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Professor Bans Laptops from the Classroom
An anonymous reader writes "USAToday is reporting that students are up in arms over a University of Memphis Professor who has decided to ban laptops from her classroom. Earlier this month Professor Entman sent an email warning to her students to bring paper and pens to take notes and leave the laptops at home. From the article: '"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Entman said Monday. "The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."'"
I'd call her a free thinker. We need more of them in the world.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Requiring students to actually show up to class?
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
and judge this one way or another. Or make any grand conclusions from one example. The professor found that in their class, students who were using laptops were not learning as well as students who were taking notes. Thus the professor banned the laptops in order to help the students learn better. Let's not use this one example to come to a conclusion that laptops or no laptops are the best way to run every single classroom.
My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing
Oh, I'm sure they were thinking and analyzing, but more likely about how to win the current game of Minesweeper or Solitaire.
People should just take audio recordings of lectures instead. Then you can automate transcription. If you record video or snapshots of the white/black board then you're really covered. At that point, you can fully involve yourself with the lecture, without having to worry about the risk of failing to record something you'll need to pass the final. Every school should encourage this.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Since Students were not making eye contact while taking notes, she emailed them again, stating pencils and pens are now banned also.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
I would say 80% of the people I see with laptops in class are on AIM/IRC, Web browsing, gaming, or some other non-related piece of crap. Its a real pain also during dark lectures (art history classes or when watching movies) because the screens light up like Baghdad during the Gulf War. Not really what I want to be seeing when I'm supposed to be watching a movie.
In one class in fact the teacher told all students with laptops to either sit at the very far left/right, or in the very back row, so as to minimize any disruption. I think thats a fair request.
Uhm, I don't know many people that can write and make eye contact with the teacher for very long. So no change here.
In my experience, the banning of laptops from the classroom is because teachers don't want students IMing each other or fiddling around on the Internet when the teacher is teaching. This professor can't possibly be focused solely on note-taking.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
...she'll probably tie part of the grade to actually participating in class.
How about designing a test protocol that only rewards those students who pay attention and follow the teacher's process and not merely the content. Then the laptop transcribers will simply score poorly.
Of course, this is more like actual *teaching* vs. fact regurgitation.
Funny. As far as I recall it, whenever a teacher/professor presented information without actually discussing it with myself or my colleagues, I used my pen&paper to transcribe as closely as possible what s/he was saying, so that I could later study it at my own pace. Most people I knew did the same. What matters is how s/he conducts classes. If he acts like a solo singer, students act like bootleggers.
Why didn't the Prof mandate voice recorders, if that was really the concern?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I've taught a number of classes at university level, and I hate people note taking with laptops, for the following reasons:
i) Too few of them are good enough typists to focus on whats being said properly.
ii) It's almost impossible for them to copy down diagrams or any complex equations, or make decent marginal notes.
iii) It's much noisier than pen and paper, and paper is easier to highlight and annotate.
iv) They remember the content better if they make pencil notes, and type them up later.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Although some old schoolers will disagree, taking notes is a waste of time. She needs to go one step further and give the students the notes in the first place. Then, if necessary, the students can add their own comments and annotations.
My high school AP Physics teacher did this and I have kept those notes for 15 years. I loved that class because I could pay attention to what he was saying and really LEARN.
Often students seem to believe that lecture time is when the professor Speaks and the students are supposed to Remember. I'd guess this is due to poor teaching methods in public high schools, where there is a focus on rote.
Ideally the purpose of class time is for the professor to lead the students to understanding. The book has the facts and figures and whatnot, but for many students just reading the book doesn't make things click. Every group of students will need to be led to understanding a slightly different way, and class time with the professor is a chance for that to happen. It's supposed to be a session of brain activity, not mere transcription.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It sounds like she made an informed decision and has a reasonable case as to why she made this decision. She should be held up as a model for heads of state and captains of industry to follow.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They are all just chatting, looking at pr0n, playing poker and all that other stuff. Thats why I don't understand the move by some schools to make having a laptop mandatory.
"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing,"
My past experience is that "trying to transcribe every word rather than thinking and analyzing" is exactly what most teachers want.
Too bad this won't become a trend. I would prefer a tape recorder to a laptop (or laptop's Sound Recorder will do). You still have a copy of the lecture, but you don't have to switch attention from the professor speaking.
plus, they're not really trying to take notes down on those laptops... they're IM'ing each other or catching up with some cruddy blog...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
... Professor Entman - 2006 03 12.mp3
And who said an iPod couldn't remplace a professor?
I've had several professors who disallow any kind of electronic devices during class -- CS professors, at that! I was in full agreement that they were a distraction during lecture. People were checking /. and watching videos on their notebooks instead of taking notes, which was hugely distracting not only for the user of the laptop but anybody who sat within eyeshot of the screen.
I ended up sitting in front of the class because the displays were too distracting to me, but every once in a while some asshole's boxy Dell would spin up belch hot air on the back of my neck.
I recently went back to school after a long time (10 years) off campus, and I was expecting laptops to be a much bigger deal than they are. For the most part it looks to me like the folks that are actually taking notes are still using paper. The folks with laptops appear to spend most of their time either surfing the web or chatting online.
I suppose I can understand a teacher wanting her students to actually pay attention. Of course, if she gets paid either way...
IMO,I dont know whats wrong with the paper and pen approach.Ofcourse some classes require a laptop.But then,only some REALLY require.
The latest tech isnt the best suited one always.
Agree?
Why does yahoo do this
When I was an undergraduate student, it was before the widespread use of PowerPoint. I would try to transcribe every note, every equation.
When I went to grad school (2002-2004) I found having the PowerPoint slides allowed me to focus more on what the prof. was saying and I just took a few important notes.
To each their own. And if the professor thinks this is best, so be it.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I totally agree with this professor. When I teach I often feel like I am in a room full of stenographers. It's a distraction to me, and definitely is not the kind of interaction I want to have with a student. It's also counterproductive in my opinion since the best way to really remember something is to process it at the deepest level you can - think about it, connect it with other thoughts and knowledge, etc. That cannot happen when one is focused on the low level aspects of the information, e.g. translating the sounds into written text. The visual barrier the laptop screen forms is also a problem. Not only does it prevent me from seeing the student's reactions, but it's hard to compete with all that light for a student's visual attention.
To counteract this I try and provide as much material as I can - lecture slides available on line before class for example, so they don't feel there is a ton of information that will be lost if it isn't written down immediately. This improves classes immensely.
I agree with her that students should be spending their time thinking about what she's saying, but writing notes on paper doesn't facilitate that any more than laptops do. My favourite lecturer at university gave us printed notes for every lecture, precisely so we didn't have to write anything down, and could focus on thinking about the subject. I did great in that class, and to this day I don't understand why many lecturers still insist on making people take notes instead of following suit.
Oh no... it's the future.
The only difference is that of technology. The students will still have their heads buried in paper furiously trying to write down everything she says and there will still be no contact. If the students are fairly proficient typers they can watch her while typing. If she was truly worried about making them think then she should ban all writing tools and at the end hand out speaker notes where they can pen in their thoughts/ideas.
Panic now, beat the rush!
She is probably right that laptops impede learning in a classroom. I'd like to see a study to prove this one way or the other, but anecdotally I expect she is right.
However, a ban on laptops is silly. If someone wants to stack the deck against themself, let them. Its not for her to regulate the way people learn. I really don't see why she cares so much. A better argument for a laptop ban would be cite the clicking keys as a distraction to the lecturer.
It is a university after all, the onus on learning is on the students, not the profs.
I don't take notes, never have since high school, so I found that all I do in class is use wireless. Finally had to stop taking my laptop to class so I'd at least pay attention.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think paper and pens are too much technology. They should be required to use a stylus and clay pads. Or perhaps charcoal and reeds.
It is easy to screw around when you have a laptop and the screen is faced away from teacher -- very easy to just look at some webpage. My favorite learning aid is a voice recorder. Then you don't have to pay much attention the first time, just show up -- invaluable for test review and the like, especially if teacher is a mumbler or poor speaker of English. Of course, the whole mode of instruction where a bunch of kids sit in front of teacher and write notes seems to be getting a bit antiquated.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-21-profe ssor-laptop-ban_x.htm
The students haven't threatened to sue yet which means they haven't paid enough attention to the lectures...
Professors should just make all their lectures available online. It means students don't have to worry about all separately copying down what the professor is saying. Many of my professors did this at my university and it helped a ton.
The professor announced that his next step was to ban all the paper and pencils in the class.
"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing, The notebooks interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students. Even since paper and writing was invented teaching has been hindered. I propose that we abolish the alphabet once and for all"
I like biscuits
In this day and age, the simplest thing would be to have the lecturer set up a webcam that can view the lecturn and blackboard/whiteboard, with a microphone to record what is said. The students could then be issued with a DVD of the lecture, which covers the notes angle. In order for the students to bother turning up - and stay awake - the lecture then has to become more interactive, with students actually solving problems (for example) for which they are graded.
The best way to learn is to do, the best notes are the ones NOT made in a rush in real-time, the best classes are the ones where students learn more than what is presented - but also where you are not penalized for not mind-reading what "more" you are "supposed" to learn.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm a geek to the bone, and use my Axim's calendar like if I forget, I'll die! However, I still use that ancient device known as a pencil.
As much as I would like all classes to get on the PC bandwagon, I think there should be at least one class that sticks to the basics. And if the students want to complain about it, then they shouldn't sign up for that class.
As far as the reason behind why she is doing it, maybe it's a little off base. The students paid for the class, and unless it specifically says, "No laptops" then they should be able to carry them in.
Just my big fat O-pinion
Contrary to what the media and Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would like you to believe, sometimes technology in the classroom can be a distraction.
I graduated just a year ago from a decent size University (10,000 students) and since I was getting a Computer Science degree I saw laptops in use in a lot of my classes. I'd say that 50% of the time people were playing video games of some sort or another, playing FreeCell or Solitaire, watching DVDs and generally using the laptop to do anything *but* take notes. This in turn distracted everyone else around them as they focused on whatever the person on the laptop was screwing around doing instead of on class.
I'll be honest, some of these classes were boring and I was occasionally envious of the people with laptops, but when I went to do homework or study for a test, I actually had some notes since with just pen and paper there is not a lot you can do to amuse yourself unless you have a really active imagination or like doing the box game or playing Tic-Tac-Toe for hours on end.
Now, some will say "but not everyone will use the laptop to screw around", and that's not my point. The point is, SOMEONE will, and that will distract everyone else. I've seen it happen and anyone claiming that it doesn't happen is lying.
So basically, I applaud her move and think that not every class should allow laptops in the classroom as sometimes technology is more of a hindrance than a help.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
And yes, I think that using laptops to take notes is ridiculous and counter-productive. Those students are attending a law school, not a dactilography course. In all my years of 'higher education', including university, specialisation courses and even high school, actually paying attention to the lecture itself and taking shorthand notes resulted in 3 positive consequences: I learned how to listen and extract important fragments of information; I developed excellent short-term memory and good shorthand; and organisation of shorthand notes into useful studying materials after class made for exceptionally efficient study sessions in and by itself.
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
I'm a college student and I bring my laptop to several of my classes. Where did she get the idea that using a laptop breaks eye contact? I'm not able to write without looking at the paper. As for typing, it's ten times faster and I don't have to look at the keyboard (I can't speak for everyone though.) I understand the importance of paying attention in class, but I don't understand why a computer would impede this (aside from wifi access, but that's another story for another day)
It's not all that peculiar. I am a student at the University of Memphis and I've already had one professor (a different one) in the business school ban laptops from his class. I can understand why, honestly, after sitting behind people playing WoW on their laptop for an hour and a half rather than paying attention...
Provided this isn't breaking some school rule or civil law about equal access for special needs types or something, I think she is entitled to set whatever policy she thinks is most effective in teaching her classes. However were I a student in one of her classes, I would likely drop it if it was still in the window to do so, or if not argue that she should wait till the next term to do so, giving people fair warning so they can decide up-front to agree with her teaching style or not.
To me a laptop is an essential tool, my notes go into it real-time, my research materials, my papers, my projects, there is just no way I would go back to leaving all that behind and have to spend time transcribing hand written notes into something useful. I also think that hand writing notes is no less invasive than typing them, for me at least I type much faster than I write, so I can listen, take notes, think and respond much easier with a laptop than without.
I go to a school that "gives" you a laptop at your orientation. I think its hilarious to sit in the back during class and look at everyone else's screens. You can see everything from legitimate notes (always your token 1 or 2) to playing NES via emulator or Yahoo pool with the person next to them. I will admit, during classes I don't feel like paying attention to, I will open up the laptop and get lost in some instant messenger convos or anything else. Though profs aren't quite as nieve about the situation anymore. I have some profs that wont let you use your laptop for notes, though these are mostly in my math classes where it isn't as easy to take good notes by typing unless you are an ace at LaTex. My point is that I used to take notes on my laptop my freshman year, but have since moved away from it. It just seems easier to go back and look through notebook paper than sift through word documents.
Not only took notes via the classroom pc, he created a screensaver with all of his notes..... and had that running while he took the final :D
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
Requiring students to actually show up to class?
Then after that, the students will actually be expected to pay attention to the professor's lecture.
If you really need to keep your notes organized on a computer, why not pick up a scanner and some OCR software. Of course, you also need to be able to write. Being able to print legibly, to say nothing of writing in cursive, seems to be a skill that is dwindling in the general population.
Seriously though, does anyone want to recommend a good OCR package?
Does she plan on making exceptions for tablet pc's? I know a few people (myself included) who take written notes on a tablet pc instead of paper and pen in class. It's no different then writing on paper so the percieved threat to eye contact should not apply. Later when I can search my notes for specific things it makes studying 10 times easier, I would hate for teachers like this to take that ability away.
I've had professors that don't like laptops, and probably a few that have stated no laptops in their syllabi. Why didn't they make the news? I'm in the middle of a class right now (although a 10 minute break), and I can say that this is more distracting then it is useful during a lecture. I typically only use it for notes (except for really boring classes), but I rarely see anyone just using a laptop for just notes, if at all..... If she was saying "blah blah, you can't come in the room with a laptop in your bag. if you do, you are not allowed in class" I could see why this is a story, but this is stupid. Teacher likes students paying attention. Now I will return to class due to the professors glare...
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
You writes offline, more like. They should be given partially filled handouts - that way they actually have to think about what's missing, and fill in the gaps so it actually goes through their brains properly.
I went to a small engineering/technology school in a rural state, starting in 92. When I started I don't think any of my professors would have allowed a video recording of class. By the time I left, I had actually been in a few classes that were taped by the school and those tapes could be checked out at the AV center. I imagine that those tapes would be encoded to a digital video format like mpeg and available on a school server for today's students. I cannot imagine a school today that would not allow recording of lectures, but I imagine that some professors may. Take notes later, pay attention in class? Sounds like a good idea. If nothing else, bring a $30 tape deck with a good microphone and record the lecture discreetly.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
If the timetable for that school is anything like others, she made a major change to the class in the middle of a semester, meaning that students currently in the class can't just switch to another teacher or drop the class and get a refund. If I were a student of hers, I'd certainly be upset about that (and worried that she'd do it over something else). If some of these students had known from the beginning she wasn't going to allow laptops, would they have still taken the class?
As for whether it was a good idea to ban the laptops...I think by the time someone's in college, it's their responsibility to take care of themselves. Let them do what they think works for them, as long as it doesn't bother anyone else. Professors all have their quirks, though, and they can generally be tolerated and worked around.
I had a professor who did this at Rutgers. He even took it a step further and would ban ALL note-taking for portions of some lectures.
A lot of people were very upset, of course -- they wanted to get through the class by rote learning and regurgitation. If it matters, it was Medicinal Chemistry...
In the long run, I think hand-writing notes is better than typing them. For one thing, people remember things better when they hand-write them. Second, good notetaking by hand requires you to organize your thoughts, and the lecture points, in order to take effective notes. Third, the eye-contact barrier is definitely an issue for lecturers, who (if they're any good) need the eye contact both for feedback and to maintain the attention of the class.
My strategy was to take handwritten notes, then type them up in outline format in the evening while the lecture was still fresh in my mind. I'd retain much of the information just by that process -- the lectures where I didn't do this is where I had difficulty.
At any rate, I believe it's her lecture, and her right to ban laptops, recorders, or anything else. Students who don't like it are missing out on gaining experience in critical listening. Also, the real post-college world will frown upon you taking your laptop to a business dinner so you can remember what was discussed.
Finally, just a note on the complaining students -- you can't always have everything the way you want it. If you have a medical reason why you can't handwrite notes, I'm sure they will make an exception. Otherwise, suck it up and handwrite your notes, and be thankful that you have the opportunity to do so.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My previous employer was a University that was about to go "mobile" by requiring every student to have a laptop.
After a few tests and faculty round-tables, it was decided that the models that will be provided at steep discounts to students will be tablets just because of the "picket fence" effect that is mentioned in the article.
Furthermore, tablets encourage the use of a stylus which means that (many?) students will still be taking notes by writing and analysing instead of typing.
"The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."
Most likely these students do not make eye contact because:
1) They are afraid of being called on to answer what exactly is the 19th Amendment to the Constitution and how it became law
2) The teacher is unpleasant to look at
3) The student is shy
4) This would interfere with their SIMS character from finishing a successful hot tub interlude
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Yes, an xvid of a class would be great and the class could be used for actual human interaction, but it would depend on the class, the teacher and the students.
I remember taking a tech college course for a year, 7 hours a day with the teacher. I honestly think that for myself there is no better way, and if university was like that I would go back in a heartbeat.
One of my best classes in college was a physics class where the professor made all his notes available ahead of time in the book store. He used an overhead projector for his notes, but the beauty was we could just listen to his lecture and scribble additional notes (rarely needed). We didn't spend all of our time transcribing his notes, but instead just listening to his lecture. As I recall, I didn't take that many notes in the class, but I learned far more in that class than my other physics classes.
This was in the early 1990s. I doubt things have changed much, though, except maybe professors using Powerpoint.
Towards the end of my college education the company I worked for during the summer let me keep the laptop I was working with. I brought it in to class and used it to take notes. That was a godsend. I could easily search all of my notes and reference them much faster than by pencil and paper. Not to mention, I could type a hell of a lot faster than write in a notebook. Other students would ask for copies of my notes as well. If the notes were not available ahead of time, this was the next best thing. Of course, back then laptops were common in college.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
.. they want to be seen as cutting edge. Especially in the case of underpopulated schools and universitys in the UK where they're really having to sell themselves to prospective students. No-one stops to think whether they're needed, they just think.. 'Oo! Technology! That college must be cutting edge..'
It was right on the syllabus for my TV Production class that we aren't allowed to have laptops in class while the teacher is lecturing. Why's this a big issue?
...and that's all there is to it.
1. people spending time on slashdot and blogs instead of paying attention. ...
2. people spending time on email and IM instead of paying attention.
3.
4. profit!
Seriously, though, since most courses are podcast nowadays and have the slides presentation on the web, students having to not use their laptops is not a serious problem, especially since many classrooms at university/college are wired.
Well, at least they are here. We even use these clicker things where you answer multiple choice so the prof can see if the students grok what's being taught, or should spend more time on an area. Much more fun than a pop quiz.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I feel books are better than reading something on my laptop..and taking notes always helps me remember things lot better than using stickies..
may be it is the extra effort u put..or something subconscious..but i could never replace my ibook with my notes...eventhough that was the main purpose when i bought it
"Teacher decides that students desires and wants are not nearly as important as her doing her job! Students shocked!"
This is stupid. A professor not allowing laptops in her class is not an afront to technology. Laptops don't belong everywhere no more than cell phones do or anything else. Bottom line? It's her class. The kids should grow up. The fact that anyone would bitch about this is EXACTLY why this professor is probably doing the right thing.
To rise up in arms against violations of nonexistant "rights", basking in the warm glow of victomhood.
And all the while submitting sheep-like to many universities' "speech codes" and indoctrination programs which truly do violate their legal rights.
It's okay to insist students only say and think certain things, but you'll have to take away their laptaps from their cold, dead hands.
I don't know what course this lecturer was teaching, but in my maths lectures I have to take down word-for-word everything the lecturer says, and I can't make mistakes. I suspect the situation is similar for most science courses. I wouldn't use a laptop though, because it's far easier to write symbols, equations and draw diagrams by hand (unless you are really nifty with LaTeX).
If you want students to pay attention then:
a) make your lectures better structured
b) make your lectures more interesting
c) provide printed notes, so students don't need to take them during the lecture.
Maybe the students can pay attention and actually use a pen and paper! Like they were all really busy transcribing her lectures. IMing and reading email is more like it. If you cannot be in a classroom without a laptop then how did you get to college in the first place?
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
The best thing I ever did in College was buy subscriptions to the lecture notes for my classes that offered them. At UC San Diego, a student who had taken the class before (and got an A) would attend class and take notes. These notes were cleaned up and made available each week. I could take cursory notes of what I thought was important and fill in the rest with the lecture notes from someone who already understood the material.
