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
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.
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
And there are some people who consider progress in general to be rude.
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
"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.
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.
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
...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.
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'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.
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
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