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."

Comments

IM == distraction

[jvarsoke]

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

Re:Somebody get to work

[jandrese]

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