Unfortunately, some professors did not want the service in their classroom since they thought students would skip class. These were usually the same professors who got upset that the entire class was busy scribbling away writing verbatim notes. I found that the lecture notes were not a replacement for going to class. Often the class time had more participation and discussion that was as important as the notes.
--Keith
Either an iPod or a simple tape recording and a good mic.
Transcribe after class.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
These students sound like a bunch of whiney bitches and I completely agree with the teacher in this. Laptops do exactly what she said, put up a fence between the teacher and the students. I've discussed this with professors before and many of them feel the exact same way. Laptops create an atmosphere where the students are doing little more than transcribing. You read the book for that. You go to class for interactivity. These students are simply too young and too immature to understand that. What the students also fail to understand is it's the teachers discretion how they teach. I remember in school when teachers wouldn't allow calculators because they felt it was a shortcut and you didn't _really_ learn the math (you learned how to use the calculator). I hated it and bitched and moaned. Looking back I wish more teachers would have done that.
In all my years, I've noticed most technology based "teaching aids" just get in the way from _really_ understanding the information. Nothing can replace a teacher, a student, and the two interacting.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Tablet!
I wonder what she said when someone flipped the lid around and started writing on their 'laptop'. HA!
Why is this filed under YRO? Using your laptop in someone else's classroom is not a right, nor is it online.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
my friend has a laptop. Laptop spelt backwards is potpal. Think about it.
"The students will still have their heads buried in paper furiously trying to write down everything she says and there will still be no contact."
I realize its been almost 30 years since I attended a University, but I seem to recall going out of my way *not* to write down everything that was said. The art of note-taking is to quickly summarize.
That's why your notes are so important. They are your summary; they help you crystalize what you're trying to learn.
Maybe things have changed?
I am a U of Memphis student. As others have stated, few people I've seen in class actually take notes with their laptops. Usually they are surfing, working on other homework, looking at facebook, etc. I've even seen people playing poker in class and heard people say they've seen people surf porn while in class. Obviously those students are not paying attention.
I admit I don't always pay 100% attention in class but I don't make it so obvious when I'm not. It is rude to the teacher and distracting to others. I've had many classes that required attendence but the teacher goes straight from power point. They are very boring but I still go and do what I have to do to get through them.
If I were a teacher I'd either ban them outright or walk around the classroom and harass students who are using them as a toy and not as a tool.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
When I bought a laptop I started to take it to class to take notes. If a professor told me that I couldn't take it to class I'd just ignore the directive and take it anyway; after all, I'm paying his/her salary.
No, I will not work for your startup
All she's doing is arming the students with blow guns and spit balls.
What?
ahem
Kaoslord [quote goes here] define("slashdot purity","67.5");
I never liked strict professors, ones that took attendance, or dictated the way you learned the class material. It is the professor's job to make an education available, and fairly grade the student on how well they learned the material presented. In college, the student directly pays for that education. Therefore, the student can choose to learn in any manner they want. If that is using a laptop to take notes, and only showing up to class once a week, that is the student's decision, not the professors.
See my Home Theater
Seriously. If this was truly being disruptive, I wonder if she just asked. "I'd appreciate it if those of you using laptops might try taking a day off so we can interact a little better. I'll put my lecture notes online tonight."
I'm hard pressed to imagine a class full of people going batty over it.
And in her defense - I know how many classes I've spaced out on because I was doing something completely irrelevant on my laptop...
"Professor Entman sent an email warning to her students to bring paper and pens to take notes and leave the laptops at home."
Luckily the students took their laptops that day so they could get the email.
I can type a lot faster than I can write with a pen.
Why didn't the Prof mandate voice recorders, if that was really the concern?
You completely missed the point. Her objecting isn't to the way the students are trying to transcribe her words, but rather the fact that they're transcribing at all. The are trying to make an external record rather than coming to an internal understanding. There was a great Doonesbury strip about this once; I couldn't find a copy on line, but I found a description:Or, in your version, the scene from "Real Genius" where the students wind up leaving tape recorders to capture a lecture presented--not by their professor--but by his tape recorder, which is mechanically droning out the material.
-- MarkusQ
I'm at the University of Hawai`i, William S. Richardson School of Law. My Civ. Pro. professor has not allowed laptops in class. It's not a big deal. All my other classes I have notes in my laptop, in Civ. Pro. I have a black notebook with my notes. I don't see what the big deal is.
And get a private chatroom, so people with questions they don't want to bother the teacher with can ask in the chatroom.
God spoke to me.
I took a biology class with a professor who had been considering banning laptops from his classes, as he was worried about students playing games instead of paying attention to the lecture. Ultimately, he decided not to ban laptops because I was able to use my laptop on more than a few occasions to look up information relevant to the discussion. A few examples I remember off the top of my head: * What foods other than fish contain omega-3 fatty acids? (walnuts, flax, and several others listed in the "Omega-3 fatty acids" article on Wikipedia) * What is the root of the word "parthenogenesis"? (from Greek, "parthenos" = virgin, "genesis" = birth) * Is rain expected on the day of our next field trip? Furthermore, I find that I can take notes more quickly when typing on a keyboard than when writing with a pencil, so the notes I get tend to be more thorough, and I don't have to look down for as long when I'm taking notes. That said, perhaps this is not true for everyone. Maybe for other people the temptation of switching from a word processor to a game is too great, or the bright, shiny display distracts them from what the professor says and does. I don't know enough students who use laptops in-class to make any kind of generalization. Bottom line: laptop computers can be misused in a classroom environment (one could play "World of Warcraft" on a laptop during a lecture), but the same is true for almost any other tool (one could just as easily play "Pac-Man" on a graphing calculator during a lecture). A tool should not be banned simply because it could be misused.
I've seen a notable number of people playing *real* video games, or even watching anime, not to mention the tons of people who just sit there browsing the web.
I think this teacher has a clue.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
Back in 1996 I was one of the rare students that actually owned a laptop computer. Good old Compaq P133 with a whopping 24MB of RAM. w00t!
:\
I got in trouble though. You see, at least 3 of my profs wanted us to not only keep notebooks, but turn those notebooks in at intervals for review. WTF?
So...I saved them all was word documents, and turned them in as a zip file. The profs were note amused.
They wanted sprial-bound notebook and handwriting. How could I prove my notes were my own otherwise?
I had to take it to the school's administration and finally they accepted my notes...begrudgingly. I wound up failing one of the classes however because my notes were not..."lengthy" enough? It seems that despite I type faster than I can handwrite (and I can actually ready my typing later!), my notes seemed shorter and smaller because well, they WERE smaller. I was using a variable-width font, about 10 point to be exact. I was so mad. I told her to count letters or words if she must to compare against other students, but to no avail. I think more than anything she wanted to make an example out of me.
Seems I was actually just way ahead of the curve and getting bushwhacked for it.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
She might however require you to keep it quiet and I would very
much like to see you typing on the laptop as silently as if you
were using a pen.
Paying or not, you should comply to certain classroom standards
and not because she's having PMS or affraid of the laptops, but
because you actually distract other people in a room.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I graduated in '94 with my first degree and then in 2000 with the second. I simply never had a laptop, not that I didn't want one. I took all of my notes with pen/pencil and paper. I will say that I found the laptops other's used to be distracting at times. The clickity of the keyboards could be bothersome, but mainly, I noticed that people who brought laptops tended to do everything but take notes. It was also tempting to watch what they were doing if within eye-sight.
I prefer pen/paper myself. At the same time, I don't think a professor should mandate one or the other. I had an old professor in the early '90s who disliked word processors and computer-printed papers. He advocated the good ol' typewriter and acted boggled that people didn't prefer it -- I knew even back then that he was falling out of touch....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
from the blurb: The computers interfere with making eye contact.
I've always found it easier to pay attention to a speaker and type as opposed to writing on paper. Even moreso when eye contact is an issue.
Not to say that she doesn't have some points but frankly I think this is a fairly limp arguement.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I currently have a professor who bans laptops for essentially the same reason, and in my opinion it leads to better discussion in class.
microphone + laptop + speach to text software
Good for her! I thought from first reading it would depend on what class the professor taught. The professor teaches a class of first year law students. She seems to be wanting to create free-thinking lawyers (oxymoronic pun aside), more interested in meaning of the law, and why decisions are made. By understanding why the current decisions have been reached, upcoming lawyers are taught to reason ways to sway the court why they should change or alter the current viewpoint. Do we need more soulless lawyers, or practioners of the law who understand how to think? You go oldschool girl!
Here it is again without HTML formatting. This should be much easier to read...
I took a biology class with a professor who had been considering banning laptops from his classes, as he was worried about students playing games instead of paying attention to the lecture. Ultimately, he decided not to ban laptops because I was able to use my laptop on more than a few occasions to look up information relevant to the discussion. A few examples I remember off the top of my head:
* What foods other than fish contain omega-3 fatty acids? (walnuts, flax, and several others listed in the "Omega-3 fatty acids" article on Wikipedia)
* What is the root of the word "parthenogenesis"? (from Greek, "parthenos" = virgin, "genesis" = birth)
* Is rain expected on the day of our next field trip?
Furthermore, I find that I can take notes more quickly when typing on a keyboard than when writing with a pencil, so the notes I get tend to be more thorough, and I don't have to look down for as long when I'm taking notes. That said, perhaps this is not true for everyone. Maybe for other people the temptation of switching from a word processor to a game is too great, or the bright, shiny display distracts them from what the professor says and does. I don't know enough students who use laptops in-class to make any kind of generalization.
Bottom line: laptop computers can be misused in a classroom environment (one could play "World of Warcraft" on a laptop during a lecture), but the same is true for almost any other tool (one could just as easily play "Pac-Man" on a graphing calculator during a lecture). A tool should not be banned simply because it could be misused.
would be to limit wifi access in class. Problem is, kids with laptops probably spend a fair amount of time checking email, slashdot, etc. Sure, i might look something up on wikipedia, but the kid nextto me probably shouldn't be chatting w/his gf, etc.
...which I assume is the vast majority of readers on slashdot...
First year law classes aren't computer science lectures where everyone sits passively and takes notes. Law Professors practice the socratic method. Which means that the professor calls on a student and asks that student a question. If the student answers correctly, then the professor asks another question. Then the professor asks a question which he knows the student can't answer. Then the professor yells at the student and asks why he is a moron. Then the professor takes the case book and beats the crap out of the student with it. A notebook computer doesn't fit into this routine.
I'm exaggerating slightly, but thats what a lot of first year law students go through.
I think that she teaches first year civil procedure. This is a very hard class that covers the mechanics of filing a law suit. It is very tricky and nuanced and even experienced lawyers don't understand it fully. Since she co-wrote a treatise about Tennessee Civil Procedure it is not surprising that according to Ratemyprofessors.com, Prof. Entman "expects you to be able to recall every detail from every footnote from every case you ever read." Yikes!
Interestingly, Prof. Entman was a social studies teacher in the late 60s and early 70s for 7 years before going into the law. I imagine that notebook computers don't fit into her conception of a learning environment.
I definitely wish there were more aware professors like that...
I normally wouldn't care what a student uses to take notes, but laptops are a huge distraction for the rest of the class. The constant clicking, the screen glow, the guy surfing Slashdot in front of you on the school's wireless network. If you really want annoying, these same students will stand up and snap images of the whiteboard with their cellphones because they can't figure out how to draw the diagrams on their laptop.
So here I sit, quietly, with my 99 cent Meade folder, 30 cent pencil, and a dollar's worth of notebook paper, taking far more detailed and accurate notes than anyone with a $2000 laptop. What these law students need to learn is that sometimes the most technologically advanced solution is not always the best solution. And cheers to the professor for realizing this.
X
What I've learned over my 4 years in college was that if the professor is good, and actually adds value to what they're teaching, students will come, and students will pay attention. Sure, there will be a couple that won't, but a majority of students want to get the most value out of their educational dollar. If a professor wastes everyone's time (Are you hearing this, professors Mitra / LaMont / Chang?), then they'll have to resort to attendance checks and other stuff like that so they can fool themselves into thinking that they're actually teaching. This seems an awfully lot like she's one of those professors, trying desperatly to get students to pay attention.
I'm a graduate student in an Aerospace Engineering program. I use a Tablet PC to take notes in all of my classes, but using the stylus to write the notes just like I would in a notebook. There is no screen to get in the way (since it's laying down on the desk in front of me). I have all my notes and text books (scanned in) with me at all times. Surely she couldn't object to that!
I am an internal technical trainer for a software company. Just about the only rule I have in my classrooms (when I do classroom training) is: While I am talking, laptops are closed, and monitors on the workstations are off.
I provide copies of the slides with supporting text for the learners, generally job aids for use after the class as well. The only writing they should need to do is jot a quick note now and then. I have had complaints from students for the policy, but then if I don't enforce it, I get complaints from those who are destracted by the "tap-tap-tap" and "click-click" from the surfers in the room too.
Granted, "education" and "training" are different. (Think Sex Ed. vs. Sex Training - which do you want your kids to get in Jr. High?) So, maybe my context is wrong here but I applaud this teacher's position. If her student's are failing without the computers, then the material design needs to be reevaluated, if not - let the little bastards think and process ideas for once in their freakn' lives - they certianly won't get to do so when they hit "the real world"
If we continue without laptops, I'm out of here. I'm gone; I won't be able to keep up," said student Cory Winsett, who said his hand-written notes are incomplete and less organized.
:sigh
Give me a freakin break. "You won't be able to keep up?" Yea, like that 10s of thousands of lawyers out there today that got through just fine without a laptop in class. All that tells me is you are an incompetent law student that couldn't hold today's lawyer's jock strap.
At some point in the future you will graduate, unfortunately, and will be required to operate without a laptop and be required to use pen and paper. Will you survive? Apparently not since you'll wind up making notes that are "incomplete and unorganized".
I guess that's the next step. They need to start creating college level classes on how to write notes with pen and paper and to keep them organized.
Except for equation writing and the like, but it seems to me that in my classes, I always spent too much time writing down what the professor was saying to pay any attention to what was being said. Taht was with pen and paper. With a laptop, I may have had more time to think about it as I can type much much much faster than I can write. The only professor who's class I truly followed had coursenotes pre-printed that we had to buy. There were a few blanks and room to write a couple of equations for a derivation to keep us involved, but 99.99% of notes were there. As a result, all the classroom time was spent following and understanding what was being said. I actually think that pen and paper is WORSE than the laptop approach.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
My friend recently graduated from Berkeley and she did exactly this - transcribe every word. I dont think she was rgetting it.
When I was in school a long time ago, it seemed better when I took fewer notes and tried to envision the topic.
I graduated college before laptops were commonplace. In fact, I don't remember anyone bringing them to class (1990-1994). But man, I wish I had one at the time. I was often in a position where so much information was being delivered, and I was writing so fast, I couldn't always read my own handwriting. Beyond which, it could be painful.
I hear these responses about how they're distracting or how people don't pay attention, or the professor's ludicrous ideas about how students merely transcribe what he is saying, rather than "thinking" or "analyzing."
When I sat in class, people did crossword puzzles, read the campus paper, magazines, snacked, whatever. The other students were busy furiously scribbling down into notebooks what the professor was saying, and since you can't write nearly as fast as you can type, it was doubly exhausting and doubly attention-killing.
If you get distracted by someone's laptop, maybe you should just quit college altogether. I don't understand this idea that it's anyone's fault or responsibility but *yours* as to whether you pay attention or not. College students had better get a grip on technology and its appropriate place in life fast, because it's going to be the same challenge after college when you're in an office full of computers and other distractions and things are far more tedious and boring than most college classes are.
I've never understood why professors take attendance. If you can pass the class without showing up, that says a lot about the professor, frankly. If you fail because you don't show up, you own that too. I had great professors and I had crap ones. I was able to get an A in a class I showed up to three classes for the whole semester, Shakespeare 350 in a huge cavernous lecture hall. Did I miss out on something? It's 14 years later and I really don't think so. I read the plays - to my surprise I enjoyed them - and understood them. On a few occasions I went to the library to look at some discussions of parts I didn't understand. That was all it took.
In the end, you're paying for it anyway.
Professors are *really* idealistic if they think that class is about thinking and analyzing. Class is about grades. It's about graduating with a good GPA and being able to out-compete your fellow students for jobs. On the way, if you're lucky, and you have good professors and are in a curriculum you love, maybe you'll have some insights and epiphanies. I certainly did (mostly in history classes), but let's not kid ourselves. 99% of what I've learned I've learned in my spare time, reading what I wanted to read, because I was interested in it, not because I had to fill in some bullshit core curriculum requirement in a class I didn't care about then, and don't care about now.
To get the grades, you're going to need to know your stuff. To know the stuff, you're probably going to need good notes. If you have good notes, you'll have time later to reflect on what they mean. Most of the thinking and insight is going to come as you study, not while you're sitting there taking furious notes.
You can take better notes with a laptop. You can format them, clean them up later (and maybe in so doing, read them again and internalize the information therein). Maybe you'll be at the student center doing the cleanup, and you'll have an insight or epiphany with a mouthful of pizza.
Students should be left to their own devices in terms of what technology they use (if any), and whether or not they attend class, and how they learn. Every person is different, for one, and second, because they are paying for it. If typing furiously on a laptop isn't working, they'll know it long before the exam rolls around. Professors have huge egoes; the insight they claim to impart through the classroom experience is *usually* highly overrated (there are certainly exceptions; god bless the ones who can still enthrall).
Beyond which, there is the basic idea of learning how to positively interact with technology. This involves
A teacher with brains and courage.
Kudos to her!
This goes on at colleges across the country all the time. Laptops are a distraction, especially if God forbid there is a WiFi connection present. I know I personally got through boring Calc III lectures by watching someone play World of Warcraft for the whole hour.
My reason for always carrying my laptop with me is that I have ALL the books and lecture notes in PDF/PPT.
Just by downloading the books from eMule I've saved more than $500 just in this semester, one third of the cost of my laptop. As a bonus I can chat with cute chicks from other faculties during lunch, on the bus during my 20min commute or even at boring classes ^____^
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
That's why teachers should provide Power Point presentations BEFORE class. Students can annotate the slides IF they have them BEFORE hand. Thus they can -listen- more during class.
I had a professor at UNC Chapel Hill tell me he didn't want any laptops in his class, but then the University REQUIRES all Freshman and incoming students to have a laptop. Bottom line was it was his classroom, and his Department Head backed the professor up. Perhaps the University and its Departments thereof need to be on the same page.
Also, Professors of all people should know different students learn in different ways. In particular I'd be happy at UNC with a 'Professor' who isn't a Graduate Student/TA, and one who can natively speak English. Spare me the cultural diversity rebuttal.
It is scientifically proven if not much more than common sense that people can type faster than they can write. In fact most can type without looking at the screen as much as looking down at the paper. So maybe, just MAYBE the Professor at the aforementioned University should think more critically.
So I'm not up in arms about such a policy, I also don't think it serves the (commonly-cited) purpose profs think it serves.
I, not the professor, should determine how I indulge in the educational process. This includes the pointy-haired classically obsessed who believe in the "Socratic" method of trying to embarass students by calling on them in class. I would give exceptions in situations such as where typing noises create distractions, but in most lecture halls, this is never a problem.
There are some classes where I do not bring my laptop to class. I don't bring my laptop to my discrete mathematics class because I cannot effectively take notes on my laptop (a tablet would be a different story) and it tends to distract me from listening to the good lecture the teacher is giving.
I have bad ADD and just staring at a professor ramble on creates a situation where I lose focus. With my laptop, I can manage this by taking outline style notes while I do something like read Slashdot or chat on IRC. Lectures do not teach you everything you need to know, so the notes are only a guide and addendum to the textbook and homework.
If students are not interested in discussing the material in class vis a viv the socratic method, then the professor should reevaluate their teaching style. If the students are finding their own way to learn the material and can produce coherant, rational arguments on tests, essays, etc. then I do not see the problem.
My experience is that the more insightful and thought provoking a class and its professor is, the more likely that students will raise their hands and fight over chances to ask questions, create discussions, and the like. Usually it is the poor quality professors (in my experience) who resort to doing things like banning laptops and taking attendence because otherwise the students would not be interested in getting engaged in the class.
I also go to the University of memphis and this is not the only professor with a no laptop policy. the only reason this is in the news is beacuse a group of her students have started a petition to allow laptops. I agree with the others that this is ridiculous. It is the teacher's class and if she says no laptops then no laptops. Last I checked the teacher was in charge of the class. I also don't like laptops in class as then inistent clicking is distracting. Just take a tape recorder to class and type your notes at home.
WTF?
I agree with the professor, but rather than a ban, why not remove the incentive to bring the laptop. That is, make your class notes available in digital form. If possible make the notes available ahead of time, or maybe give access instructions at the end of class. Then in class, gently request that people put away their laptops during portions where you desire more interactivity with the students. Heck, if she really wants to go all the way, record the class as a podcast too!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Proper respect for professors? Grow up? This is university, not preschool.
