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Estonian Tech University Bans Notebooks and Smartphones
J-Georg writes "In Estonia's Tallinn University of Technology, all electronic devices — like notebooks, tablets and smartphones — are now banned in lectures held by the Institute of Public Administration. The restriction, which according to the institute aims to reduce factors interfering with academic work, came as a surprise to most of the university-goers. Moreover, it came just a day before the country's Ministry of Education announced a plan that by 2020 all textbooks and other literature would be turned into e-books and in eight years students are expected to start using computers and tablets to access study materials."
If students didn't have them or smart phones, they'd be doodling, spacing out, sleeping in class as well. It is just a diversion.
Dude it has been shown that doodling enhances absorption and recall on information, but distracted multi tasking decreases it.
Also since when do we say notebook in a headline and have everyone read it and think laptop not paper notebook.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yeah, there's been dozens of people who've noticed that the university lecture is a really poor way of conveying information, which maybe suited a bunch of philosophy students gathering to hear Hegel hold forth at length, but not much else. But, nobody has come up with a way of doing it better that fits existing economic/institutional constraints. More interactive classes require higher teacher:student ratios and better teachers (uni professors' incentives don't favor good teaching, since they're judged approximately 5-15% on teaching, 85-95% on research), and are more difficult to plan. I still think Seymour Papert was at least partly on the right track.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Entirely this.
I'm an engineering student and I have noticed that most of the time, the general theorem that applies is that the interestingness of lecture is inversely proportional to the technologic level used.
In other words, someone in the theatre who'll use blackboard/scribbled projection tend to be almost universally amazing, those that use common "fill in gaps" projections tend to be OK , and lecturers using powerpoint tend to be the "gouge out eyes" sort of boring.