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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."
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.
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!".
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.
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
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I'm all for interaction, but this kind of simple-minded requirement just leads to awkward, stupid, and obvious things being posted by people who either 1) can't think of anything better or 2) were already beaten to the punch in asking a truly insightful question.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
I know this is a really geeky website and we have to sex everything up with computers but there's on need for computers or wireless networks to as a goddamn question.
Have a teacher have an anonymous question drop box that he can look over and address a few of them the next lecture or at the end of the lecture.
Gadgets in lectures will only distract you.
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.
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.
It probably depends on the lecturer. If he/she is simply going to dictate or write up his/her notes, with no comments or thought, then an online presentation will probably be more useful. However, some lecturers work things out as they go, and it can be very useful to see their thought processes (especially if they make mistakes!). Some are very interactive, gearing what they present to the reaction they get. Some explain far more out loud than ends up on the boards/notes. And a few (very few) are simply good presenters, who are worth watching simply for interest or enjoyment. All of these would lose something in the transition to a web site.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Those drop boxes don't work. It's a lottery to see if your question gets answered and by the time the teacher reads it and responds, you are already way beyond that part in the lesson.
One thing that is important to remember is that most knowledge builds off of preexisting knowledge. If you fail to understand something early in the lesson, you could end up missing large amounts of material as the lesson progresses. That is why it is so bad when the student has to go back to the teacher afterwords to get a clarification on something taught earlier in the day. By the time they get the help they need, they're going to redo half of the lesson to catch up. Most professors and TAs don't have enough time to reteach entire lessons to the dozen students who didn't get it the first time.
The usual solution is for the student to ask the teacher to stop and clarify, but that is a tremendous time sink for someone who only has three hours a week to impart his knowledge. Once a class size becomes large enough, this solution becomes completely unworkable, and some students are left out in the cold. If used in moderation, these backchannels would be a great boon to most classes. IMHO
I read the internet for the articles.
There's a project currently going on at UC San Diego, which is aiming for something similar to that. The main webpage for the project, ActiveCampus, is located here.
I took a class a few quarters ago when this project first got started. Students could log into discussions about the lecture they were attending and post questions and answer others' posts. Other students could vote for posted questions so the professor would know which were most relevant. Information (and screenshots) for this can be found here.
My experience with this was not very positive. For the most part, the professor would halt his lectures every few minutes to check out what the students were concerned with. It seemed more a hindrance than a tool. Maybe if a TA was assigned to attend lectures and monitor the online discussions so the professor didn't have to, the system would work out better. Also, perhaps because it was new at the time and perhaps becuase it was a CS class, the questions students posted gradually declined into flames and/or trolls.
Its an interesting concept, but I don't know if colleges are ready for it.
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
I'm reading this to say that WiFi would enable you to pass answers to each other using laptops, so I'm assuming that some of you have laptops during tests or some other evaluated part of the education. In that case, has the school considered the possibility of students using laptops with buildt in WiFi in ad-hoc mode? And what would they do about it (assuming that the students are not caught red-handed)? Unless they use jammers or something similar (and around here (Denmark) that would likely be illegal), how can they prevent it? And what about cellular internet connections?
I'm not saying that it is fair or right to cheat, but this is the technological landscape that the battle must be fought in.
Professors are not perfect people and what seems like totally obvious common sense to them may not come so easily to those who are learning it the first time.
Even if you listen intently, you won't understand everything all the time. This is why gaining a quick consensus on what was least understood while the professor is discussing it is important.
"If you want to discuss the lecture with people, wait until after it is finished"
If you wait until after the lecture, everything after the point where you did not understand will be gibberish in your brain. Then you have to find out about that one tiny thing, then you have to go back over the rest of the lecture to deduce what it means when the professor is not there. If you don't get to this by the start next lecture, then you'll be lost for that class too.
From reading the post you quoted, I think that he was talking more about conferences. And IMHO anyone who pays to attend a conference should be free to spend the time in the way (s)he sees as most profitable, as long as it does not disturb the rest of the audience. Heck, the same could probably be said for education: If I'm paying, is it not my own problem how I spend the time I've paid for?
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.
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!).
If you wait until after the lecture, everything after the point where you did not understand will be gibberish in your brain.
:)
Yeah...that's why I took notes in class. It's not that hard to just write down what somebody's saying, even if you don't understand it. I would put *'s in the section where I got lost, transcribe the rest of the lecture, then in post-processing with my study pals, would get over the hurdle, and voila my notes made sense. In fact, I would go so far as to say that getting lost and having to play 'catch-up' is part of the program in most advanced disciplines - not only are you learning the course material, you're simultaneously learning how to learn by teaching yourself ex post facto.
Besides, upper-level classes (like my junior- and senior-year physics classes) are typically small enough that asking a question when you're really stumped isn't too much of a distraction - in fact, you're probably helping out other people in the class who are also lost, but too chicken to ask. I agree with grandparent poster - lectures are supposed to be dynamic and interactive. Certainly grad school is like that - students do as much of the lecturing as do the lecturer. It's all part of a process that laptops should blend into, and maybe not change. If it ain't broke...
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
I had a math prof like that... he didn't *throw* the chalk - but he did pelt you with it.
The best response was: "Either you make your lecture more interesting, or you run out of chalk. Either way, I win."
=Smidge=