She's overstepping her bounds, and even if she wasn't her reasoning is flawed. Who's to say students aren't using shorthand and trying to write every word? Who's to say they aren't 'making eye contact' yet daydreaming? If students are typing every word she says, that's up to them, they are paying for it for the right to be there and learn in the way that suits them best.
If she wants to help, how about providing a full and detailed copy of her notes for the class at the beginning of the semester? Then students already have most of what she is going to say, can review it before hand, and can use the class time to ask questions they may have and spawn intelligent discussion. It would be a step forward if that idea were mandated.
She should be attacking the problem. She's attacking the computer, and the computer is just a tool.
I'm wrong and so are you.
I am really impressed with that professor's students who want to transcribe her words. In my (law) classes, most people with laptops either browse the internet or play solitaire. I use my laptop for notes and rarely (but admittedly sometimes) use the internet to check my e-mail or look up a case i haven't read.
I think the professor should have the ability to not allow laptops. I wish they also had the ability to turn off the wireless internet in their classrooms, but that's not really feasible at my school.
In Vino Veritas
Hell, who cares if they're paying for their own education?
I hope this professor starts bringing back the tradition of corporal punishment, into the university lecture hall!
Spank those arrogant university students.
...we'd call people like you losers.
Of course, laptops weren't quite as elegant in the early-to-mid 90s and the geekiness factor of toting a laptop with you wherever you went was much higher. However, "the laptop guy" was pretty high up on the "piss of the class list"--probably higher up than the "just doesn't get it and asks too many stupid questions that should be saved for after class guy". Why was "laptop guy" the target of such derision?
* he was being a showoff--"look at the fancy toy I bought courtesy of the Bank of Mum and Dad...too bad for you with your big loans and Kraft Dinner Diet that you can't be elite like me" (remember this was before the age of mandatory laptops for students)
* the laptop screen projected an "attention force field" that caused him to zone out and fall out of the loop...at times this would get bad enough that he became "just doesn't get it" guy.
* the constant clicking on the keyboard annoyed all neighbouring classmates
* his occasional bitching about the prof changing the overhead transparency too quickly, before he could transcribe it into his machine, grew annoying within a few weeks.
Perhaps you're personally a pretty nice guy, but I'd be willing to bet a number of people have quetly labelled you a "laptop loser", and if your professors knew you attitide towards their teaching methods (basically that they couldn't possibly know anything about teaching people) they might be somewhat offended.
There is another problem with "laptop losers" in the classroom...they're becoming "laptop losers" in the boardroom as well. The problem is getting bad enough that laptops are banned from most meetings where I work (for non-presenters only of course since we are still addicted to powerpoint here). So speaking from the corporate perspective I might offer this suggestion: if you plan to have a career outside academia then youd best be putting away your laptop during lectures so you can "learn to learn" effectively in an informational meeting and be a meaningful contributor to discussions when in the boardroom.
Although she is wrong in trying to force students to not use laptops, I doubt that laprops provide any significant benefit for most people in the classroom. Personally, I never take notes. Taking notes is a distraction that just detracts from actually thinking about and remembering what was said. I've seen many students bring their laptops to lecture just to play Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat: Source, or WoW. The only good use I see for a laptop in a lecture hall is to look up background information to clarify any lecture based on a premise that you are unfamiliar with, or to provide a fun distraction while the professor is beating a dead horse. These two issues are the root of nearly all bad lectures i've had in college and can be avoided by simply doing away with the synchronous learning model and studying individually instead.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
It's all in the way they're used, AND the student. I use one in class, and I use OpenOffice.org instead of MSWord. I can keep up with any professor I've had, including diagrams because OOo has better diagramming tools than Word. I had one professor who's goal was to draw something on the board I couldn't take in OOo (he was very pro MS), and never did succeed. One diagram he challenged me to draw I even color coded as quickly as he drew it in one color. I'll admit in SOME classes I just chat and it's a distraction - but I still usually have a good grade in those classes as usually they are just gen ed crap. I do still feel it's the teachers choice - and for the first two years of college I always asked before using it, then I just started assuming it was fine unless they said something, which nobody ever did. I started posting my notes online, and even the teachers would refer students to my website if they missed a day of class or wanted more information. My point is not that the teacher is wrong in not wanting laptops in her classroom, just that they are not always a distraction, as she implies, and can be a benefit. Nothing stops the student from just doodling on their paper either. Personally I can type faster than I can write, READ my writing (very important), and when the teacher asks something it's easy for me to press Ctrl+F to find it.
I can't write and look at my professor in the face, just not gonna happen because I can't. I also can't write as fast as my professor speaks. I can, however, type without ever looking at the keyboard and I can type at an average speaking rate. For me, it would be better (barring any class that requires non-linear writing, like art or math, or anything else with diagrams).
Now, a real reason why I would not want students to bring their laptops is because they may be playing games, chatting online, etc. Possibly because the sound of fingers striking the keyboard might get distracting (assuming the student does not have a quiet keyboard). But eye contact my ass.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I can honestly say I have never looked at my old, scribbled notes written in 5-subject notebooks throughout getting my BS. They're locked in the closet in a box, and I'm likely to throw them away soon. I can barely even read the writting.
However, using my tablet PC and OneNote, the information is actually relevant after the lecture (currently in medschool). If I'm looking for a particular word or subject, I do a seach and OneNote can find it throughout subjects.
The tablet PC negates the (can't make drawings, highlight, etc) "not-paper" problem.
His problem with students not paying attention may be legit, and a tablet PC may not even help with that (can still surf the web, etc), but IMO a tablet PC is a superior solution to pen and paper, and nothing stops students from drawing or scribbling.
Ahh, the tried and true method of blaming the tool instead of the user of the tool.
As someone with bad hands I was entirely reliant on a laptop (Actually, a Newtown with keyboard) during my high school and college years. It allowed me to relax and concentrate on the lecture without constantly popping aspirin because my hands hurt from gripping the pen, because I could type much faster then scribble, and it allowed me to neatly organize and search my notes later.
"If we continue without laptops, I'm out of here. I'm gone; I won't be able to keep up," said student Cory Winsett, who said his hand-written notes are incomplete and less organized.
Does this scare anyone else? This is law school that we are talking about. All of the basics should have been met by now. If you're incompetent without a laptop, then I don't want you to be my lawyer!
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
were taught in classrooms with NeXT pizza boxes on every student's desk, with a copy of Mathematica. By the time I finished that first year, I knew the material so well that I can still do multi-variable regressions, transforms & D.E., model an E&M problem, and solve for algorithms -- this after I tranfered schools, changed majors, and haven't used most of it in 15 years. Computer's are not easy to integrate into classrooms, and I think there is a valid argument for keeping them out of many hummanity classrooms. But anyone who thinks they can't add massively to an understanding of physics, mathematics, chemistry, etc. just hasn't seen them used correctly.
Exactly once, because that student was removed from my classroom and had to retake the class with someone else the next term
As a student I've run into professors like you. Unfortunately not all of us roll over quite so easily. On the contrary, some of us are quite vocal and will work to make things change our way. I led a petition drive that successfully reverted a policy change implemented mid-semester; similar to this case. I was also an RA at the time and went to bat for several students who were getting pushed over by manipulative professors.
Long story short a vocal student can get what he wants just as easily if not easier than a professor. The whole point of the university system (beyond generating papers and research for more funding) is to educate. If I can't optimally absorb knowlege then there is a problem, and I will make sure damn sure that problem is resolved. Quite honestly, the students don't need your self-centered, self-absorbed pompous self either.
I agree with the professor. As a 2nd year student, I purchased a laptop and brought it to class, thinking I would use it to take notes. For a little while I did take notes, but I quickly fell behind, as I couldn't keep up with the diagrams and whatnot. My GPA went down that semester. The next semester I did not bring my laptop to any class (or just didn't bring it out if I had it), and my understanding of the topics went up, and so did my GPA.
I think that she is not totally wrong. Computers on education are bad since there was a research on somewhere that computers acctually did make students perform bad on same tests that students that did not have computers. I think this research was performed in Israel... It could make some sence why it even was studied. :)
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
I did play StarCraft on my laptop. I graduated with high honors. I'm sure I destracted other people.
finally someone with some fricken common sense.
this teacher should get a raise.
where I went to college we could not even bring a calculator to math class - that is the way it should be.
this is great and a trend I would love to see - get the fricken computers out of class period.
I think this is a great idea!
I'm tired of trying to decipher the horrible handwriting of most kids.
I was always in pain from writing so much throughout my school days, why do these kids get to have the easy way out?
I once had an idiot professor who insisted we write our final exam essays in cursive rather than print them. This was supposed to do something to stimulate us intellectually. All it did was give me a cramped hand and assure that I never took another class with her. Perhaps wet ink is in order too. None of these silly ballpoints.
I can understand where she's coming from, but not everyone learns the same way. Some people are quick hand note takers, and some are quicker at typing. Some people are better at organizing and utilizing hand written notes and some aren't. I for one use my laptop to take notes a lot, and to write reports, and do a large number of other things. Digital notes are easy to organize and recall at later dates, as well as search through. Forcing a student to use a pencil won't do much else than force them to sit and become a note taking zombie, it doesn't mean they'll learn more simply because you force them to take the slower method. I think she went a tad overboard at flat out banning them.
The fact still stands that they did pay for the class, if they fail because they were playing solitaire all class, that's their problem, not hers, I doubt they would have gotten more out of the class if the laptops were banned to begin with given their total lack of interest.
If they are interrupting the class, that's one thing, if they're disturbing you in some way that's one thing as well, but outright banning them on such personal grounds is not the way to go about it. Forcing them to learn your way will most of the time only put up road blocks, I personally wouldn't want to be the cause of someone's failure.
Some of you say "well he can't take a laptop to a court", okay, and i'd like to note that this isn't a court, this is merely a school for learning, who said he was going to take a laptop to court? He's partaking in the process of becoming a lawyer (or whatever he may be trying for). When you were learning in 3rd grade and you had school paid lunches, chalkboards, supplies, and a professor, are they going to let you bring those? I somehow doubt it.
Next up some said it was "interfering with the teacher", okay, how? The relatively silent typing? The jealousy of having a piece of technology he/she doesn't? Were they playing loud music? Were they distracting other students? You say "interfering", but all you seem to have here is a professors personal opinion getting in the way of her own teaching.
After that someone said "teachers teach teaching". Uh...right, because people all obviously learn the same way don't they? Show me the international standard that our brains all adhere to and i'll call it a day.
The most common notetaking practice is a teacher rambles on and on for an hour or so expecting you to take good notes of everything. How does any of that instigate "thinking and analyzing"? If you decide to ask questions during the note taking session, who will have more information to actually think and analyze? The people who were allowed to take notes their way? I'm not saying they should be allowed to inscribe notes on the wall in their own blood because they can do it faster (spare me the sarcasm). Or the ones struggling to keep up because you force them to conform to your ideals? Some people have been screaming "respect your professors", but you seem to forget that professors don't know everything either, just because they may know a considerable amount in their field doesn't mean an electrical engineer can tell you how to oil paint.
(P.S. Only reply if you have something meaningful to say, purposeful misinterpretation gets boring real quick.)
The prof is correct - this would force people to listen more closely and to actually pay attention. Anyone remember "Real Genius" with the professor's tape recorder lecturing to a bunch of student tape recorders???
What about a person who can't take notes with pen and papper? She just gonna fail them?
I was in a law class, taking notes on a PowerBook 145B, use ClarisWorks. The prof drew a diagram, which I diligently copied down using the drawing tools (it's integrated, so very easy), drawing oohs, and ahhs from the people behind me.
FTFA, ""If we continue without laptops, I'm out of here. I'm gone; I won't be able to keep up," said student Cory Winsett, who said his hand-written notes are incomplete and less organized."
Cory Winsett. Added to a list of lawyers NOT to get, if you need one.
His notes are incomplete. Either he can't keep up or he doesn't bother ("I'll remember that later, why write it down, it's obvious!").
His notes are disorganized. Either he can't keep up or he doesn't bother listening. His professor claims she is trying help them "connect-the-dots", and laptops don't help there.
If he can't keep up, then perhaps first year law isn't for him?
If he can't bother writing or listening, then really, a laptop is better?
If he can't keep written notes complete and organized, at a first year univeristy level, he had better figure it out. I'm sure judges in a court room will love to hear his "clickety clickety" as they or his opposition speak.
For that matter, clients of his will also like to hear a keyboard when discussing items.
The professor has a very valid points about laptops in a classroom, and kudos to her for standing up against it.
Vip
When was it a crime to waste you're own time and money? You're not doing anyone a favor by barring people who legitimately use such technology to 'enhance' their learning to 'protect' the weak willed among us. Sounds like this professor is a technophobe, or just gets really pissed when people don't pay attention to her.
:) I'm not the sort to take notes in most of my classes because many instructors make sensible use of modern technology and provide them for you. Or you can just crack open the textbook.
I've taken plenty of 'distribution requirements' in which the professor had no interesting information to divulge, aside from their ppt slides which they read back to the class verbatim. I am capable of reading, thank you professor
The stuff that fits in between is what you have to actually be paying attention during class to catch. I have a notebook but I rarely use it to take notes. Often I use wikipedia to learn more about the topics being discussed in class. Occassionally I find that a tangent to the subject is more interesting than the discussion at hand and find myself reading something completely unrelated when class is dismissed...
Is anyone else reminded of the 1985 movie real genius? The prof. doesn't even show up for class. There is a real-to-real machine sitting on the desk playing a lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
Fast forward to today and the prof. could just email the lecture to everyone and be done with it.
This is the way to go for future lawyers:
;-)
-Don't think too much whether something makes sense or not.
-If something bothers you, go ahead and complain/sue/threaten to sue. This is far better than trying to solve a conflict by other means.
-Repeat: I am right and everyone else is wrong.
-Don't ever deviate from your point of view.
where's all that Karma?
I find this whole discussion depressing. I didn't feel too old this morning but trying to recall if I was ever distracted by a laptop in class reminds me that I never saw one in class when I was in college.
And when I graduated, Bush was in the whitehouse. OK, it was the George I but still...
No matter where you go, there you are.
I'm in class right now, and this is just appalling. I can't believe she thinks these laptops impact the students learning. Well, off to Digg to see if anything new was posted...
I found a sweet flash game earlier too.
I agree with the general idea that using laptops to take notes is pretty detrimental, but not for the same reasons a lot are positing.
It's not that laptops make note taking too hard (i.e. you're too focused on typing). It's that they make it too easy! Now, bear with me for a second. When you take notes the old fashioned way, it's hard to keep up with the lecture if you try to write everything down verbatim. You're forced to translate into your own words, to condence, or aotherwise actually process the information you're taking down. When touch typing it's much too easy to keep up with the lecture and just write things down verbatin. That is not good note taking. A good set of notes should never repeat exactly what the prof says. The best notes are concise, extracting the ideas of the lecture and expressing them in a form you personally understand. If you want the prof's words verbatim bring a tape recorder or something.
And then of course there's the fact that 90% of my fellow students are playing solitaire, browsing slashdot, chatting on AIM or otherwise goofing off with their laptops. I have to wonder why they even bother showing up at lecture if they think it's that much of a waste of time. And don't tell me multitasking. There have been way too many studies that have definitively proven multitasking kills your ability to concentrate and perform effectively for me to buy that.
Anyway, this is, imo, an example of a bad use of technology. Laptops don't have to be useless/detrimental in the classroom. But teaching and learning both need fundamental adjustments to properly integrate the tech so it aids understanding. If the laptop is used as a glorified typewriter it wont.
Does that mean this professor bans blind students from her class also because they can't make eye contact with her??? Or what about if a student had a learning disability that using a laptop could help?? ACLU would have a field day with this "free thinker"...
I used my laptop all through college.
My 2 reasons for doing this were eye contact and the ability to listen and analyze. When I was taking notes I would fold the screen down flat and not take my eyes off of the professor and the board and I believe this led to a better relationship with the professors. A relationship that benefited me greatly.
Also, I did like she said, I took down her words verbatim because it was easy enough to just type what they were saying. But, unlike taking written notes, I could really listen to the content of the class because I didn't have to be constantly trying to figure out what to write down and what not to, since I couldn't write it all down fast enough.
I'm sure there are students that are hurt by laptops but, honestly, I think she'd do just as well to encourage proper classroom use of them.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
When it comes to school a student should be allowed all the tools required to gain the most out of there education. A student bring a laptop to class isn't in any way effecting the teacher. I am a great example of this, personally I have the penmenship of a 2-year old. Taking notes with a laptop for me is more organized and efficient. I can type faster then any person can talk. Also, when I type I can still look at the teacher, it doesn't require me to stair at the screen the entire time. The eye contact that the teacher describe is in many ways none existent in a large class room anyways. I believe that this must have been a special case. I've found that the only fault of bringing a laptop into a class room is sometimes a person can find them self on the internet doing something else, instead of concentrating on the class. However, a student is free to do what he wants, it's his money. This isn't a case of disrespecting the teacher, this is a case where the teacher is to focused on interaction in a place where many times there isn't going to be interaction with all students.
And how exactly is this the laptop's fault? If students do this with a laptop, they'll still do it with pen & paper. I was in college before laptops existed (yes I'm old) and remember some students scribbling notes furiously as they tried to write down the professor's every word.
The teacher is likely quite like many of the professors I have had over the years. They don't engage the students -- they spew out their lecture as if they are talking to their academic equals -- instead of students.
There are students up to the challenge, and in history classes I felt I could do that. However, in literature classes, it's the job of a teacher to motivate and engage their students. At the college level however, the professors have largely *never* been educated in proper teaching methods and ways to engage students. Some pick it up as they go, and a LOT just 'stick to the script'.
Really the outlawing of laptops in a classroom tells me that this teacher drones on and on about a topic, and doesn't give the students a CHANCE to look up. They likely know how she grades, how she gives tests, and that everything she is saying is going to be on the exam, so they are furiously typing away getting the material into words they remember, and understand. If the teacher instead posed questions, and answered questions as they relate to the subject matter -- they will have a lot more luck in students remembering the material as well as being genuinely interested by it. I had a history teacher or two who used this approach and what a difference it was... I enjoy history more now than I did in college, and that was a helpful primer on learning to appreciate it.
And if I haven't already hinted at it... this teacher needs to get with the times. Laptops are here to stay, and it's not the technology that has to change and evolve -- that HAS. It's the teaching methods that have to.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I go to business school at night and I use a laptop in class. What I use it for is not to take notes. I use a notepad for that and a plethora of pencils. I use it to have the Powerpoint that the instructor is using, so I can see it. I also keep a copy of the chapter outline and glossary up, even if I had to make them myself. I also keep copernic agent, google and wikipedia up, so I can look up stuff in class.
I am also famous for loading up WoW when the professor goes far off subject, like a legal professor discussing his bird watch hobby for 2 hours. Going to a night course and spending 4 hours a night, three nights a week leave me little patience for a professor who wants to discuss the birds he saw last week when we need to go over agency law. I am paying really good money to go back to school, not the goverment nor my parents.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Have you threatened to sue the professor ?
Ever heard of 'vocal minority' term ?
Ever wonder why it has this negative tint to it ?
Besides if you can't 'optimally absorb the knowledge',
the problem might as well be with your head, not a professor.
How about banning teachers from the classroms?
They're useless if you've got a laptop. They're even disturbing sometimes...
Can't you tell legy from rihjt?
Well, this might help you understand. It's not as unusual a condition as you'd believe... although a lot of people are just poor at writing because they weren't taught correctly (yay to crappy school systems).
I recently got an inquiry about jamming wireless LANs from a professor at a very famous law school. She was upset that her students were not only staring at laptops during her lectures, but were ignoring her and surfing the web. I told her that deliberate jamming was illegal under federal law and that she should probably just tell her students not to use laptops.
Surfing the net instead of listening to talks is very common at professional conferences which I attend. High tech conferences and many venues now consider WLAN access a necessity, and even I have been guilty of reading e-mail instead listening to a dull talk.
Forbidding laptops in classes is difficult these days because they are very handy for note taking. My personal view on lectures is that there should be no note taking at all: no laptops, no paper, no nothing. The students should be watching and listening to the professor who then hands out good, printed notes at the end of the lecture. It is more work for the professor, but provides a better educational experience for the students. I also think some subjects are better taught in front of a blackboard than with PowerPoint slides. For a high-tech professional I can be such a luddite.
Clemson has required students in the College of Engineering and Science (and more recently some business schools, etc.) to have laptops since my freshman year (2003).
The majority of my professors have it listed in their syllabus that they do not allow laptops during their class. We also have several laptop classes such as a math class that uses Maple, but outside of that laptops are not allowed.
I would guess the reign over students derives from the military school heritage of the university.
This Professor knows that real education is about thought and analysis, not turning facts into brain vomit. She knows her students will be better served in the long run if they comprehend law, which can only happen if the students participate in their education. Too many kids (for a long time now) think an education is a handout, mostly because the system is designed to make it that way. It's not--look at any international test results. The students don't understand this because they lack thought and analysis skills, which their fact-vomit based K-12 "education" doesn't include.
