my thoughts (thats just me) - writing in real time might clarify in real time and so change the way I learn. Perhaps this is just like note taking - but I doubt it. Note taking is just transcription most of the time - this is more critical and communicative. But, there is also an access issue covered in the article - some don't have access and may be cut out of the experience for lack of equipment - that's probably not fair in a learning environment. Bottom line - technology is nothing until we use it. One group might collectively surf porn, another might broadcast running commentary on the latest WiFi conference to people in the room and outside of it or truely use it to enrich the learning with materials and thoughtful comments. In the case described in the article it was clearly (usually) the later. But, whatever floats your boat... ya know? nan
I miss my Handbook...
S PE C.shtml
http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/HAND286/HB2
There's this professor in an introductory class of computer science at our university. Now, these classes are filled with fresh young people, eager to learn about computers, and as I started studying in 98, at a time when job prospects were promising. Thus, lots of people had chosen computer science.
Now, you might think that this ended up with classes full of people with no clue what so ever to computing. Well, you are right. The problem with this professor though, was not that he went through the stuff too fast or too slow, but that he didn't went through his stuff.
The professor, well known for his mac addiction, spent most of lectures showing of his macintosh and talking about how stupid and non-useful those old mainframes used to be.
There are some highlights in all his stories, as when he talked about programming classes in the old days at high school. The students started on Monday, writing their programming lessons on paper. On Tuesday, the code was reviewed and typed into punchcards. On Wednesday, the cards were sent to the university, layed on batch for compiling. On Thursday, the compiled programs were runned, and on Friday the results returned to the high school. They now had the whole afternoon to debug so that they could rewrite whatever neccessary on Monday to make it work.
Now, focus, stain, focus. Back to the story. I forgot to say something about Extreme programming and nowadays and checkin-each-minute-cycles.
The thing was, on one lecture, the professor started up with his slides, gradually shifting to some example he had found in 1987 that he just needed to show everyone. This example, of course for the Macintosh, required the lowest possible resolution and color depth, and the professor fickled and tried to locate the Screen resolution dialog (hurray for usability, Apple!). Nobody cared. Students small-chatted about were to go drinking in the upcoming weekend. (Samfundet!)
Suddenly a student started snoring, but nobody could figured out who. Everyone laughed, even the professor. He's a good hearted guy, but he made a point of the abuse of time to come to lectures just to sleep (08:15 lectures aren't called 'night shift' without reason). The lecturer continued, "I suggest for the sleeping person to leave now, get some sleep at home, and rather spend the afternoon playing with the lecture examples. " Then, fifteen students raised and leaved the room. More laughter.
Stain, vel! - http://stain.portveien.to/ Stian Søiland - stain@nvg.org - Trondheim, Norway
At my university, Acadia University(www.acadiau.ca) in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, each student is provided with an IBM R31 as part of tuition and ethernet ports are under practically every desk.
This leads to an awful lot of ICQ messaging during classtime. Little to none of the discussions during lecture are subject related or even school related. Good students pay attention and take notes like they would have under any regime. The students who would have been passing notes 30 years ago are passing ICQ messages, arranging to meet at the bar that evening.
Since the laptops are a matter of school policy, every attempt is made to "integrate" them into the learning environment. In almost all contexts this is done clumsily and without positive effect - and this school has had this program in effect for over 6 years.
Acadia has the highest university tuition in Canada thanks to this technological "improvement", and often wonder if it is worth it...but then I remember how good the faculty is, and I remember that I like the place...
-traser
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
Actually,
With a TabletPC, you could easily scribble out equations through Microsoft's "Whiteboard" application inside of Messanger.
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Hmm...I don't know. It's always seemed pretty easy. Anyone who's ever programmed or used Mathematica would probably recognize something along the lines of:
Integrate[x^3, {x, 0, Pi}]
Actually, I did this very thing taking notes on my palm during my calculus class. It's not really hard at all, though I do type 90WPM, so that might have something to do with it..
When a 4th year IT major asks (no joke) what a subnet mask is, there is something wrong!
The last time I asked this in class, I was in grade 10 and Windows 95 was new...
Screw bringing laptops and PDAs to class. I can't think of many classes I took that didn't involve me copying pictures and diagrams off the board, which I have yet to see handled well on a laptop or PDA, although some of the tablet PCs come close.
If we need a greater than 2-party discussion about the lecture there's thing thing called "voice" that people have been using since the dawn of structured education which seems to work pretty well in my experience. Plus, this also happens to involve the professor in the discussion which helps to clarify points, and pace the lecture appropriately rather than having the lecture blaze on while you and your buddies are trying to figure out a point he stated 20 minutes ago.
I have a few friends who work in the computer department of the prestigous Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire--a private prep school where motion picture actors (if you can attach that sobriquet to Stephen Seagal, anyway) send their kids, and that regularly gets written up in papers and journals for its progressive stance on computerizing the classroom. Each student is either issued or brings to school his own Apple Powerbook, and they're fully integrated into the class curricula.
Of course, their use of those computers is strictly controlled--no computer games, for instance, and I believe instant messaging services are blocked at the firewall. But still, just imagine the sort of things you can do, educationally, when everyone in the class has his own computer...
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Ever tried a medium-resolution (2 Mpx or higher) digital camera?
If a lecture is worth all this peripheral activity, then whatever the prof is saying is probably sufficient to occupy a normal person's full attention span. Maybe I'm just slow, but I seriously doubt that many people can really absorb the material while dividing their bandwidth between the lecture and all the instant analysis and discussion. Maybe the real purpose of backchanneling is to provide legitimized filler for the more boring lectures.
Well, no. They didn't exist when I went to school. But someone snapping pictures in the classroom is guaranteed to piss people off.
I did manage to fall asleep in a calc class during my first year in college. It was in an over-heated room in the middle of winter (I don't remember what time the class was). I do remember, however, waking up, looking around, and thinking to myself, "These are *not* my classmates. And who is that professor?" I don't recall anyone saying anything, but there were a lot of smiles as got up and left.
Two or three years later, I was at the weekly seminar given by my department. I, of course, fell asleep (as I still occassionally do). Some time later, I jerked awake, looked up, and saw the speaker looking right at me. He paused for a sec, and then said, "Well, hellooooooooooo!"
The world is a harsh place and being dirt poor makes you vunerable. I would advise kids to focus on a specialization first that lends itself to making money. Later in life, when you have the luxury, go back to school and make yourself well rounded.
Why use IM? The different protocols are incompatible with each other. While I suppose one could use a "swiss army knife" like Jabbber that includes them all, how about using the more open IRC protocol instead? That way, one has a choice of clients.
Also, one could more easily create a log of an IRC session that includes all participants. I imagine a log like this would help the lecturer to see what kinds of questions or comments his audience has. With this information, he could figure out which parts of his lecture were unclear or need more detail.