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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
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.
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.
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
*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
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!
"now that many conferences and universities have wireless access, some people discuss lectures via instant message or weblog as they happen."
"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!"
I've certainly known it happen at many conferences. People will often look up the website of the speaker, try out their tools, look up their papers while they are speaking. A very good thing.
Of course others do spend lots of time checking their email, or doing other work. But this is the nature of the beast. At many conferences most delegates are not interested in all the talks, but you often do not know whether you are or not, till a couple of minutes in. So now the choice is between listening to something you are not interested in, or email. A improvement from when you could listen, or fall asleep....
Phil
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!
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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...
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 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...
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.
I'm a teacher, and I think you're exactly right about what this says about openness to questions. A couple of things you notice as a teacher:
I can also see how the appropriateness of this kind of thing could depend on the situation:
Find free books.
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.
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 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!
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
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.
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.
...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!).
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
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
>During a first year maths lecture in Cambridge, a member of my college
:) So what's more embarassing, getting up and leaving, or sticking it out to the end of the class?
>fell asleep - head leaning on hands - and awoke when his head slipped
>out of his hands. The sound of this collapse drew the attention of
>almost all - in particular of the lecturer who commented humourously
>upon the occurrence
Wow, your profs are pretty good-natured.
A buddy of mine (Jimbo) fell asleep during a lecture, sitting right next to a window. When the prof noticed, he got pissed. Since he had a piece of chalk in his hands, he threw it at Jimbo.
The prof made an honest attempt to bounce that chalk off Jimbo's head, but he wasn't a very good shot: it missed Jimbo and went BANG! off the window. Jimbo sat up, and looks around to see the whole class was staring at him. Serious embarassment.
Another story I heard from my high school was about a guy who fell asleep in class. The teacher let him sleep right through, when the bell rang he didn't wake up. The teacher told everyone to leave very quietly, and met the incoming students at the door and told them to enter very quietly. When the poor bastard woke up, it took him a few minutes to realize that he was surrounded by a bunch of people who weren't usually in his physics class
(I know people who witnessed the chalk-throwing incident, but I only heard about the other one third-hand, so maybe it's bull.)
As I sit in my Intro to macro-Economics class...
Actually, this class isn't mandatory attendance, but I want to hear the lecture. Not all of the 3 hour lecture, but being in the class Mudding is an occupation that allows me just enough leeway that when the professor comes to a subject that I don't already know, or would like clarification on, I can ask about it.
This is a suprisingly good idea, since the material that is being presented at _________(college name left blank so as not to offend) is not really at the level that a normally intelligent person should have to pay more than minimal attention. The downside is that there are only 3 ppl with laptops in class, and no easy to use network protocol for chatting in class, so very little class work gets done.
Another benefit is that I can look up subjects and read about them while ignoring questions that are being asked for the 2nd and 3rd times.
Basically, for any class where you can't use a calculator (soft sciences, arts, etc.) I think a laptop is a good idea, just in case you decide to stay for the lecture.
I'm a concientious
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 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=