If there were more educators like Professor Entman at all levels of education, the US would be much better off, now and in the future.
By the way, "snowball effect"? Law students today can't use legal phrases such as "establishes precedent"? I rest my case.
more like she doesn't want them googling her statements to find out she's making up 50% of her lectures.
It's called job security.
I hate to say this, but when I took notes in college classes, I expended significant energy trying to make sure that I got as many nuances as I could from the lecture. This required a lot of writing, and I can pretty well guarantee that eye contact with the professor was the LAST thing on my mind.
The problem as I see it is, that you can think, and reflect, and write down the byproduct of all that, but if you happen to miss the gist of what the professor is saying, you've not done yourself any favors. I figured that I could do any reflection and thinking after the fact, when I wasn't so worried about missing a key point.
funny thing is when I was teaching Programming classes, OOA/ODD, etc. I banned all note taking regardless of medium, just to get the students to actually listen to what was being said and to think and concentrate on the concepts and not just write down everything I said word for word. They were allowed to take notes during a brief "review" session at the end of each class where they discussed what we had covered amoungst themselves while I listened in and corrected where needed. It worked great, there was a bunch of bitching and moaning at first but at the end of the class they all thought it was a great idea / experience.
AMEN! I've had student try to pull the "I pay your salary, so you work for me" line of bullshit once.
While I agree with you that a professor or teacher has to have some control over disruptive influences in the classroom, but there is definitely merit to the notion that the teacher "works for" the student. The purpose of the teacher being there is to serve the student, and I say this as someone intent on going into elementary school teaching. In my case, I'll be teaching the general public, paid for by public tax dollars, and so I will be working for the public, which includes my students. (Children are people too). In your case, as a professor, you are being paid by the university which is paid for by your students, so in that sense you work for them as well.
But the point isn't about who pays who. The point is that the good of the students comes before the whim of the educator. Like a doctor. Like any service profession: the customer is always right. You are doing your job well if you are serving your clientele well. The only way you can reason out of that is balancing the good of many 'customers' or 'clients', e.g. in the case of disruptive students ruining the experience for others.
Consider an anecdotal example. This term now ending, I had a philosophy class (theories of justice) with perhaps the worst instructor I've ever had. He wasn't such a bad person, he was just a really bad teacher. The format of the class was one three-hour meeting per week. We'd come in the first day, be assigned some reading, and immediately the next class we would be told a topic to write an essay about and given an hour to write it. No writing down the question, and no repetition of it. You miss it (which was easy since the guy could barely speak up at all), and you're screwed - or have to ask another student. After that, we the students would spend the remainder of the class discussing the material amongst ourselves, prompted by vague open-ended questions from the professor.
If I had wanted an experience like that, I'd have joined a freaking book club. "Read this, write about it, and now talk about it" is not the kind of instruction that I'm paying for. At no point did the instructor ever actually instruct us on anything, helping to explain the positions of the authors we were reading, or any such thing. When I enroll in a university of an acceptable quality to me, I expect to be able to trust that professors employed by that university will be of that quality. Generally, the instructors at my school are of decent quality, so when one fails to meet that standard, I as the student feel a right to be indignant about it. And it's not so easy to do as you say and "take your money and go elsewhere". Transferring universities is a huge, life-uprooting task, especially if you're attending somewhere that you've got a job, family, friends, secure housing, etc etc. Just abandoning all that because your school is problematic is no small thing.
Your kind of attitude, that you the professor are the King of the Classroom and students should feel privileged to hear you speak, is the exact kind of pompous bullshit that leads to the political problems that pervade civilization. It's akin to a politician saying "well I'm the one in charge and if you don't like it, move to a different country". The people at the top of any hierarchy have a responsibility to those lower down - the top exists only to serve the bottom. It's as true in the classroom as it is in the government, and everywhere else as well.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The computers interfere with making eye contact
I don't know very many people who can write legibly without looking at the paper. In fact, I can keep eye contact much easier with a keyboard as I don't have to keep looking down.
firestream.net
If a textbook is provided, reading the section of the text before hand and then taking notes during class on what was most emphasized and on the teacher's explaination of material is the most effective way to maximize your time as a student. Not only are you prepared for lecture, but you also have the time to ask questions of your professor if you had some the night before.
//aids// will not have much permanance- they may help with understanding, but they will not do anything an effective professor couldn't do. They're just bells and whistles.
/average/ student has no incentive to go to class if all the notes are in powerpoint format online and he has a book at home. The person in the quote above suggests grading a student. While ideally a very nice suggestions, this is an execution nightmare. Attempting to have 50-300 students demonstrate a skill on paper AND grading all of these to ensure attendance is extremely impractical. This needs to be done regularly to ensure attendance, and it's just not possible to collect so many papers. Any instructor will attest to this- those not teaching should not dare insinuate that the instructor is just "lazy."
"The students could then be issued with a DVD of the lecture, which covers the notes angle. In order for the students to bother turning up - and stay awake - the lecture then has to become more interactive, with students actually solving problems (for example) for which they are graded"
I understand the logic behind giving students notes so that they theoretically are more focused on the lecture itself, but there are a few issues with this assumption:
1. First of all, we're ignoring years of research which states that many students are tactile learners, in addition to auditory and visual learners. Many students need to write things down in order to PROCESS them (not necessarily remember. That's studying.). If we eliminate the note-taking process, the professor simply has to hand out notes, and read them. If these notes contain everything, including diagrams and calculations, (which a lazy student would love), there is no reason for a professor to write anything on the board. Thus, we have eliminated 2 of the 3 main ways that students process information while in the classroom.
2. Let's say we try to alieviate this issue by using more "interesting" lectures as was suggested in the quote above. Understand that more "interesting" in a college classroom is really limited to videos, perhaps a science demonstrations or a guest speaker. Still, with note-taking removed, these
3. So, the
4. If we enforce an attendance policy to try to corral students in the classroom with their powerpoint packets in tow, we simply end up with a room full of resentful students who are simply daydreaming or casually listening. There will always be the very prepared student. There will always be the exceptional student. But if a student is given everything before hand, they no longer have to work for their education. The lecturer is reduced to a "Chapter Summary Machine".
There is an educational psychology term known was "constructivism", which states that each student comes into the classroom, takes imput in, and constructs their own educational experience. Everyone gains something else from the lecture. Having only an auditory imput with no tactile componant is like listening to music in mono. It's simply not enough to be enriching.
All these assume the average, liberal arts education. When you get into the classical sciences and mathematics fields, writing things down is imperative. Looking at multivariable integral or a Claussius-Clapyron solution on a slide is nowhere near the same as experiencing it in person during lecture with a professor present.
All of these points have also simply considered the manner in which information is obtained. There is an entire seperate barrel of fish which discusses the problems we have with how the average student manages their education. Someone previously mentioned th
The professor should provide the notes to the class and ask the students to simply pay attention and become engaged.
The prof is wrong to boot laptops out. Instead the class should include a class participation component in the scoring; if the laptop is a barrier to communication then it is reflected in the grade. There is nothing wrong with the prof coming in on the first day of class and saying that 1) class participation and engagement are included in your grade, 2) I find eye contact an important way of measuring engagement, 3) hiding behind a laptop transcribing madly may negatively impact your grade, If there ar touch typists who cna take notes while still being engaged then so be it. if you as a student can't do that, then you need to either get rid of the laptop or find a different class.
I don't understand. Why would an instructor care if one or more people aren't paying attention? This isn't high school. In this case the students are just throwing away their time and money. Let them... they'll obviously fail their tests. Let it play out.
If I wanted to bring, say, a tablet notebook with a digitized/scanned/OCR'ed version of the textbook, I don't think it should be up to the lecturer or the department to tell me I can't. A stylus is much quieter than a pencil. A 12" tablet is much lighter than the thousands of pages of paper I'm toting around this semester.
There's a level of professionalism that is expected in higher education. As long we're not taking away from the lecture we should expect it should be fine. But in this case, expect the professor to do something about others being disrespectful.
Hmmm.. now I'm considering the whole usb webcam thing.
A laptop is only good when you're typing in notes while not looking at the keyboard. Most students suck at typing and will concentrate more on where the letter 's' is than listening and understanding what the lecturer has to say.
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
I have seen students fail a course for silly little things that they thought they knew better than the professor. Class participation is one of those silly things. When you are busy typing, you are probably not actively thinking and responding. You think of it as taking notes. The professor thinks of it as a distraction.
Whether or not you agree is entirely beside the point. The real issue, at the end of the term, is that the professor writes the grades on the papers. Only a really foolish student would start a conflict with a professor over something petty. Humor him/her, even if the demands seem silly, at least until the 'A' is on the transcript.
Shields up geeks. We wouldn't want to be accused of sexual harassment by means of leering at starry eyed teachers who want to make eye contact.
Welcome to the whipped society.
I've worked as a technician for Community college, University and Middle School. The truth of the matter is that sometimes technology detracts from human-to-human communication and understanding. Anyone who says otherwise is being unrealistic. A key element to human communication is facial expressions and eye contact. If your face is buried in a laptop while trying to type every word, you run the risk of missing information, context and nuance -- the things that differentiate quality education from memorizing facts. This whole argument about "I pay for the education" is a misguided and disrespectful. The professor is trying to impart knowledge to the student in the ways that they (theoretically) have found to be the best. On the most basic level, it's rude in to put something in front of your face in *any* lecture/meeting/presentation. That's just basic courtesy.
My best professors were the ones who eliminated the middle man and provide their outline before class. That way, we were all literally on the same page -- and therefore we could discuss the material without worrying about copying it verbetim.
First off: I don't care about the presence of laptops, or paper and pencil... or even the student. They paid me to give a lecture, clarification of material through discussion, evaluation of work, project advisement and so on. If they choose to ignore any of this or be absent then my evaluation of their performance will reflect it and they just have to live with their consequences.
That being said: "[her] main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing." Is she kidding me? I can't see through my student's laptop covers but I highly doubt they are diligently transcribing my lecture. I would bet dollars to donuts that a whole lot of Internet surfing, mine sweeper and IM is taking place with almost no notes. I cannot possibly see how you can take notes on a keyboard for a subject such as advanced data structures where diagrams are key. She's living in a fantasy if she thinks student's are transcribing.
Now for the students: Most of them suck at this learning thing. I get asked questions like:
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
As a law student myself, I've tried both ways and mainly the reason I use my laptop in class is because there is no way I could keep track of all of the notes I took the night before if I had them on paper. Also, into my second year I've had a couple of classes that involved a little more lecture than socratic method and I'm able to take much better notes by typing.
I also have a difficult time deciphering anything I handwrite when I am in a moderate hurry.
It's more of an organizational benefit for me than anything else. It is also an incredible distraction. Not just the person sitting in front of me chatting with every person they ever knew in high school, but the temptation to quickly pull up Slashdot or whatever and browse a little when the professor goes off on some philosophical tangent that isn't particularly interesting.
Professors do have the option to "disable" wireless Internet access for their students during classtime, but since we figured out they do this with MAC address filtering it hasn't stopped everyone.
Pros: I can review notes I made the night before when reading; look up stuff on Westlaw; stay 500% better organized; type 120 wpm;
Cons: The Internet. The incessant noise of people who treat their laptop keyboard like an old IBM Model M keyboard.
What?
The faculty member is simply going out of her way to help them out in their future profession.
Good on her.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
The problem with what most folk are saying in this discussion, that people play games or are annoying with computers are missing something fundimental. People are plenty annoying without computers. That fidgety kid in front of you who bounces his feet and shakes the floor distracts you, if he had a laptop minesweeper could keep the floor more steady and the rest of the class more focused. People pass notes, chat, doodle, &c. This has been done for a long long time, and just because the diversions are getting more plentiful and frankly more fun doesn't mean they should be blocked. In addition, some people cannot take pen and paper notes. I, for one, have dysgraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia) and get a laptop for exams and instead of bringing one to each lecture I just don't take notes at all and listen, tho that seems to be a bit of a disctraction for folk too. Perhaps students should learn to focus on the teacher and not the people around him/her with or without the machine. Some have said that the classroom is the teacher's space and I agree with that, however it is also the student's space. As much as the teacher is there to teach, if the students can't learn effectivly how the teacher wants them to learn then the teacher is doing something wrong. I believe that at least for myself taking notes are a distaction and a barrier, but that doesn't mean as a teacher I would ban pen and paper. ~J.C.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
I hate professors like this who think they know better than you how you learn best. Hell even if you are wrong it's your fucking education.
Besides, even if this helps students learn that class better it makes sure all the students we graduate for college expect to be babied and have their study habits dictated to them. What happens when they get out in the real world and they don't have people telling them to come to class and to put away their computers and etc..
Most of all though this pisses me off so much because it is very similar to professors I had in college who required class attendance or decided that it would be better to present the material in this non-standard way (which was just a bit better) so you couldn't learn out of a book.
NEWS FLASH different people learn differently. I can't learn jack squat from lecture in technical courses, i.e., math. When I have to attend lecture I just waste my time and make sure I hate the class. Yet because I went to a school where *most* professors didn't care what you did as long as you got your work done I went to virtually no classes through all of college (made it entire terms without seeing a professor) and I graduated caltech and am now a math grad student at berkeley.
When I teach I make a point of only imposing discipline as necessery to stop students from interfering with other student's learning. If a student wants to stare at the ceiling or even read a novel that's fine with me. I will advise them to pay attention but it is their buisness and they are either good enough or learn differently that they will do well on their exams or they will learn the lesson and now understand how to handle their own study habits.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Oh boy. I would agree with taking notes on MATH class, like typing equation or ennumerating procedures, things which are easily written.
But this is a LAW CLASS, notes are very important and students have more important things to do than hurting their wrists with pencil and paper (I still remember those dreadful days in high school).
Fire that woman, she obviously doesn't know how to teach.
This happened in a few of my classes at Carnegie Mellon four years ago. You would think we are all about technology there, but many of the professors don't allow them into the classroom.
Much of the commentary above revolved around computer's in the classroom generally -- including math and science classrooms.
"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing".
In a few of our classes at law school we have students with special needs and so the university provides a court reporter for them who transcribes the entire class. Those court reporters can barely keep up with the professor half the time and they're using machine shorthand probably pushing 200 wpm.
What?
It was interesting to see that a student's justification for a laptop was that is handwritten notes were incomplete and unorganized.
That is one of those critical skills for higher learning. You better get organized or you are going to flunk out.
A computer does not make anyone more organized. You need those skills for any type of profession and you cannot always depend upon a computer to make you smarter.
Tisha Hayes
This is pretty mixed up-- I do think there is a small, relatively insignificant effect on synthesis when writing by hand (at least compared to linear text input with a keyboard), but I don't know that a class full of scribblers will be any more attentive than a class full of keyboardists.
The real behavior that is tacitly being addressed is probably surfing, chatting, playing solitaire, etc. I have my own thoughts on that score as well-- mainly that this is a wrong-headed "solution" to that "problem"-- but it's not a particularly popular one...
granted i'm not in the law school, or even pre law, i don't see that many kids with notebooks. i am usually one of two or three students with a notebook in class, but i'm pretty sure i'm the only one using it for notes. everyone else is checking their facebook or myspace or some other infernal waste of time.
If I can't optimally absorb knowlege then there is a problem, and I will make sure damn sure that problem is resolved. Quite honestly, the students don't need your self-centered, self-absorbed pompous self either.
If you can't optimally absorb knowledge without disrupting others, then and only then is there a problem. I've met a few students like you, who have egos as big as the sun and think they can do no wrong. Usually you're just pissed because some professor put you in your place or you discovered that just because you're in college now doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you want. Or you're just an attention whore. This may not be the case, but considering the battles at my university for "fairness" I highly doubt it.
Professors have the privilege of being self-centered and pompous because they're PROFESSORS. It's their classroom, they'll decide if they want to use lecture slides or write on the chalkboard, if late homework is a zero, etc. If they say laptops are distrupting the class I'm sure they are. 99% of the people who have them are usually IMing or emailing or watching march madness clips, anyways.
I had to write like a maniac in my classes (physics and math) because the material on the board wasn't in the book or in any handouts. It was frequently mathematical equations and derivations that would have been a struggle for me to reproduce (assuming I could). If I didn't write it all down I'd look at equation X and equation Y later and wonder how the hell he got from one to the other. If I just watched in class I'd understand it for a hour or so but then I forget it when we went onto another subject. I had to write it down.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"Unfortunately not all of us roll over quite so easily."
And that is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to say.
Long story short, the professor is there to teach, the student is there ro learn, and if the student thinks they know more than the teacher and should be in charge, the student destroys the relationship and makes learning impossible.
Not that bad of an idea and would probably keep people from playing on the internet all day. Seeing that a lot of schools have wireless internet connections now, it's not hard for someone to get side-tracked. On a another note, people like me type faster than they write and a lot more legible. ;)
[%] Cingular Ringtones
i don't know how many times i saw people a) staring at laptop and not listening b) people playing games during class. It is the professor's class to teach and I wholy approve of her method. I'm sure some student will be suing shortly...
I'd venture to say that what's going to be on the tests is what the prof yaks about in class so transcribing would give you a better edge.
... will understand how great a help laptops can be, and banning anyone from using a laptop will cause problems for anyone who needs one. I, for example, find that it's a lot less painful to take notes on a laptop than with a pen and paper. I'm at a uni with a lot of dyslexic people, and many of them find it easier to take notes on a laptop.
Instead of prehaps saying "NO GO AWAY SILLY LAPTOPS!", why not instead train students how to appropriately use laptops to take notes? If I'm not mistaken, the reason people go to uni is to learn new skills and professional practices, and surely the ability to touch-type, make accurate notes, and multitask are all professional skills which, if people insist on using a laptop, should be learnt. I find my notes are a lot more detailed and consise when using a laptop, mostly because I forget that a pad and pen are in front of me and I just forget to take notes.
If lecturers are finding that their students laptop-taken notes aren't consise or accurate enough, why should thier hand-written notes be any better?
She could also consider abandoning her (probably 5 year old) lesson plans, and rewrite them to use formats, materials and forums designed to not easily be transcribed w/ a keyboard.
Get your tagline off my lawn.
Just to follow up on this as a 3rd year law student, the parent is essentially right. But.
;)
Almost all law students use laptops now, and most take their exams on laptops, at least at my school. The game effect has hampered my attention in class sometimes, both when others play them and when I play them out of boredom. It is a problem. I think she's probably justified in barring laptops. I would, however, allow exceptions for those with handicaps, et sim.
The problem is that many students nowadays simply don't know how to take notes on paper, and can't write quickly or abbreviate sufficiently to get anything down of value.
I have found that I recall better and analyze and summarize better when I take notes on paper, but I usually fail to keep everything organized, and there's little time to re-copy notes for outlines or reorganization. Taking notes on my laptop allows me to keep everything organized and accessible. However, over the last couple of years, I've started to migrate more back towards paper for certain tasks. I have a paper organizer, a moleskine for ideas, and use paper to think.
Paper is good for processing, summarizing, and synthesizing disorganized information. Computers are good at working with organized information. If you have to take a load of disorganized information (cases) and organize it, though, paper seems to work much much better. I can't easily look at 5 or 10 cases at the same time, even on a 1600x1200 screen, especially when there's no organizing principle (I have to discover it).
I've found that I get much more done when I only take out my laptop for specific tasks, such as checking email, work/school sites, getting important info, doing legal research, and writing. Thinking, planning, reading, and organizing, however, I now do mostly on paper. It works much better for me. Sometimes I leave my laptop out, but closed and hibernated, and only open it when I need it. This seems to provide just enough distance to keep my use on track.
It has been very hard as a CS person to develop the proper balance between my paper/computer uses, but it's worth it to do so, because of the (possibly counterintuitive) gains one makes in efficiency by using the best tool for the task at hand. Oh yeah, and avoiding procrastination...
If I were in that professor's class, I'd get the local student union on the case. Here in Quebec, student unions are actually accredited unions (like labour unions), so they have more power here than they do elsewhere.
Oh, get a life. Different professors teach differently; if she doesn't like laptops, just don't use one--maybe you'll even discover that she is right. Be happy that she cares enough about the class to think about such issues at all.
Right now, you may have a motivated professor that doesn't like laptops. Once you get the "student union" on her case, you're going to have a grumpy professor that gets irritated by staring at laptops during her lecture. You can then type notes into your laptop, but you may not want to anymore.
The only request I had for a ban in the classroom (in college) was from my general relativity professor. Since her class was right after lunch she wondered if we were sleepy from having just eaten. She proposed that we bring our lunches to her class so we'd be awake and fall asleep in our next class instead.
Actually I think it was simply because the math was frying our brains.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Just because I have written down a bunch of notes doesn't mean I understand what I've written, and just because I've written down nothing at all doesn't mean I don't understand what's being taught.
Notes have never done me any good, and I've never taken them. My high-school biology teacher gave me a public dress-down for not taking notes about various Latin-named microscopic organisms. I still didn't take any notes, and got an A- on the test. The teacher apologized to me.
Also, just because I pass a test doesn't mean I understand the material.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
In my first year there was a guy that played Quake 3 on his laptop. Flashing colours every couple of seconds was damn annoying.
If I became a prof, I would ban laptops too.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I think you've missed my point.
I don't think the student should be 'transcribing' anything at all. I think they should listen, think, and ask questions. Recording the lecture is back-up and reference for later.
So - I agree with you insofar that students need 'internal' understanding, but I fail to see how letting the iPod (or whatever) record the lecture as you listen and participate (and think) precludes this level of understanding.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I attend law school, which not only allows laptops in class, but has wifi. I traditionally sit in the nosebleed rows and so I have the opportunity to see what most students do with that wonderful combination. Most surf the web, a few play Yahoo! games, and still others play Solitare. Few ever too producitve notes. I myself brought a laptop to classes.
This semester, I started weaning myself off of the laptop. I started with a mostly lecture class with a high informantion density. I found my understanding of the material was improved by actuall jotting down notes into a cheap moleskine knock-off. So, after a week I stopped using the laptop in another class. Now, I'm down to only using the laptop in one class. I tried to wean off of that, but the information density in the class is essentially a vacuum.
The result? Much better understanding of the material. I'm more invested in the class because I'm trapped in the professor's world. That said, this semester I did a much better job than in past semesters with taking notes on the laptop, but the overall quality of my notes spiked after I stopped.
I do not believe a laptop materially adds to the classroom.
Having given presentations in such classes where laptops are in use, I can say that it is also obvious who is paying attention and who is not.
Granted, this is my experience, YMMV.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Laptops have no place in the classroom. They are an excellent educational tool, but when it comes to taking lecture notes, they are annoying.
First, it is annoying for other people in the class to hear the click click click of someone trying to frantically type everything the professor says. When I was in university, it was also annoying when those using a laptop would constantly ask the professor to repeat what they said because they couldn't keep up, even to repeat something said like 5 minutes earlier.
Second, while for some course you might only need to take verbal notes, many of the engineering courses I took involved math formulas and diagrams, and there would be those with a laptop trying to draw or use Matlab to take down the notes, adding to further annoyance when the professor wanted to erase the board 15 minutes later while the notebook guy was still drawing our creating the math formula.
What was also annoying was those people that were not actually taking lecture notes, those that use the notebook as a source of entertainment to them and others because they were board with the lecture. Wireless internet wasn't prevalent back when I went to school, but I am sure now that many people probably browse the web while in a lecture.
Finally, I agree that going to a lecture isn't about transcribing everything the professor says. Listening to them, engaging them in dialogue, and actually participating in the class is the best way to learn rather then just writing down everything and reviewing your notes come exam time. In my senior year, I stopped taking lecture notes, period. I found that by getting the gist of what the professor was saying was enough to do well on the exams, rather then a word for word regurgitatory review of his notes. Professors come to know people that talk to them in class, and generally I think you get better marks in the long run, you get better marks.
That, and most professors in the know simply photocopy their overheads or lecture notes and sell them at the book store or post them online.
I wanted to use something like a tablet PC when I was in university, being able to scratch both notes and formulas down on a touch sensitive screen makes more sense in the class environment then typing them down.
Ultimately, its up to the professor to decide how people take his/her course. Most schools cater to the specific needs of the professor, these are people that make the university what it is, they bring money into the school by doing research and writing books, teaching is a secondary task for many university professors. Few schools would force a professor to accept notebooks in the classroom if they are against it. If you don't like that policy, then drop the course, you ain't going to win either way.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
That said, I could be entirely wrong. The point is it doesn't matter what I think. When you go to a class, have a little respect and go along with that particular instructor's teaching style.
When you record a lecture, you are only postponing having to think about what the professor is saying. Effectively you are moving the lesson to another hour, while wasting the one you are in. Every lecture has some point to it, and the student should understand it instead of blindly recording everything he hears. If you listen to what the professor is saying, you will see what he is trying to tell you, and find out that it is usually just a few simple concepts. Then you will discover that in most cases you will not need notes at all, and convert your notebook into a reference manual rather than a textbook, which, after all, you have already bought.
What? No Notebook? I'll try to remember to take my PAPYRUS!
I am portuguese. If you think my written english is bad, try posting in portuguese!
There may be a good reason not to have laptops in classrooms (games, internet, etc.) but not because they are a more distracting note taking tool. It really depends on the student. There are some people (myself included) who can type faster than they can write. You don't have to worry about the words on your page running in to each other because you were not looking down. When I took notes in class I hardly ever looked down. The key is not to worry too much about small typos. I guess if you realized your hands where in the totally wrong place then a sentence would be unrecognizable. Its more of a matter of what works for you. My hand writting is terrible! So I would either not take notes at all, or type them.
The professor is a professional teacher paid to teach, and the student is the one receiving his services. I'll never understand why the student should be the only one responsible for his learning, when the teacher is the one getting paid. This is a classic example of the school-as-service-corporation attitude that many Gen Y kids* have and it is simply wrong. It is also unfortunate for those with the attitude of "serve me, I am your student
University does not serve a commercial end. they are not-for-profit and they serve a civil end. This end is to train citizens, not consumers or employers. Unfortunately, this gets lost in the 'marketplae-as-metaphor-for-everything" world we live in here in the US. The professor is there to help you learn, and yes, he/she IS a master. That's what going throuhg the doctoral process is all about - becoming a master in a specific domain.
I realize that many professors are not good teachers, but it is even more true to say that most students are not astute about learning, their own or others. If someone feels they learn better with a laptopscreen up in front of thier face, that's nice. but what if hat interferes with other student's learning? What if that interferes with the teacher's teaching (which then intereferes with other's learning) I am in classes and meetings with laptop screens up and I find that the interaction in them is significantly lower than in places without a physical barrier between participants.
This of course is all base don teh assumption taht laptops are in the classroom to faciltate learning rather than to allow the student to surf the net and IM over the campus wifi network because they don't feel like paying attention.
* it's not just Gen Y'ers MBa students are probably worse - any student group wit a sense of entitlement is really a pain in the ass
What a joke!
Every worthwhile point can be satisfied this way: the professor bans laptops in her classroom. Instead, she later hands out notes of every word she spoke, verbatim. With technology available today, the latter is easily achieved.
So why the fuss? If the professor has brains, she should propose it instead of pushing a one-sided argument.
I am a 3L at that same school.
1) many people who signed that petition were falsely told it was re: a proposed policy to ban laptops altogether
2) the students in the 1L class have been communicating in groups during class. Dozens of students at once would turn to look at some other student, or laugh at an IM'd joke.
3) students were sending each other the needed answers DURING class; law school class is not supposed to be a collaborative effort.
It's also not mentioned in the article that by far the majority of students at Cecil C. are embarrassed that these 1L's are such whiny lightweights.
...and, unfortunately, a good number of people who go into teaching fall into the "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" category. Sure, some professors are stellar, but some are there more for their own validation and sadomasochistic power trips. They treat students like primary school children, structuring their courses and their own behavior for maximum scolding potential, and then complain that their students behave like primary school children. So, you get peevy things like not liking laptops or whatever and rather than just structure the class to eliminate the problem, they "make examples" out of anyone who would dare resist their fetishized tantrums.
He would lead a discussion of the topic by prompting questions and answers from the students. During the discussion, he would create (on the chalkboard) a running outline of the topics with some details, but not EVERYTHING we talked about. As he wrote on the board, we students wrote in our notebooks, and then went back to the discussion.
I learned more from this method than any other I have used since.
Mr. U., your teaching methods kicked ass!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
they go based on the quality of education and the jobs they can get afterwards
Yes, and the quality of the job you get afterwards, unfortunately, is completely based on GPA. I've been to several recruitment faires at my university and there is always a cut off in GPA to even get an interview. Classes at my university are difficult, the quality of the education doesn't make a difference at this point, it's simply the letter grade you can spit out and show whatever firm you're attempting to interview for. If I can take my laptop to class (which I do) to take notes (which I do) and record lectures (which I also do), to review and learn in depth all subject matter in a course, why is that me "not appreciating the opportunity" and not making the best of it? I can be a whiney self absorbed jackass who leaves a room in protest WITH precedence and complete justification in my actions in this regard.
Everyone always glorifies higher education, but "we are the future leaders of the world" does not equate to the highest level of quality in education, it equates to "who ever has the highest GPA will get picked up at Lehman Brothers as an investment banker making $120k starting with a chance at making partner/becoming head of one of the best investing firms in the nation some day." I've learned a lot in college, and one of the most important things I've learned is that it doesn't matter how good your social skills are, to get your foot in the door a super high GPA always weighs more than a smile and nice personality. So I'm going to continue to take my laptop to class and will raise hell if the practice is ever banned.
If a person knows how to type, they can take notes while never looking at the keyboard.Thus, there will be much MORE eye contact
When I write notes, I cannot stop watching my hand and the lines on the paper. I think that the faster speed of typing would allow more interaction as well.
Here's the student newspaper article: http://www.dailyhelmsman.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2 006/03/22/4420cb72c53d6
First, I think a teacher has every right to completely control her classroom environment. But I think she's exercising poor judgment here.
Bad note taking habits have nothing to do with the tools you use. Some students take too many notes with paper. Some take too few on a laptop. She's essentially saying that good note taking habits cannot be taught; that sort of defeatism doesn't make her sound like that great of a teacher to me.
Besides, I think she'll be amazed when some of her students manage to avoid thinking about the material even without the assistance of modern gadgetry.
Everyone will be going back to pencil and paper soon when they realize that these computer things are just a lot more trouble than they are worth.
She gave two reasons in the article: "more time for critical thinking" and "more eye contact."
I know from experience that I enter notes 5x faster typing than longhand with pen and paper. So "more time" is a bogus reason. There were many times I sat in class looking at the Prof after having noted cites or details from an overhead...while the rest of the class still had heads down scribbling away.
If I finish taking a note much faster than those still scribbling with pen and paper, who has time for more eye contact?
So given her two reasons, that's a bunch of B/S. I wonder what the real reason is?
Reading through the comments posted here, I understand both sides of the argument. One one hand, every student has the right to take in information in whatever way they please (handwritten notes, audio recorder, laptop). This is university, there should be no restriction on this.
On the other hand, some people mention the loud clicking of the laptop keys and the occasional P4-based laptop that sounds like a jet fan. Some students partake in web browsing and watching videos which can distract those around them.
Personally, I bring my iBook to every class and have since high school. I would simply not be able to intake all the information that the professor gives out (especially when there are no slides) by writing it down. I simply cannot write fast enough, not to mention that my handwriting looks like that of a three year old. The laptop allows me to listen and absorb information while writing it down, since typing is second nature to me, I don't even have to think about it.
To minimize the distraction for those around me I try to keep on task and stay in Word, not browse the web. I also have a rubber keyboard protector which is designed to prevent liquids from getting into the machine in the event that I spill my tea. This has the added bonus of nearly silencing my typing. Those around me cannot hear my typing whatsoever. I highly recommend anyone who uses a laptop in class to get one (around $10 or so) to minimize distracting noise. Oh, and please keep your laptop on mute, there is nothing more annoying than hearing the Windows sound go off full blast in the middle of class.
Back when I was in school, they didn't have laptops. If I took notes, I did so with pen and paper. And I can tell you, if I was writing, I wasn't really thinking. After awhile, I gave up trying to take notes. Usually, if the teacher was just reciting, he was doing so from the textbook anyway, so that was my source material.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I guess I'd rather take good notes than make eye contact with my prof. I'm trying to get good grades here, not get a date.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
How did ya'll get the idea that our educational system is designed to educate? It is there to teach you to conform - nothing more. Any education you receive is a secondary concern that results from you actually remembering a handful of factoids and (if you're lucky) some principles. Very few students go so far as to learn actual material while at school, and those who do are primarily self taught. Whether they spend hours each night reading textbooks, or skip class and teach themselves, the classroom only serves as an arena in which they compete for grade points and delete information that isn't going to be on the next test. Making students use pen and paper, or permitting laptops will make little difference to those students who are already actively teaching themselves. But it underlines the message of conformity and obedience that is the true message of the system. Oh I know we all think of ourselves as individualists and nonconformists - but look at the avenues our "nonconformity" takes. We protest, petition, and publish, but rarely cause real or lasting change because few of us are willing to make the requisite personal sacrifices. Further, many of us confuse independence with anti-conformity. The latter is a reaction to and is therefore controlled by the perceived influence to conform. The former isn't affected by either influence and can stand on its own two feet without external support. This is just another example of a professor's power trip supported by the university's structure of conformity and justified by a fallacious arguement for equity (which is incorrectly referred to as equality).
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
What a bunch of crybabies students have become, what they cant learn without a laptop? "OMG I cant 'like' study without my cell phone/Ipod/laptop, I mean like how can I learn". Sad and pathetic.
While I believe in god, I choose not to worship the professor. My professor is not my master, and do we really want to encourage the worship of professors? It's bad enough that we have to kiss ass and beg for an A, do you really want to make us into complete servants making our professor coffee and shining their shoes? What do you want?
Our only job is to get an A, any way we know how, and it's not the professors job to tell us how to learn. It's bad enough we have to let the professors tell us how and what to think. Now you want the professor to tell us what tools to us? Do you want to put us on ritalin and make us sit still like zombies while we stare into the professors eye? Do you want us under hypnosis?
Look, I know you are a hypnotist, but some of us arent majoring in psychology and don't need eye contact to make our calculations and write notes.
I worked full time and took 8-10 credits each semester at the University of Michigan for an engineering degree. I did poorly when I was taking paper notes, and I improved greatly after I started taking electronic notes.
I'm surprised that so many people here are commenting that laptops are universally worse than taking notes on paper.
It's just a tool.
Whether the tool is appropiate for the task at hand depends on the skills of the user and the flexibility of the tool.
Perhaps the professor believes that a laptop is an inappropiate choice for her classroom. Perhaps she even believes that no one in the entire world could possibly learn better with a laptop as their tool as they could with a pencil and paper.
However, I doubt that either case is empiracally true. At best she may notice that some students will do better without a laptop. At worst she's taking away a good tool from many students because a few don't know how to use it properly in her environment.
For me the advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
Electronic notes are easier to write, update/modify, share, refer to, and search than paper notes.
Due to limited classroom space I cannot have many physical items open at once, but with a notebook I can easily switch between the textbook, my notes, the lecture slides/notes, previous sets of notes and slides, and utilities (calculator, for instance).
A light notebook computer is a vast improvement over carrying even one textbook and binder for class work, nevermind 2-4 books, classwork for several classes, and miscellanous materials (pens, pencils, highlighters, staplers, hole punch, etc) required for paper processing.
I didn't have time (full time job, 3/4 time school) to refer to audio or video lectures - that simply wouldn't have worked for me. I was able to use the laptop for both school and work during "down" time. I didn't have to keep searching for an open computer to perform assignments.
Disadvantages include battery performance, diagramming (I carried a small sheet fed scanner and used paer notes when I could find no easy laptop method. This was rare since most diagrams were available from the professor in an electronic format), distraction to other students, electronic wall (some professors are initimidated and don't ask questions of students using a laptop).
I had no problems with eye contact - the screen was never between me and the professor.
I respect the professor's desire to provide the best learning environment for her students. If I were in her class I would follow her instructions, though I would make my case for the use of laptops in the classroom. I would also endeaver to avoid taking classes from her in the future unless I determined that she has more to contribute to my learning than I could get from another professor who would allow me to learn in the manner I choose.
However, assuming she's a law professor going over case law, I imagine that the learning done in her classroom has less to do with sound engineering principles (as I was learning) and more to do with the relatively subjective nature of case interpretation. While one can take adequate notes to understand an algorithm, a single case could be studied perhaps forever with new insight. I doubt that I would have used the same study habits in her class that I developed for engineering classes. I do beleive that I would have wanted a laptop to be part of the process for me.
Does the use of a particular tool mean I would be, by default, a bad student or a bad lawyer?
-Adam
If I'm paid to teach you, I'm paid to teach you, not your $4000 lattop.
If I think that you teaching your laptop what I'm saying is getting in the way of you teaching yourself what I'm teaching, then I'm gonna have you get switch off your lattop.
You really will have to trust my ability to teach and my reasons for asking you to put away the laptop. If you don't like that, you're always free to take your tuition to another instructor -- or even another school, if it comes to that.
I'd not be asking you to burn your laptop. I'd simply be asking you to not use it in my classroom. There's a big difference between the two.
Just as you are not your car, you are not your laptop.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I can understand her concerns about eye contact, etc. But at least some of us are "lexically challenged" when it comes to handwriting. So if I were a student, I'd "force her" to have to read anything I submit as part of coursework in my truly appalling handwriting :-)
After all, it's only fair. If I have to read my handwritten notes, she should have to read my handwritten coursework.
dave
A lot of comments are talking about how laptops should not be used because it is so hard to input diagrams while taking notes.
Experience tells me exactly the opposite. I, being a regular geek, bring my laptop to just about every class I go to. I generally take notes, though some classes get boring as hell (especially in certain cases where the professor e-mails his powerpoint notes to eveyone, and proceeds to read those notes (and nothing more!) in the class), so I do surf the web, play solitaire, etc. (The worst I ever did was play Half-life, which is hard to do on a touch pad.)
In this case, the class is Physics. "But physics has lots and lots of diagrams and models," you say. Damn right it does. I took notes by copying down the words and having a quick-copy sheet for the various greek letters and symbols in use. When it came time to draw a diagram, I had a small binder next to my laptop where I wrote down the diagrams, labeled them, and put the labels in the right position in the electronic notes.
"But then why not just take notes in the binder?"
For a couple of reasons. First, my handwriting is horrible, and it's often hard to go back to notes and read what I wrote. Second, I type much faster than I write. Third, and most importantly (and to the reason I am posting), it forces me to go through my notes.
Normally, I, and most others, will jot down notes and completely forget about them until we need to study for a test. By drawing my notes in the binder, I am forced to copy them over to the laptop notes using my paint program of choice. This not only forces me to draw the diagram twice, which will embed it more in my memory, but I have to often analyze the drawings. As stated, my handwriting is not very good, and sometimes I'll have to move around letters or notations to make them fit in the diagram and easy to read; to do this, I have to know what I'm looking at.
I wound up with a 97% in that class, and a good portion for that grade comes from having to go over my notes, again and again. Yes, I could just read through them again, but that's boring; having to search, input, and analyze requires much more focus. And this isn't the only class where it's helped me, either.
So, don't disregard laptops for notes outright. When utilized correctly, they are powerful learning tools.
I still wish I had a tablet instead, though.
My Devices Professor has done this for years....get over it. If you can't write you probably shouldn't be in college anyway.
Laptops are very annoying in class. Students are usually surfing facebook.com or watching DVDs. In my Art History classes it is very annoying to have a laptop in the room. Laptops stick out like a sore thumb in dimly lighted room. The comment about people listing to MP3 players in classroom is very annoying. I took a test about two weeks ago, and a kid listened to his iPod during the first half of the test. Very annoying! People have no respect for other people in the room. My professor does not accept e-mails from students. What about that?
_buzlink_
It's a fair assumption to make, when the opposite is the exception rather than the rule.
Just look at the support staff at Algonquin College here - they're on an illegal strike right now that's ruined the enitre semester for not thousands, but tens of thousands of students at the Woodroffe and Perth campuses. This is exactly what the majority of the college staff is about - they don't give a damn about yout education - they're there for the money. The students association as well as many individual students are filing a class action lawsuit to get back the money they paid for a semester that will go to waste, because we've lost too much class time to pass. I hope that the court grants us the money, because many of my friends put themselves far in debt to begin with, simply to be there.
I have a few professors who are good people and aren't just there for the money - but they're a dying breed, and, as I said, the exception rather than the rule.
The kind of example in the article is no different - and is, pyschologically, showing a degree of controlling behaviour. Personally, I was always a fan of my Programming teacher's view: "if your here to learn, you will, by whatever means you prefer - if you're not, then I can't force you to." Why other professors feel such a need to control students, is something I don't know enough about advance psychology to comment on. I will tell you one thing though - trust is a double-edged sword - if you don't trust your students, they will not trust you.
She should be going after the education system she is part of. Why can't students in at THAT grade level, type without looking at the keyboard? There's something wrong here.....
I will also say that when I went to school, I don't know how many times I had a silent laugh with the instructor as all the students, except myself, were busy writing down everything the instructor was saying. Then, they'd get pissed when I would discuss with the instructor, concepts based on the material presented but not SPECIFICALLY that same material. Someone would always ask, "Is this going to be on the test?", and when the instructor would say "no", there would be the voice in the back, "then why are we talking about it?".
The system is broken and the teachers haven't a clue that it's broken. This instructor is addressing the symptom and not the problem... IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I've just about had it with these people.
How about you quit yakking and actually DO something to make students appreciate you more?
Where ARE the distro CDs ? Where ARE the free T-shirts and iTunes ? And the list goes on and on!
Oh, and show some leg. Please?
I always found note taking a waste of time. How long has it been since we invented the printing press, projector, photocopy machine, or internet? Couldn't we find a better way to distribute content than to have a highly-paid professor copy his notes onto a blackboard so that they can then be copied by a bunch of highly-paying students into their notes or laptops?
I always preferred classes where notes were made available ahead of time and then all you had to do was add a few extra annotations during class. This allows you to concentrate on the material being presented rather than on its copying.
PowerPoint slides should not be used! They suck and are not detailed enough to express what is being taught! To many teachers try to use a technology that they think will catch the students interest, but in the end they are crippling their teaching style and how students learn. I would be open to teachers providing mp3-based podcasts of lectures, or audio book textbooks. I took a test created in PowerPoint the other day. Ick!
_buzlink_
The professor in question is probably an undercover agent for Logitech. They need to create a market for the Digital Pen somehow... That's one classroom down.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
In real life, bleating that you did something good 2 months ago isn't going to help you solve the problem you are facing now ! Similarly, more and more exams are using multiple choice systems for the answers. well, I'm sorry, either you know it or you don't. You can take an "educated" guess when the answer is written in front of you - real life isn't like that.
Consequently people are leaving schools thinking that they've learned a few subjects, when all they've done is memorise a few aspects. Utterly useless in the workplace. and it seems to spread into all their other dealings where they are expected to think and evolve solutions. People take a driving test, and then drive that way for the rest of their life, except they get worse as they forget what they learned. The test is to demonstrate a basic and safe understanding of driving. It is the minimum not the be all and end all. But they have the certificate so that's all they ever aspire to.
As for laptops in the classroom, well that is just exacerbating the problem, unless you can touch type without looking at the screen, and are highly skilled at it, then you aren't listening to the tutor at all. The only reason you are taking the "notes" is to cram them the night before the exam. Which means you aren't learning, or understanding, just parroting someone elses thoughts. And then political pressure arises because so many people are so average, that they lower the standards so that people feel better.
And so the cycle goes. It's amusing that the UK govt. is now talking about streaming different ability levels in schools. They're the ones who abolished it in the first place !. No one was allowed to be any better than anyone else, so they all had to take the same courses in the same classes. Now they reap the consequences.
When I did maths at school, calculators were only allowed if you were in the top stream, ie you had demonstrated that you could do it in your head anyway. These days, calculators are required for all pupils. They can't add, subtract, multiply or do division of even simple problems without a gadget to do it for them. That sucks, and they are worse off for it, and so are we.
As another poster pointed out, the govt. doesn't want an educated population, because they might actually realise what's being done to them. It amuses me that all these kids with their degrees are worthless in the real world, but it doesn't matter because they all end up in the "service industry" ie office workers. And they think they're clever. As long as they've got a shiny BMW and the latest TV and HiFi they think they are the dogs bollux. In actual fact the govt. has them by the bollux, because they can't do anything else.
</RANT>
(breathe....)
I am a student at RPI, which is one of the 10 most wired campuses in the United States, yet we have several professors that prohibit the use of laptops in their classrooms. Not only can people go too nuts on note taking, but they can also easily be distracted by other things on their laptop such as AIM or games or even just work for other classes. Nobody here thinks anything of it when laptops are prohibited so I don't see why they are making such a big deal of it.
AJ Henderson
"I hate to say this, but when I took notes in college classes, I expended significant energy trying to make sure that I got as many nuances as I could from the lecture. This required a lot of writing, and I can pretty well guarantee that eye contact with the professor was the LAST thing on my mind."
I agree. I'm not going on myspace or IMing people, I'm taking the notes that matter and organizing them better than I can with my chicken scratch.
"I figured that I could do any reflection and thinking after the fact, when I wasn't so worried about missing a key point."
Hell, if they can't get the gist of what the professor's saying on a laptop, chances are they'll miss it with a pencil.
"The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."'
How many people here can type without having to pay extreme attention to the screen? I'm here right now, able to send this message without having to focus on the screen.
Eye contact cannot be a good arguement as you don't need eye contact to pay attention. I find that it is a lot easier to take notes if I've got a laptop in front of me. The fact that I'm skilled in using it, makes it easier to split my concentration from the transcription to the instructor.
Maybe what she needs to give is some typing lessons in order to get them to be able to type without staring at the screen! I remember the boxes in Elementary school when they were teaching me how to type... of course, you could just unplug the monitor instead.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
I'm sitting in my environmental engineering class (breadth elected, I'm a CompE major) ignoring the instructor to post on slashdot.
Man if I didn't have a laptop in college I would have went nuts. Not only did I take excellent notes but it also provided an excellent distraction to me... and everyone behind me as I would always have some kind of movie playing during class.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
It's not about cathing interest. It's about having diagrams on the slide to display, with extra notes on the side, without having to maintain and sync separate word docs.
This is a modern day version of this. The next optimization will be that the teacher will put the entire lecture up on the projector as a powerpoint; scheduled to start at 13:01.
This is a nice break from hearing people in university departments like "Interactive Media Studies" (or "English" for that matter) regurgitate things like, "Computers are going to allow whole new ways of learning and thinking. Every child deserves a computer. Books are so yesterday." God, I thought people in academia were supposed to be critical about the crap coming out of corporate marketing departments.
I couldn't disagree more. Progress is entirely about learning how our technology can improve our processes. Making broad sweeping generalizations and banning new-fangled gadgets is not a good solution. As they say, it's a band-aid on a bullet wound.
Students need to learn how to use technology in a non-disruptive manner, how to get the most out of their equipment. It's similar to the way math teachers like banning calculators. Like someday you're going to be stuck on an island and the only way off will be to repeatedly find the 30th derivative of patterns produced by the ocean waves, and do it using rote memorization alone.
I think it's faulty logic to take such a stuttered approach when incorporating technology. We shouldn't be easing backwards, we should be charging forward. Technology tools should be at the center of our learning experiences. When a tool, like a laptop, becomes such an integral part of society, the first question you should be asking is "How can I make this a core part of the program?" or "How can the program benefit from this?" but not "keep that thing away from me, that's the devil comes through them boxes!"
When you're transcribing using pen and paper, you have to look at the paper and break eye contact from the prof!
And who hasn't experienced madly scribbling notes in class, while trying to listen to the prof (all while making eye contact). Some people also type faster than they write.
I'm not sure if it's just the eye contact thing that bothered her...
Personally, I find it MUCH easier to go through paper notes than scroll down a word document. It's way easier and faster to go back and forth between pages, reference other documents at the same time, make marginal notes, etc. When using reference texts, that physical book is much easier to use and somehow more personal. I frequently have three or four books open and stacked on each other; the indexes are available with a flip, and you can instantly get several different slants on a topic. Works for me.
So... she mailed the students to tell them to quit using computers in class, in order to promote communication, instead of telling them directly.
if professors could just learn to hold classes in WoW.
As a recent grad I've found that the best way to deal with notetaking in class is for the prof to provide you with their lecture notes. Some only made notes available after the class while others had their full notes available before you even sat down for your first day. While it strongly depends on the subject having notes available frees students from having to copy down notes during class - the professors who did not make notes available often expected you to copy them down from their slides during class - and allowed you to pay attention to the class. Those who didn't often had various reasons for it (more than a few felt that writing down notes during class helped you to learn better... I and my sore writing hand strongly disagreed) but the end result was that after the lecture you typically only remembered what the slides were and relied much more on the professor to write good slides. One memorable class (Biology of the Cancer Cell) didn't have a book and none of the notes were available online. If you missed a few words or didn't make it to class that day you were beyond screwed.
As long as you're concerned with taking down notes you'll never be able to actually take valid, intelligent notes about what the professor is saying. Whether you use a laptop or wear out your hand writing down complete notes on paper the only way to really pay attention to a lecture is to know that you have the freedom to actually listen to the lecture itself for once.
Personally, i would put blame on teachers.
When the teacher doesn't make the material interesting, that's when students start looking at their laptops.
I had to go through a class where the teacher banned laptops.
Going to class involved seeing him with his back to us barely speaking loud enough for us to hear. What made it worse was it was a required class, and he was the only one to teach it.
I had another teacher make the class interesting and discussion related.
After the first 2-3 weeks of class I ended up putting up my laptop to participate and listen.
You can't put the blame on one party every single time, but if the teacher can't convey the material well, who would want to pay attention anyways?
As for noisy laptops, blame the laptop design. I barely make any noise with my powerbook, but when someone brings a bulky PC laptop next to me, all I hear is the whir of a noisy fan.
Next thing you know they'll ban you from bringing your personal laptop to work with you and attaching it to the corporate network. Of course that depends on whether you comply with rules and are able to graduate from college instead of trying to crusade for laptop freedom.
University students need to learn quickly that they have to listen to someone else's rules for a change. It isn't high school and people aren't there to insure you get a good education. They are there to impart knowledge and insure there are metrics recorded about your progress. If a professor says not to use laptops to take notes students should accept the consequences of being removed from class if they don't comply. They can try again next time the class is offered with another professor's rules. You can damn well believe if you bring a personal laptop, a USB thumb drive, or a cell phone with a camera into some work environments it's grounds for termination. Get used to being un-tethered at the whim of someone else's rules.
It is asinine to think that you have the right to carry a piece of personal electronics equipment anywhere you want to. If the teacher is distracted by it, or feels that their class is distracted by it, or just doesn't want people to use the technology then they should be able to make that decision and enforce the consequences if there is an infraction.
If nothing else, as a teacher, I would want to know that the answer one of my students gives to my direct question came from their knowledge of the subject and not Google. A laptop cannot be controlled in the classroom and someone surfing for an answer or bringing up an Internet sources counterpoint during a lecture discussion is counter-intuitive to the learning process.
http://chip.cuccio.us/organization/effective-notet aking/printpage/
I can see banning laptops if they are distracting to the other students, but I don't think professors should be deciding what is the best way for you to take notes, especially at the college level. What's next, banning daydreaming? Putting a cap on the rate of blinking because it momentarily blocks your view of the professor? It's one thing to suggest that students not use laptops, but I would find it insulting if a professor told me I could not use a laptop because they think paper and pen works better.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
By the time a person reaches college he should be able to pay attention with a couple of minor distractions.
It isn't elementary school anymore where a person can get sent to time out for distracting the other students from story time.
But also by the time a person reaches college he should know that he is paying to listen to a professor, and if that professor wants his classroom a certain way he'll get it.
So this should have nothing to do with the students. If they don't like it then they can take a different class with a different teacher, or just deal with it. It has everything to do with the professor. People with authority can make things how they want them. If you want power over the classroom then become a teacher.
You're wrong, prima facie, because you believe -- at least according to the words in your original post -- that you are owed respect you haven't earned. Students should respect you because you are an effective teacher, because you are a natural authority in your subject matter, because you are demonstrably wise or knowledgeable and your words carry some weight as a result, not because you fill a role.
Authority is meant to be questioned--especially from educators who, by appeal to the very authority you cite, carry a great deal of weight over how people think. You're owed no respect because you stand at the front of the room. You're not better than your students.
Have you stopped to consider that your attitude is arrogant and condescending? "I pay your salary and I therefore own you" is likewise arrogant (and similarly incorrect), but your response shows you think exactly the same way.
Like omfg!111!!!
Anyway really profs have been doing this since students started bringing them to class in the first place. Heck I remember back in my 1st year, Acadia University (Nova Scotia, Canada) was one the the first to entirely wire there campus, every chair in every lecture hall had an ethernet port, and every 1st year student was issued a IBM thinkpad as part of their package (yes they had some of the highest tution in the country for undergrad)... This started two spin offs. 1)Wanna laptop, just go steal one, drunk students don't lock their doors anyway, and 2)Profs started getting their collective panties in a bunch and banning the laptops (The university Admin loved this, totally wired, but not allowed!).... as students weren't as in TFA taking notes and not thinking, but rather checking e-mail, IM chatting, hell playing LAN games, normal games, and everything but hearing what said prof had to say... not to mention the infernal clickity clack of keyboards while they were trying to speak.... that was back in '95..... Mmmm carry the one.... OVER A DECADE AGO! Yes this sure is news to be posted to a news service on the "cutting edge" of technology etc... Anyway kinda funny...
Rant. Rant. Rant. [[[[END TRANSMISSION]]]]
So, you can write without looking at the paper, but not type without looking at the keyboard/screen? Is this lady for real?
The professor banned laptops from the class because she believes that note-taking on a computer distracts the students and interferes with eye contact. My opinion is that it is the professor's responsibility to supply the students with detailed notes. If the professor expects the studentry to take notes, then she should not interfere with the way this is done: One student may prefer the pen, while another may find more comfortable to work on a laptop (I would just use my PDA). In my view, if the students feel the need to take notes, the professor has failed to provide them with adequate written material. I still remember a seminar where the professor supplied us with a written version of his lecture, and I still remember word-by-word everything he said, after 7 years, because I did not have to take notes. Professors who just talk and never sit down to write what they say during the lecture are lazy and should be fired. They pass to the studentry a job that they should have had done before a lecture begins.
It is not uncommon for some students to have their notes transcribed using Computer Aided Transcription software, or even via CART software. This is found often for students with handicaps.
What they need to do is start making transcripts of the notes so people can actually listen in class instead of trying to jot everything down all the time.
Who knew trolls fed off the glass tit? And your vocabulary obviously hasn't suffered from all those years of Saved by the Bell and Who's the Boss.
That's hilarious. I bet you beat off to Seinfeld. Kramer/George facfic?
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
One of my professors does it... I am unsure whether or not it increases efficiency, but I can tell one thing: I see many of the students that bring laptops to class playing games on them. Someone always has freecell or solitaire up and is not paying attention to the lecture. However, I do believe that the student is paying for the education, and they should be the one to decide.
I'm not in a classroom environment so maybe I don't have the right perspective. I do however work in an office environment where everyone has a laptop. When this first started, the general consensus was that it was rude and distracting to use laptops during meetings. As the years have passed this mentality has come and gone. After all, it's just a perception that this is "rude". People now realize you can do a whole lot more with a laptop than pen and paper. After all, that is the point of technology.
So while it might be distracting for some, if everyone had a laptop, the culture of the classroom would change. It would no longer be rude or distracting and it would change everything for the better.
I know if I was in a classroom environment that required note taking I would be lost without a laptop. I seldom use handwriting, and have all but lost good technique. I can type much much faster than I can write, and with much less hand fatigue. And text you take in a classroom is searchable, cognizable, ect. Pen and paper is stuck in the exact format in which you take it down.
Some people are applauding this professor for taking her classroom back. I say she's impeding progress.
My experience is that:
1. Typing is faster - I (touch-) type much, much faster than I write, not the least because I can watch the blackboard while I'm writing.
2. I can find anything I need in instants instead of having to wade through forests of treeware
3. I can print out a nice, well-structured, revised version for off-line and archival purposes.
How many of you are in a lecture hall or class right now?
Wow. Just...wow.
Should I read anything into the fact that you've got a Republican link in your sig, and you think that controlling the actions of others for stupid reasons constitutes "free thinking?"
Should I tell my "Think outside the box" story? It seems relevant, considering it happened at a school.
This prof gives us a paper with a grid of nine dots, saying it's a puzzle. We're supposed to hit all nine dots with three lines without our pen leaving the paper.
So I draw a big S and announce that I'm done, since he didn't say the lines had to be straight. So he gives me another paper and tells me to take it seriously.
I cut the paper into three strips and tape it together so the dots are all lined up. So with one line I can hit all nine. He huffs in indignation and gives me another paper, telling me to "Do it right."
So I fold the paper up so the dots are really close together, then take out a huge magic marker and hit all nine since they're so close together. He didn't like that either.
Then I rotate the paper as I draw so that, even though my arm is drawing straight, the line is curved, and hit all of them with a spiral.
Then I try a team effort--I do three lines that cross two papers and my neighbor does the same, so all nine dots on both papers are covered without either of us having drawn more than three.
Finally, I refuse to take any further part in the exercise on principle. Eventually he shows us the solution he had been looking for--a big triangle. He then announces triumphantly that "apparently there isn't a single student in this class that can think outside the box!"
This really happened.
Anyway, the moral of this story is, most people wouldn't know free thought if it drilled their sister.
All Hail the Maggott Show
Why not just hook a mic and record the darn class, it so much easier and practical to just record it and archive, hell bring a webcam and record the video of the class too for cry out loud.
..just because you can, doens't mean you should...
I seriously ask, what's the big deal here ?!
:P
/I'm on spring break
/Quarter system, yeah !
I am currently going to a small liberal arts college right now; and after two quarters, I have not seen a student pull out a laptop in class. Granted, this is short time and I have taken all humanities and social science courses so far, but I've asked around from other kids (yes, I asked a couple upperclassmen about this awhile back) and they said it's very rare to see one in class. There's a couple people who use palm pilots for assignments and that's about it.
I guess I am missing something here since I don't attend a large state school ? Or is it just that I have not posted on slashdot in 3 months ?
If the problem is that studends are just copying whatever it is she's saying, how will switching to paper fix that? It sounds like the real problem she has is that students are merely taking down data, rather than actually thinking about what she's saying. Forcing students to switch to paper would probably just aggrevate matters.
If people are getting by the class just copying what she says, maybe the problem is as much in her lecture style as the student's notetaking technique.
Not to mention everybody just plays videogames.
There's probably someone who left me an in I could reply to, but I haven't found it yet.
This smacks of ego to me — that she's trying to sate a desire to be the center of attention WHERE'S MY SPOTLIGHT!!! and not to communicate — because unless the evaluation system is broken, grades should show who mastered the material and who didn't. If taking notes by laptop was a perceived hindrance to mastering the material, students would dump them of their own accord.
Plus, this is LAW SCHOOL... if she thinks someone isn't rapturously lost in her nuanced delivery of the part of Law Professor, she should humiliate them in front of the whole class Paper Chase or Legally Blonde style.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
I'm with you. I am so sick of all the powerpoint-mania these days. Everytime someone presents at work, they have to put up their ugly slides using the same tired stock images as everyone else. Of course, people are constantly asking me to "make some slides" on X.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
How do I know? First, my credentials: I went to Princeton, than Harvard for grad school. So I've sat through many a lecture. Then I worked as a business guy at several significant tech companies, so I have tech blood in me. And finally I taught as a professor for several years at a large university-- classes on managing technolgy, in fact. So I have some experience with teaching.
The first day, students (class size = ~40) brought laptops. "No problem," I thought. Then I discovered two things:
So I said "from this moment on, no more laptops: it's distracting, and you're not really paying attention." Everyone closed his laptop, and I never heard another complaint about it.
During my first three years of teaching, I was elected Professor of the Quarter three times and then Professor of the Year. OK, now I'm bragging, but my point is simple: sometimes technology helps, and sometimes it gets in the way. At least for the kind of class I taught-- similar to the give-and-take of a law course-- students quickly understood that it was getting in the way, and were happy to put pen back to paper.
While I didn't do a law degree, I did an I.S. degree where using a laptop or lab computer was encouraged.
That being said, in my time I've run across horses asses where you either couldn't use a computer, or were actually forbidden to take notes during lecture.
One of the cases was a high school English class. I'll never forget Brother Stephen in his gown, jumping up on top of a kids desk when the kid took a pen out and started drumming on the desk. Seems Brother Stephen was a little tightly wound. Granted, this wasn't about computers but about another method of recording notes.
The second was my first iteration of English Lit in college. The professor was a piece of work - the requirements were ridiculous, and you couldn't use a computer in the class. Needless to say I promptly dropped the class and waited until someone more reasonable was teaching it.
But those are the only two examples I can think of. Otherwise technology wormed its way in everywhere.
I've seen many Asian students benefit enormously from tablet PC's. Languages that are heavy on calligraphy seem to benefit greatly from the tablet model.
Personally, I don't like people typing while someone is talking. To get better notes, I've preferred the discreet minidisc recorder...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Great discussion... great points...
But what kind of fucked up HDD does that laptop have?!??
I mainly agree with the parent, but I would like to point out that law schools really encourage laptops now. I would say in my classes the laptop usage rate is probably upwards of 95%. The students use laptops for their other classes so for organization purposes it is better to use laptops for all classes.
I think that law school lends itself to typing notes. There is a huge amount of information coming at you. Most professors encourage reading the cases before class and briefing them. With types briefs you can modify the conclusions you made the night before. Handwriters have a much harder time with this.
If the interest is in improving focus, and typing notes is distracting then so is handwriting.
-It writes, rates, creates, even telecommunicates. Costs less, does more the Commodore 64. Compute's Gazette
Nicely: "Can i record this lecture with my mp3-player so i can participate better, and ask occasional questions without having to scribble?" Very few that doesn't accept it..just ask respectfully. But thats sweden on the other hand.
A slate style tablet with OneNote can do all these things, and is frankly what every student should be using in college anyway. However, since they don't run FPS games all that well and have smaller screens most people overlook how useful they are.
Taking good notes isn't something that's just good
for school. It's a skill you will likely need in
the work world.
I live and die by four or five small spiral bound
notebooks that are about as thick as a paperback
book.
I take notes at meetings, when doing projects,
among other things.
I can take fast legible notes so there's no
misunderstandings and I can refer to things if
I need to. These have come in handy again and
again. I just make sure I date everything so
I know when I wrote something.
At many of my meetings at work people will
have laptops out and one particular manager
will ask for the employees to close their
laptop because it's a little too easy to
space out into your own cyber-world.
Makes sense.
So I don't blame the Prof. in this at all,
her class, she makes the rules. Take some
notes and type them all up legibly later.
Or bring a cassette tape recorder and record
it or iPod with recording attachment if your
notes look like scratchy scrawls.
I totally agree with you Gallowglass. A lot of universities today have classes with 300+ students. A professor can't be expected to tailor their course to the individual needs of every single student in the class when there are this many students. Hiring a tutor, taking advantage of free tutoring services provided by dorms and honor societies, or even forming a study group with other students in the class is much more helpful than whining that the prof doesn't accommodate all learning styles.
I don't know if you're being serious or not here. Good CS and engineering classes don't work like that. The ones that did I skipped and read the book.
-Dave
Some students are just whiners. If a professor has a policy that they don't like or says something bad about their favorite elected official then they'll make a big stink and try to get their way. These students are probably just riding the wave of anti-intellectualism that's sweeping this country. Hopefully it'll go away so professors can get back to actually teaching the students and not defending themselves against frivolous complaints.
I've had only a single class where powerpoint slides were used effectively. My teacher put up the slide, THEN repeated all the work that was on the slide on the blackboard.
Personally, when learning engineering stuff at least, I absolutely need to see the derivations be made real-time and not just presented on a slide. A bunch of slides with a bunch of math is incredibly incredibly boring. There's something about watching concepts get worked out on the blackboard that just clicks with my brain. If there's any teachers who teach math or engineering THROW AWAY THE POWERPOINT!
For me personally, not being able to takes notes would be a serious problem. As I take notes it forces me to concentrate on the topic and internalize the concepts. Throughout college, I gained far more from the note taking PROCESS than from the usage of the notes themselves.
I was generalizing. There are some classes that have a nice friendly give and take with the professor. But large lecture classes just require that you sit back and listen. I was trying to illustrate that law professors try to make you cry.
I type 100+wpm, and have been typing since I was eleven years old. I can type without looking, and without thinking about it.
My handwriting is atrocious; illegible or fast, pick one. Also, my hand craps easily from holding a pencil or pen.
From this you can gather that I'd rather take notes on a computer than on paper, and you'd be correct, in most cases. Specifically, if I'm going to take effective, useful notes that I can refer to later, a laptop is mandatory for me. On the other hand, if I don't plan to KEEP the notes -- that is, if I'm using notes merely as a mechanism to help me remember what I've just heard -- I take a notepad.
So for me to have the option is what's best for me. If I entered a classroom that banned paper and pencil, and required laptops for note-taking, I'd be just as annoyed as this makes me.
"In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail?"
She DOES, it is called a syllabus. What she adds in the lectures is what needs to be absorbed to pass
the class. Having a bunck of two fingered typists clattering away, attempting to take notes on laptops
is retarded.
Professors set the class rules, NOT the students. Students or someone supporting the students pay for the
class attendance.
Frankly, any aid other a pencil and paper in the class is just a toy. Been there and done that.
They do not call it Tiger High for nothing. Graduates of that institution seldom find meaningful employment outside the insular world of Memphis.
The profession in question is most likely completely uninteresting, and teaching a boring subject in a boring way. This tends to prompt students to do other stuff. What her decision would force me to do is become an absentee student from her class. I'm paying the college for my education. I go to lecture for clarification of the parts of the subject material I don't understand. During the rest (~80%) of the time, I make myself available for my employees to ask me questions, read on subject material that isn't assigned in class and is interesting to me, or monitor websites that I'm responsible for (case-in-point: school elections for Student Government runs through my software).
The teacher has no right to ban me from an activity that isn't distracting to other students. When they start paying me to come to their school, I'll follow their rules. Until then, I'll bring all the cell phones, laptops, newspapers, journals, and PDAs I want to class.
This would bother me. I type over 90 wpm, but my handwriting is completely illegible to myself and anyone else. Since I am post-postgraduate degree, going back to 3rd grade penmanship is not an option.
/TPS report/ etc straight from my notes.
I am far more efficient at taking notes in Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ and capture what I need. Freemind allows me to organize while typing without having to format a document, so it allows me to ponder the concepts as well, rather than just acting as a stenographer in a notetaking situation. I work in the medical field, so understanding deep and detailed concepts presented at meetings and lectures is a daily occurance to me.
In client meetings and pro-ed lectures, I type my notes, then am able to go back and hyperlink relevant reseach, answers to questions, weblinks, etc. I can then output to an outline format, and start producing my status updates/ actions list/ proposal/ content paper
I would like this professor to provide evidence that passive listening beats out active learning in the classroom. As far as students web browsing and IMing instead of paying attention in class... well, a) shut down the wireless b) engage students suspected of not paying attention or c) let them fail exams or the class outright.
Oh... Mr. "Free Thinker"... why don't you follow the link in my SIG and we'll see who "thinks outside the box".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The problem with trying to get students to think about things and analyse the content of the class is that often the exams are "easy to grade" aka "route memorization."
Problem is, if you do that then you get students who haven't ever had to use their brain complaining that your class is "too hard." Because you didn't ask route memorization problems and asked them to think. Most US schools (grade, jr, high) don't encourage thinking. They encourage memorization.
What date(s) did Rome get sacked? What is the name for C6H3O7? (made up the molecule on the fly, I have no idea what it is offhand) What is the scientific name for the domestic cat (far too common an animal for that question, but...)?
Memorization is easy for a computer to grade, so I can't entierly blame the schools.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I understand your professor's point, and I think it has a lot of validity.
I had a physics professor, I think it was in a lab class, who used to tell a story about Feynman -- which I can't find any reference to online, so it may be apocryphal, but it made a good story -- that he tought a very small advanced E&M class once, and on the first day of class, when the students were all sitting there, with their notebooks and pencils ready, he walked in and told them to put everything away. No notes, no calculators. The theory being that most of the time when you're struggling to copy down an equation or a diagram off of the board, you're not listening to the lecture, or really thinking about the concepts that are being presented. Given that you're not really going to memorize most of the equations -- they're not really the "take home" knowledge that you retain at the end of the semester, but the concepts are, it's better to pay attention to those. You also end up better prepared for a no-notes test that way. (Although you can argue about the validity of closed-book tests as actual simulators of real-world knowledge.)
My professor (the one who was relating the story) didn't go quite this far, but took a good compromise; he put all his notes and diagrams up on the board before the beginning of class, and gave everyone ten minutes to copy them down before class began. You weren't prohibited from taking notes during the lecture, but it wasn't recommended.
Although I don't want to give that particular aspect of his style all the credit (the guy was also an excellect lecturer as well as being an all-around brilliant physicist), I remember more of the material from that class than I do from anything else I've taken at that level.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So the proper contrast is big lectures versus small ones.
-Dave
That's what I call news!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I have a small Olympus voice recorder that I used to use during my last year or so in school; it's a lot less work than lugging around a laptop and a hell of a lot more subtle. (There was a certain stigma associated with people who brought laptops to class that I didn't want to partake in.) It worked pretty well, connected to my computer over USB to download the data.
The only problem is that it's very proprietary; I don't know why Olympus insists on doing this, but it uses both a proprietary audio codec (DSS, for Digital Speech "Standard," IIRC), and a proprietary control interface to download -- it's not a Mass Storage device. So it's a no-go on Linux, but they do have a Mac version that's passable. And to their credit, the software will convert the files out to AIFF (and any other format you want from there) so it's not terrible for archiving and sharing.
The only thing it doesn't do, rather obviously, is link itself to your typed notes in the way that an audio recording made with MS Word's "Notebook" feature does. (I'm not sure if this is a Mac-only feature or what, but it's fairly neat, for a proprietary MS thing.) I've only ever used that capability once, but it's cool to be able to jump around in your notes and automatically go to the point in the audio recording when you typed that line. (Attn: OpenOffice programmers....)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've tried teaching college courses where I made material available to the students ahead of class on a web site. When you do this, there is no incentive for the students to come to class. They think they will do just fine if they download the notes. The exact same thing happens if I post the notes online after the lecture. The problem is, students who skip lectures and just use the online notes miss out on the discussion in class. I've found that the people who rely on the online notes and skip class do worse in a course than the people who make the effort to come to class and pay attention. The people who actually come to lectures are always the ones who do the best in a course. I don't know if having the online notes really helps the best students retain the material or not - the main thing is that these students actually want to learn, and make an effort to do so.
I could provide handouts in class, but if you have a very large class, you often do not have a large enough photocopying budget to hand out copies of each day's lesson. I did try this once for a complicated homework project. I passed out the assignment and then went over a very detailed step-by-step example of how to complete the assignment. Only about half the class sat through the whole thing. Some people left immediately after getting the handouts or about 15 minutes into class. The people who skipped class habitually and just downloaded the notes didn't even bother to come, even though I had posted a notice on the website saying I would go over the project in class. Of course, only the people who listened to the entire lecture actually completed the assignment correctly.
They also thought it was a really cool assignment. The people who didn't listen to the entire example in lecture struggled through it, and complained the homework was too hard when it was due. The only people who actually asked me for help with the assignment outside of class were also people who had been in class when I did the example and were doing just fine - not the people who really needed help.
The really sad thing is, the assignment I gave my college students was originally designed as an exercise for K-12 students. I figured that college students would be able to do it without much trouble, since they should have a stronger math background. I know of people who have done this exact same exercise with talented middle school/high school students. The younger students usually do it correctly, and with less complaining, even though they may ask for a lot of coaching along the way. For some reason, there is a big change in the attitudes of a lot of students towards school and learning over the summer between high school graduation and their first semester of college.
THIS IS A BLOODY OUTRAGE!!!!! HOW DARE SHE?!!?!? How will the students access AIM and facebook during lecture without laptops? Laptops are a VITAL component of the college classroom experience. Good job, professor. Typing makes too much noise anyway
Heh. For years now, I've been saying that more professors (and teachers in general) should practice this method of teaching, but mostly because I fall asleep in any kind of lecture situation. My problem is, I need to be intellectually engaged, or otherwise titillated to stay awake. Lectures with no Q&A just don't do that for me, and most times I end up either taking copious notes (pen & paper, or typed if possible) just to stay awake and help retain some of the information. Yes, I've taken notes with a laptop, in a math intensive course (graduate level encryption), and having the laptop *does* help me comprehend more and stay awake. Granted, the professor was very laid back and didn't rush anything, but I still think that people who are complaining about laptops not being suitable for note taking are either a) jealous, b) *way* oversensitive (you do realize that pen/pencil on paper makes noise too, don't you?) or c) realize that the emphasis in this article isn't on banning a particular technology, but is trying to get the students more engaged in the subject matter. Me, I'll go with the latter, and if the prof could keep me awake and allowed tape or video recordings of the lectures, I'd be willing to close the laptop for that class.
Bring back the Socratic method! Hold students and teachers more accountable to the subject matter!
Nathan's blog
I wish I had a laptop when I was in college.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
What bothers me about this is that the professor presumes to believe that they have the answer that is best for everyone in their class. She believes that laptops are bad for focusing. They probably are for her. For a number of the students in the class, probably the opposite. For example, when I was in school I would never go to class. I have a tough time learning orally. I found that I did far better by simply reading the material and doing the assignments. Would I argue that we should get rid of lecturers and simply hand out written material? No. Just because this is the best way for me to learn does not mean that everyone should do things this way. I think that one of the most important things I learned in college was how I personally learn best. It is what has aided me the most in my life since.
I taught at a local college as an adjunct prof from 1984-2001 before state budget cutbacks terminated all of the adjunct faculty. I taught in a "computer lab" environment; everyone sat in front of their own computer.
During the 1980's and early 1990's, very few students tried to use their computers for note-taking (on floppy disk). After the advent of the Internet, I noticed more and more computer use; once instant messaging gained a foothold, I noticed a lot more. I finally requested that all computers be turned off during the lecture/class discussion portion of class.
Try it sometime; it is very difficult to teach/talk with/discuss with a group of people who are doing something else. Some part is psychological; not being able to make eye contact with most of your "listeners" is not conducive to good teaching. When fifty people are typing, it's noisy, too.
I also noted that students who were on their computers become disinhibited from the standpoint of no longer being polite or participative listeners. Some students even tried "quietly" printing out their notes in the last ten minutes of class! Or laughing or talking to themselves as they answered an instant message.
As a teacher, I always got high marks from my students when it came time for them to evaluate my performance. I never heard a complaint about being asked to keep computers off.
Worried that people on laptops will just transcribe everything and not take anything in, gee wiz, when I was at university (not so long ago), it was the people with pens and paper who were transcribing absolutely everything, sometimes word for word and everything that is drawn on a whiteboard or put on a overhead projector.
Those with laptops, well they sat at the back doing there C++ coursework, or watching movies...
Personally I kept few notes in lectures, prefering to just sit there, and think about what's being said, there's books'n'stuff for the detail later.
Using a camera especially one attached to a notebook is my prefered way to take notes and has the following advantages
1) Reselling the notes is easy and very cost effective and will provide income for years, regardless of how well you did in college.
2) Neither you nor your fellow students actually have to attend, just your laptop.
>the crossword was all that kept me from sleeping if I had a laptop back then I would have used it for solitaire.
:D
Crossword puzzles make you smart! Solitaire turns your brain off. You should thank your lucky stars you didn't have a laptop then. You are smart now.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
If the only thing I had at the end of a 50-minute class was a memory of what was said, I am certain that I --personally -- will remember less than if I had the opportunity to write notes during the class.
Specifically, writing what I think is important helps me remember the key points visually, plus I believe there is a benefit in the note-taking itself -- a kinetic engagement of the new material, if you will -- especially if it's not strictly words but includes a few diagrams/pictures.
The book Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer (links to Amazon.com) includes scientific evidence proving that most people learning more if they engage multiple senses (e.g. hearing and sight) while learning. (Interestingly, he also shows that we tend to learn less if the visual part of the learning is simply to read word-for-word what the lecturer is saying. E.g. any speaker who reads his PowerPoint slides to you word for word is actually diminishing what you might have gained from the presentation.)
You may like extra insight, as I happened to call this nice lady.
/. comments to her as part of a fake interview) that laptops are not only a distraction, but they cause people to not think critically, nor do laptops help people learn how to condense information on the fly, since they do indeed try to type every damned word. As an estimate we both agreed upon, roughly three out of every eight words need to be noted in her class in order to have a rudimentary understanding of the subject which can be easily refined many orders over with two or three simple questions. Her POV is that these laptops are robbing her students of the ability to think for themselves, which, in essence, is the main idea behind college - from K-12 you're just taught the basics, then with college, you learn not only a useful trade, but also how to think for yourself and filter out useless information at a whim, and improve your life.
As of now, she currently thinks (due to me relaying
And though I disagree with laptops being a distraction in the class (as long as sounds are turned off and students aren't having to deal with system crashes) I have to agree with her standpoint. How about the rest of you stop calling her a luddite or anti-luddite and USE YOUR RATIONAL MIND instead of this huge knee-jerk reaction I see happening here? After all, I'm only a high-school dropout, and I've gotten a FAR better perspective on this than the rest of you have. You're just sitting around discussing probabilities and what-ifs when you could just as easily find the source AND ASK HER FOR YOURSELF! She's not being bothered by the media, infact, she's surprised USA picked up on it. This hasn't even hit OUR (Memphis) local news.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You are a faggot
For beginners, I attended law school, graduated 2001. Laptop use was about 30%, more as time went on and laptops became more powerful.
This professor is TOTALLY within her rights. This is law school. She gets to teach however she wants. Don't like it ? Too bad. It's her class and she gets to create whatever atmosphere she thinks is best.
This is a law school issue much more than a slashdot issue. If you haven't been to law school, your response is possibly interesting, but you cannot really understand. If somebody wants to quit law achool over this, they really are whiny asses and shouldn't be thinking about being a lawyer.
I bring a laptop to class to give me something to do. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with mandatory attendance to classes that I don't need to be in the lecture for. I can read the suggested chapters from the textbook and ace the exam.
Don't whine about how I'm missing my education, etc - I'm just here for a piece of paper that says 'Master of Science' on it.
One thing from reading peoples posts, professors are not "teachers" and graduate level education is not spoon feeding information to students and patting them on the heads when they regurgatate it (well not here in the UK, no experience of the graduate education systems of other countries).
Speaking from UK experience in science, lecture notes are not complete notes, they are more like an annotated syllabus, commenting on the major areas of the topic in question. Lectures are not intended to 'teach' you it, they are to help you understand it to a certain level, so after the lecture you can go to a detailed book / reference material and research it yourself in a greater depth, and then you can write comprehensive notes or whatever you want do (IMO comprehesive notes are bad, best to write more 'digested' notes, i.e. do the major thinking now + not during exam revision). In a descent university regurgatating lecture notes in an exams while demonstrating understanding will not get you far, a middish 2-1 at best.
Is that it can be hard in general to keep up with note-taking and listening. You'll be wasting an equal amount of time in paper, plus possibly missing stuff because it's taking you longer to record.
I had a tiny little 8" screen notebook-PC which was great for tapping away notes, and I managed to get my thoughts and the teachers thoughts into notes, without losing track of class.
Using paper, I'd often miss some things because my pencil was too busy catching up to my brain on the prior topic, somewhat of a buffer overflow/underflow issue, eh?
The eye contact issue is actually important. Eye contract comes with a whole bunch of other communication channels (all composing the face), and this is one way we can get feedback about what is going on across the class (who is with us, who isn't, who is sleeping, who is texting on their phone...). (I am a Communication prof, and I've had to teach nonverbal.) Are they IMing? Email? You don't know, and if the computer helps them not pay attention and hurts their ability to learn, it's out. Yes every student is different, but you can't do case by case.
Also, the article is about LAW SCHOOL, which is NOT COLLEGE and very, very different even from most PhD classes. They really need to learn to analyze and think, not just repeat. Law classes are not democracies either.
For me this relates to powerpoint. I use it in 101, but not my upper level classes. With powerpoint you're somewhat stuck with the slides you have and the order they're in. If you have a good room you have some chalkboard not covered by the screen. Students have this odd habit of writing down everything word for word from powerpoint as if it is gospel. Creeps me out. But in the upper level classes the discussions are more free-wheeling, so I use the chalkboard and don't want to constrain my students with a fixed, linear, powerpoint presentation. Yes, you can jump around in powerpoint, but that really hurts the class if it goes badly.
My point wasn't that I thought you were republican (it was quite clear you weren't). My point was that they--along with their brother democrats and anyone else who defines things by "party"--don't understand what free thought really is. Both of them think they're the free thinkers and that the other side is mindless drones. The truth is, both of them are composed of free thinkers AND mindless drones, and the free thinkers are the ones who realize that political parties are elaborate fictions. You could almost call them a religion of sorts.
All Hail the Maggott Show
Last I checked, Universities were a place that offered education in exchange for M-O-N-E-Y. Adjusting to Johnny and Suzy's learning style is called customer service. Johnny and Suzy pay that money because the university and every teacher since first grade has sold them on the idea that that little piece of paper will get them a good job, or the lack of one will prevent them from being successful. Since we all know that's bullshit, the least the university could do is make sure they own up to the original agreement: Education for money. Johnny and Suzy should be able to learn the material if they really want to do so. I'm not talking about handing out 4.0's to everyone. I'm talking about bending over backwards to accommodate them after hours if necessary. You sound like a professor with a sense of entitlement.
I am in a humanities education course where most of my courses are things like education, history, government and english. They are all text with little in the way of diagrams and they are all things that can be very nicely outlined for the most part. I digest things in the lecture and group and catagorize main points into nice outlines that are easy to follow later. I love the easy ability to write up an outline in such a way with Mac Office's Notebook view and to be able to go back and add to a topic a few minutes if a lecturer returns to it or even a few days later if the light goes off to clarify it. I love being able to keep all of my assignments listed as Tasks on the Entourge calendar. It lets me keep everything organized in that way. I can type 75 words per minute so it gives me more time to listen and less time is needed to type/write the relevant details. It is electronic so that it is easily readable and can be easily searched, easily backed up, easily printed, etc. I only bring one thing, a 12" PowerBook, to most lectures so I have a nice light backback that I know I always have everything with me with. I back everything up every few days to a USB thumb drive and at the end of semester to a CD.
I find it better in almost every way - and these notes I stand a much better chance of still having and being able to find something in 10 months or 10 years time if I want to see it again.
It might not work for everybody or every situation but I would be very upset if one of my professors made me change from a system that works great for me because of their preconceptions of how I am using it or not learning properly. It is their lecture but it is my education and notes - and at the University level it is my perogative how I go about that...
I have often not been prepared for a lecture since I always took more lectures than one was supposed to and worked on different projects during the semester.
/., but then I waste even more time here ...
So during some lectures I didn't understand a word. But I took good notes and thus was able to study the material afterwards at home.
For about a year now I've been taking my notes with latex on my notebook. What has not been mentioned here is the biggest advantage in my eyes:
Being able to transport your notes/knowledge everywhere! I am studying at a different university right now (One year Erasmus Program in the European Union) and everything I have in my notebook I can use, whereas I was not able to carry arround all my handwritten notes to a different country.
Also I might distract others (though I doubt it), but most of the time I help others with my notes who weren't able (or willing) to come to a lecture.
I should get an account on
Richard
Most high schools don't allow the students to use laptop computers during class, even though students need to learn how to control themselves around the technology. If high schools were to allow laptop use, then students would not pay attention early in their education, fail high school classes, and know not to do so in college. Thus, the distraction factor,though not completely gone, would go down some for the students in college, which is much more important than high school.
One of the best teachers I ever had (back in 1990) banned note taking entirely for his Trigonometry and Calculus classes.
Quite interesting--though I do remember that I gave up trying to transcribe what was written on the board to my notes anyways and just jotted select concepts and formulae in my math-heavy classes anyways so I think he had a point.
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
Woah...wait a minute...pencil and paper is LESS efficient than using a computer....in MATH? I'd sure like to have YOUR laptop man...it must have quite a decent digital cam on mounted on the outside of the lid to capture all those graphs, diagrams and math formulae--or maybe a good touchscreen to doodle them right into your document, cuz I'd NEVER be able to take decent math notes on a computer and keep up with the lecture.
In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail?
Because then she'd be talking to a mostly empty classroom, and the people that did bother to attend would be zoned out (we have the notes...why bother coming to a lecture?)...not to say that there is no merit in the prof preparing the notes in advance--it's just that they shouldn't be distrubuted in advance. A good way that some profs do it is they do the lecture and essentially take notes from the class, annotating the prepared lecture notes with questions/comments/additional discussion points that came up during the lecture (flipping things around--funky when you think about it). The annotated lecture notes would then be available online a day or two later.
This is a hard issue to take sides on, as there is equally valid arguments for both.
...and when the camera pans around to the front of the hall we discover that the professor isn't there either! He's left a tape player to deliver his lecture!
One of my first professors in college (teaching an introductory course to software engineering) talked about how people get carried away with technology until it goes too far. He illustrated this point by describing from memory a movie about college life (he couldn't remember the title) which showed a lecture hall full of students. One of the students, however, was absent -- in his/her place was a running tape recorder. The professor teaching the course keeps glancing at the tape recorder, somewhat distracted, as he gives the lecture.
As the movie progresses, we keep coming back to the same lecture course, only each time there are more and more absent students -- each leaving a tape machine to record the lectures. It's like a mundane version of "Invasion of The Body Snatchers."
Finally, in the closing scene, we return to the lecture hall for the last day of the course. We are treated to the ludicrous sight of tape recorders replacing *all* the students in the course! Meanwhile, the professor's voice delivers the final lecture, seemingly unfazed by the fact that there is no one in the hall to listen to him
Just thought I'd throw that in, for what it's worth. (And, no -- I don't know which movie it is).
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
They were typing so fast trying to transcribe everything. As a side note, I never even realized how many words I used that had the letters W,A,S,D in them.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
In an episode of "My name is Earl", he goes to give a talk at a class, and everyone types EVERY WORD he speaks, even when he asks "Are they gonna type everything I say?" the class types it... Finally he convinces them to put the laptops down and listen.
Another example of reality mimicing TV (fiction)
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I believe it should be "If he knew what he were doing" rather than "If he knew what he was doing". Unless, of course, you are referring to an actual student who was in your class (past tense). But I don't think you were.
Now, about that low salary, are you bragging or complaining?
is in your not so humble opinion. I have a correlation of my own I'd like to present. First, I am a successful student. By that I mean I was/am in the top 5% of every single one of my classes and in the top 2% of my major classes.
Here is the observation:
Mediocre profs make rules, good profs do not.
By good, I don't mean easy. Good profs are firm, fair, have a great work ethic, live up to their own standards, know their material, and present it well. They walk into the classroom start lecturing and leave when it's done. They aren't easily distracted or ruffled because a student asks a tough question or puts them on the spot. They don't care if people are paying attention or not, they teach to those who are and respect that those who are not have a good reason for doing so. Good reason is defined by the student.
The sooner students learn this the better. Just drop the power freaks and take someone who doesn't need to compensate for his/her inadequacies.
That is all.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
...I remember desparately writing down everything the lecturer said. It was so much easier to concentrate on what was being said back then. Oh wait, hang on, it wasn't - same problem, different technology.
Besides... if you haven't actually done any of the required reading before the lecture, you'll find some way to avoid eye contact no matter what - I speak from experience here.
Everyone learns in there own way. She should stick to presenting the information and let the students figure out the best way to absorb that info. She shouldn't be telling anyone the "best" way to learn as it varies from student to student.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
The point is that she does not want to them to try to copy all of her words (which requires a fast recording device like a keyboard). Rather she wants them to summarize what she was saying, which requires analysis instead of mechanical transcription.
I work at a vocational post-secondary educational institute for aspiring chefs. Students constantly tell me "we pay your salary, you work for us." Especially if they've: been caught dealing drugs, been caught drunk on the cooking sherry, been caught stealing knife-cases.
Upper management seems to agree with them. In all the above cases they will get a talking to and then sent back to class. Only the most hopeless psychopaths will not graduate.
You cannot fake having the ability to cook. You can fake knowledge of Kierkegaard or post-modernism or deconstruction or any of the many facets of a liberal-arts education. (In fact faking, or bullshitting, might be considered supreme mastery of the above subjects.) But you can't fake cooking a steak medium, or trussing and stuffing a game bird. I have eaten chicken still pink on the inside made by graduates.
I was going to make a point but I will let you make your own. Please don't tell them I said this.
Bullshit.
You teach because you get tenure.
You have a well paying job in a system that prevents you from being fired.
You get to divorce yourself from reality, sit in a Ivory tower, and work 10-20 hours a week.
The Real World would eat you up and spit you out.
I wasn't aware there was supposed to be a "leader" in every classroom, at least outside of elementary school.
Cute. Not too bright, though.
Half my class was busy playing online games or IM each other or other friends.
It proved too distracting to us who wanted to actually learn something.
Lapotops are useless in linguistics because it's a thinking class.
My professor sent us all an email and verbally told us:
Pen & paper and a brain are required for class. Leave the laptop at home please.
After a month, I'd say it was a big change. More class input and greater involvement in the lectures and seminars. By the end no one cared about laptops.
I found the noise fromt he keyboards really annoying so I welcomed this move.
Why is this news? I've had many profs in university who said the same thing in its time. This isn't uncommon.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
My Contracts professor banned laptops. Not because he had anything against them per se, but because he had asked students what they preferred. One year, apparently, he let the class use laptops for half the semester, then banned laptops for the other half. At the end, he asked the class to vote on whether he should allow laptops. The result: an overwhelming majority thought class was better without laptops, as it was much easier to have discussion without them. Among my section, everyone invariably says that Contracts was a great class for that reason--discussion--and even though we grumbled at first about the lack of laptops, we were thankful for it in the end. I even gave up my laptop next semester.
If you had a straight lecture class, then I could see how laptops might be beneficial. But I think that class format is inefficient, anyways, as it doesn't promote active learning. Law school avoids lectures in favor of active learning via the socratic method, mock oral arguments, writing excercises, and class discussion. Having taken undergraduate (and some graduate) classes of the liberal arts and technical varieties, I think law classes are hands down better taught, and it's largely related to how they're taught.
Unless the actuall eyeball is missing, she can still reach out and touch it.
emt 377 emt 4
seems they have already gotten their first lesson, they are petitioning to reverse the ban. my feeling is, you are in college. if you want to waste your time and college tuition reading /. in class, that's up to you. if you want to use the laptop as a tool to help you learn better, up to you also. if you don't want to use one at all, same. i understand faculty egos need constant massaging and they hate it when all eyes aren't on them. most college kids are old enough to go die in a war, let them use a friggin laptop.
That's a totally valid point/question. I used to use a cassette recorder, pre-Olympus, and in fact I still own several of them, ranging from a very nice Dictaphone (uses full size cassettes, all metal construction, probably cost a fortune when it was new -- glad I bought it used) to some cheapie RadioShack micros. I actually have a thing for analog recorders and electronics, particularly analog tape, so it would satisfy a certain part of me to use one. (Actually I'd love to bring my Sony 1/4" open-reel deck in with some Quantegy 456...)
I have a few reasons for preferring the Olympus: first is storage and archiving. It's a lot easier for me to have everything stored inside my computer than in shoe-boxes of loose cassettes. It only takes one move -- and I seem to be making those about once every 18 months -- to lose or misplace a tape, and it's gone forever. I'm pretty unlikely to misplace my computer, and I'm reasonably careful about backing up the data that's on it (it's mirrored to a remote machine). My father laments the fact that he had recordings of Carl Sagan lectures that got lost somewhere along his way; I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to anything of mine.
The second is physical robustness. I can beat the living bejesus out of the Olympus because it doesn't have any moving parts. No little tape doors to break off, and I don't have to worry about getting it full of dirt and crud if I leave it in the bottom of my backpack, briefcase, or laptop bag for a while. It's also tiny, not too much bigger in terms of volume than one of those big (15 stick?) packs of gum, although it's longer and skinnier. I can put it in my front shirt pocket without noticing it, most of the time. (Mine is an Olympus DS-330 -- no longer in production, and it seems as though prices on used ones have spiked a bit.)
The major reasons why I like it, though, are because I can listen to the recordings on my iPod and through my big stereo on demand. I could do that with an analog recorder, I suppose, but it would require an extra set of patch cables, and digging out and connecting up the recorder when I want to listen. Not to mention queuing up the tape; with a digital recording it's easy to just open it up, jump 5 minutes in, listen for a while, move 20 minutes more, etc.
So the inconvenience of having to use the Olympus program to download and convert the recorded files to AIFF, and then drag them onto iTunes to make them into MP3s, is worthwhile, IMO. I have a balance between archival storage (assuming I maintain good integrity of my data going forwards) and accessibility that I'm not sure I'd be able to replicate with tape. (I suppose really the most obsessive thing to do would be to record on tape, then digitize the tapes and also storing the originals, as I do with videos...but that might be more effort than I'm looking to put into the project, given the volume of recordings I've made at times.)
For someone in a different situation, or with different requirements, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend tapes. (Particularly a standard cassette recorder, if you can manage it, since I think they'll be easier to find in 10 years than the micros will.) The Olympus has a lot of shortcomings, but for my purposes I think it works out better than tape would. Would I be happier if the Olympus recorded to MP3 and used SD cards and appeared to be a Mass Storage Class device, while still being the size of a pack of gum? Definitely; but it still does the trick even with its obnoxious shortcomings.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No problem in my school. I guess they want everyone to have a laptop since every classroom has wireless intenet.
Fuckit. In the good old days, all you needed was a textbook, and some decent notes the prof would hand out before or after the class. The notes would augment material not covered in the textbook, tell you what the assignments were, and where the exams where held.
And scientific calculators were not allowed in the final exams.
Disclaimer: This is a rant from a mid-70s EngPhys graduate, and has no bearing on the current subject.
I personally can type as fast as someone can talk. Telling me I have to write what you say will distract me more. I would be writing trying to catch up to the teacher. By the time I was done I couldnt even read my own handwriting.
Simply put, you get less detail onto paper and on top of that if you type you can get done faster to view what is on the board. It does not help students at all focus as to what the teacher is saying. Insted your busy trying to play catchup.
Not having the attention span required for such a task is classified as a mental illness (ADD, ADHD, or some variation thereof.) I don't think it's an educator's responsibility to cater to the handicaps of the mentally ill.
And the only guy left taking notes at the end was the young prodigy kid.
MP3 recorder, decent mikes, copy for all - if agreed by everyone. No sound, no interruption, perfect recall. Maybe illegal, though, but that's IMHO a better technical solution if you can get to pick up the whole class in a decent way (that always strikes me as the problem - you can filter people in a conversation as it happens, it's hard to impossible from a recording).
Insert
Okay, a related topic. Many of you guys here would have a similar experience - people who bring their laptops to meetings, even customer meetings and tap-tap away on those while presentations that take place. More prevalent in the US than anywhere else, but there are always a few cases in every meeting I attend. These are typically technical presentations (design reviews, test result reviews, etc.) Some people take notes, but many simply use it to check email. Yeah, I know, it is corporate email and no doubt very important - still bugs me no end. I personally never take laptops to meetings; rather I jot things down in a notebook.
Sorry to say, but that is profound bullshit up in the parent comment. You claim that maybe one person will use a laptop to distract people and thus it is OK to ban laptops? I claim that maybe one person will use a pen to poke someone in the eye and make them go blind, and thus we need to ban pens. Infact, some students even use furniture and logs to hurt other people. Let's ban furniture in classrooms now. See the trend? The slope is slippery, and once you start weilding your power to ban stuff, where is it going to end? I do see your point in that laptops aren't the universal solution for everyone, but if you claim that no-laptops is a good solution for "everyone" (i.e. a classroom filled with a diverse bunch of students), then I call bullshit.
I am too lame to make a
In order to learn, you need to study. The way it works is by crunghing the info you got.
If you listen, you are crunching info at level "0". If you take notes, you are crunching at level "1". If you read the notes and write down an abstract/schema you are crunching at level "2". Trying to memorize the highlights, your level is "3". Math/phisics and other subjects as well, require further level "4" which is practice (problem solving, etc...)
So.. If you record the classes and you don't take notes and you just listen the lessons again, you are staying at the first, "0", level of study. Of course from that point you could follow the route with higher possibilities of success, but people tend to record the classes to avoid the stressful "1"-"4" steps, and that is why they miserably fail.
When I went to university, laptops were in their extreme infancy (monochrome, 2MB RAM, and so on), and extremely expensive, so the clickety-clack of laptops didn't exist in lectures.
I had one classical mechanics lecturer who would derive everything from first principles on the board (that's a BLACK board, not one of those new-fangled white things), with no notes, from memory. However, he carefully followed the structure of the text-book in terms of presentation order. This was brilliant. There was no need to take notes, because it was always in the book if you forgot.
What made it even better, was that he would do 5 black-board long deriviations, and often make mistakes. Then he'd look at the final result, and wonder aloud where he went wrong. The man seemed to have no inner monologue; he always said everything that he was thinking. He'd work backwards, and students would suggest potential spots where he'd made mistakes.
I barely needed to study for this subject, because I understood everything as it was presented. However, if you weren't suited to classical mechanics (or horrendously complicated applied calculus, as it's otherwise known), you'd probably be in deep trouble, as you'd only have the text-book to help. Them's the breaks with maths and physics, methinks.
Oh yes, that's right. I forgot the subject at hand - I blame beer. Laptops may be a little bit distracting, but students and lecturers should just get used to it. Those outside of academia have. I work on complicated engineering systems, and guess what! I'm surrounded by lots of cubicles, full of people clickety-clacking all day. All forms of engineering in the current day occur cubicle-land. Most engineers get used to incessant clickety-clacking in their day-jobs. Maybe the students and lecturers can learn to deal with it too.
I agree, taking notes does boost learning and although you could type notes into the text-editor, pen(s and pencils) are far less constraining and faster "input and storage devices", they free the mind from "using the software" (they free your hands and mind follows), give you opportunity of instantenious (as fast as your thoughts fly) switching between fonts and alphabets, size, bolding, underlining, writing in cursive, inserting special characters and icons, adding pictures (drawings) without waiting for drawing program to open... and everything is saved instanteniously! Computers may someday (and should, as soon as possible, wink, wink!) enable us with same options as paper does. But that time has not come yet.
The lecturer is the qualified teacher in this scenario and possible wants to teach in an environment that's best for the class. So what?
IMHO any calls of "luddite" are me-me-me-BS. "I want to go to a good University... but when I get there I'm paying for it and want to do it on my terms! What do the academics know?" Not every problem (lecture notes) needs an IT solution (a laptop).
This might be slightly rantish but I've heard fellow pupils (from an early age to graduate) ask what the date is (one of my secondary/highschool teachers always addressed this with asking "What was the date yesterday?" and when, correctly, answered, "So that makes today?"). If you want a decent education at some point you'll have to accept you'll probably need to actually think a little.
Yes, you're paying for the education but this doesn't mean you have absolute consumer rights and get to call every single shot. If you're an undergraduate then some element of you're education will, at least tangentially, be a preparation for the world at large and a working environment you'll enter into. It migth be a shock but the world doesn't owe you anything and you won't have everything on your own terms. Get over it. For anyone objecting to the lecturer's actions here this might actually be a lesson worth learning.
It's a little facetious but where is the line drawn? I might discover I concentrate better when juggling or humming. You probably don't want to support my "right" to do this in a lecture if I'm sitting next to you.
I was a CS grad student just last year, and for two straight years I used a laptop in class. We had wifi too. None of that Harvard-style restrictions.
Aside from notetaking, laptops are good for:
- Double checking facts.
- Reviewing material that the professor thinks you know but don't. Trying to catch up is next to impossible.
- Keeping yourself awake. CS professors tend to be ridiculously monotone.
- Many professors publish PDFs of their lecture notes. Now use Acrobat Standard and you can annotate the notes. If you tell me to print the notes and annotate on paper, that don't work because some professors put up the PDFs online only 5 minutes before class starts.
There are reasons not to carry a laptop, but you all already mentioned them.
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
My daughter is in fourth grade and has spent about 2 weeks in a standard class room. The rest of the time she learned over the internet (PA virtual charter school) or, sometimes, she learned from her mother. Now days she gets up at 6 AM, starts reading, and is usually done by 10 or 11 AM, then she has fun while waiting for her friends to get home from school.
Do you have access to Mathematica now? Is there any use for Mathematica in your current work environment?
I don´t think that in Computer Science classes the students must be passive...
Well I agree with that sentiment. That's why I don't really consider myself much of anything since NO party represents me well. It's also why I don't call myself a liberal even though others do. Personally I hate politics because they get in the way of actually getting work done. But I do believe that government is necessary since people are typically not the best judge of what they are capable of doing and need strong controls to prevent them from doing stupid things.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
No, the proper contrast is between a typical first year law school class which is taught using the Socratic Method (the subject of the article) and a typical first year computer science class (the majority of which are taught as a lecture).
Slashdot may be a welcome respite of sanity after all that.
(NB: I do not work for the Norwegian government.)
"The only thing they didn't have was jackass behavior."
Except from you
2) some people can honestly type faster than they can write, even if they are looking at the teacher and typing
3) it is insanely easier to go back and edit parts of my notes since I got my laptop this year and started using it for notes - EVERY teacher tells you something, moves on, then goes back and tells you something else vital to that first part - being able to type notes in OOo I just go back in my bulleted list and append that topic, and go back to the bottom of the page in my notes where the teacher was before he backtracked
Yeah. Most people assume it's a joke.
It's not that I can't write clearly, it's just that writing clearly means that I have to write slowly and pay attention to what I'm writing. If I'm in class and taking notes, I'm writing quickly and trying to pay attention to what's going on in class. I can usually decrypt what I've written, but doing so is a nuisance.
Is it possible that your idea of typical is colored by your graduate school being superior to your undergraduate school?
-Dave
Indeed; I apologize if my tone seemed to be antagonistic. I was more railing on parties in general than you.
Organizations--whether governmental, corporate, or "gentlemen's agreements," are a necessity simply due to the practical truth that a hundred people working together can accomplish more than merely a hundred times what one person can. If you send a hundred men one man at a time, they will lose to only ten men...
But we tend to misrepresent them in our minds nonetheless. Governments are hardly seen simply as practical necessities for practical functions. This is true, I imagine, mostly because the spectrum of governmental action is as broad as the spectrum of human action, and thus is too complex to grasp without abstracting or symbolizing it to at least some extent...
All Hail the Maggott Show
The job of the professor is to teach. Professors should not care if students pay attention during class, or if they even show up. They teach.
The students who want to learn will pay attention -- and they can take notes in whatever way they want. The students who are uninterested can fail the class.
You can look this page to read about a teacher who has successfully employed the socratic method to teach binary arithmetics to third graders.
How could I prove my notes were my own otherwise?
... I was using a variable-width font, about 10 point to be exact.
They could look at the "Document Properties" on your Word file and see that it was authored by you.
I wound up failing one of the classes
Dude, you deserved to fail for doing this. Everyone else knows that "14pt Courier-New" (monospaced) is the magic problem solver. It can discretely turn a 5 page report into a 10 page report. It's not the length that counts, it's how you format it!
I've become a big fan of One Note. I record lectures and then my sparse notes effectively becomes an index for an audio recording.
This is truly the value of traditional note taking, it's a way of indexing your thoughts and memories.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!