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Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop In the Classroom (scientificamerican.com)
Cindi May writes via Scientific American about new research that "suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class." From the report: Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer. To understand how students are using computers during class and the impact it has on learning, Susan Ravizza and colleagues took the unique approach of asking students to voluntarily login to a proxy server at the start of each class, with the understanding that their internet use (including the sites they visited) would be tracked. Participants were required to login for at least half of the 15 class periods, though they were not required to use the internet in any way once they logged in to the server. Researchers were able to track the internet use and academic performance of 84 students across the semester.
participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes, including social media, checking email, shopping, reading the news, chatting, watching videos, and playing games. This nonacademic use was negatively associated with final exam scores, such that students with higher use tended to score lower on the exam. Social media sites were the most-frequently visited sites during class, and importantly these sites, along with online video sites, proved to be the most disruptive with respect to academic outcomes. In contrast with their heavy nonacademic internet use, students spent less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes (e.g., accessing the syllabus, reviewing course-related slides or supplemental materials, searching for content related to the lecture). Given the relatively small amount of time students spent on academic internet use, it is not surprising that academic internet use was unrelated to course performance. Thus students who brought their laptops to class to view online course-related materials did not actually spend much time doing so, and furthermore showed no benefit of having access to those materials in class.
participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes, including social media, checking email, shopping, reading the news, chatting, watching videos, and playing games. This nonacademic use was negatively associated with final exam scores, such that students with higher use tended to score lower on the exam. Social media sites were the most-frequently visited sites during class, and importantly these sites, along with online video sites, proved to be the most disruptive with respect to academic outcomes. In contrast with their heavy nonacademic internet use, students spent less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes (e.g., accessing the syllabus, reviewing course-related slides or supplemental materials, searching for content related to the lecture). Given the relatively small amount of time students spent on academic internet use, it is not surprising that academic internet use was unrelated to course performance. Thus students who brought their laptops to class to view online course-related materials did not actually spend much time doing so, and furthermore showed no benefit of having access to those materials in class.
https://www.google.com/#q=things+i%27ve+seen+students+doing+in+class
I like to jerk off during class, helps me relax. I need my laptop to help, else I'll be jacking it for 20 minutes, and that's just awkward.
My problem with education and technology is that they do not do enough to plan out how to use it. Its like Los Angeles district who after two years of giving every student a iPad. They reversed course and abandoned the platform. Sighting lack of curriculum, stolen iPad's and breakage as the reasons. This should have been apparent before embracing such a investment with a device that is not the most durable. In most cases education has tried to defend technology as a replacement for books and yet the costs do not measure out in the long run. It also has not proven to improve student performance or grades either. It's interesting that kids born into some of the most brightest technology creators, insist their own kids avoid too much technology in their education.
Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
That's interesting, so the kid who can only communicate through a sip & puff connected to a laptop is better off without a laptop in the classroom? Oh that's an exception? What about the kid with a processing speed deficit who performs their work 3 times faster on a laptop? Another exception? What about a well run classroom where the teachers is supervising what the children are doing, the same way as my teachers called me out when I was doodling at my desk instead of getting my work done?
Like most things involving humans, sweeping conclusionary statements about the educational process are myopic and ill advised, because educational methods should be shaped to the PEOPLE involved. What works for one teacher/student/class will not work for another teacher/student/class combination. That's why teachers are professionals, the same way as IT professionals are, they shape their approach to the situation at hand. (and before someone makes a disparaging remark about teachers, allow me to point out we all know IT people who should be in another profession too)
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
FAR too many people think it will help. In some cases it can but the problem is that people think these cases generalize more than they actually do. It's just a modern day version of letting students use a fancy calculator as a crutch to get answers rather than having to do the heavy lifting to actually learn from first principles and gain the intuition that results.
Plus for too many students the computer is just a HUGE distraction. Why would a kid pay attention to a boring history or math class when they could be doing something fun on social media?
I'm sure some billion dollar social media companies will be able to quietly cast doubt on these "absurd" and "backward" conclusions.
I went through college in the early 2000s at a school where a laptop was required for school.
I did terrible in classes where the teachers expected us to have our laptops. They'd do stuff with Maple, Mathematica, Maple, etc. I went back to keeping the laptop in my backpack and writing the code down along with a verbal description of what each line did.
Transcription errors just forced me to RTFM (StackExchange was still 7 years from existence) and understand what each command actually did along with calling options.
Plus there was "StarCraft", the kid that did nothing but StarCraft all class. Headphones and all.
This month in "Duh Magazine"!
Sounds to me like the problem is having an internet connection in class rather than laptops themselves, since the findings focus on time wasted on social media, shopping, other non-academic uses. I used a laptop in class in the late 90s/early 2000s for taking notes on, instead of on paper, but it wasn't really a distraction because there was no internet connection (Wifi wasn't ubiquitous in classrooms back then). It was just the way I took notes.
You can find the same content traffic on any company network.... Surprised?
Work production also goes down about the same amount. We blocked various sites here at work and one of the programmers decided to set up a proxy server at his home. It is allowed to work from home so we had to leave it. But the gigabytes of traffic is suspicious.
We decided to not block websites but to put monitors on sites visited. Corporate decided that as long as production isn't slipping that they would turn a blind eye.
We would rather have our firewall deal with HTTP traffic than have that traffic come in over encrypted https from a proxy where no telling where it actually came from.
This is too obvious to former students. It's college though, like the real world if you don't put effort in and fail it is your own fault and your own money and time you are wasting, unless you are a socialist getting college for free.
Computers are used at work too. If students can't figure out whats appropriate in what environment, they are in for a rude awakening.
Hardly seems the laptop's fault.
.. a bowl of humboldt, now they're blaming computers?
"This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out,"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Students with self-discipline and an interest in academic success perform better than students without self-discipline!
Here's an interesting anecdote as a West Point alumni - cadets all had computers starting in the very late 90s. In 2001, USMA switched from issuing towers to issuing laptops, which cadets took to class. The laptops took the place of hand-written notes (of which everyone was expected to keep volumes), and paper lab books (of which there were many - and costly).
They worked fine. There was also disciplinary action if caught using your laptop during class for non-class related work. Then again, West Point is extremely academically rigorous, and you get kicked out if your GPA drops too low.
Point being - half the kids in college are just there because that's what they were supposed to do next - they're not trying to better themselves, so given a chance to fuck around, they're going to entertain themselves. There's a lack of discipline. If people want to see college kids performing better at academic pursuits, then colleges are going to have to invest in some.
When I was studying computer science in school, most of our classes were in lecture halls, and you'd have a lab portion on a different day. I got a PowerBook for my last couple of years, and was able to type my notes, since I can type way faster than I can write., so it worked out pretty well for me. Of course, Facebook wasn't a thing yet, and I detested MySpace.
Now that I'm teaching, we're in a classroom with computers. Since so many students just goof off on the computers during the lecture, I decided to start flipping my classroom. I record video lectures and then have them work on their labs & homework during class time. It has worked out pretty well, especially for the good students, and it removes some excuses for the bad students.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I can totally buy this, 100%. I was in the first class at my college required to buy laptops, in 1995. I can definitely say that even before Youtube or facebook, we were frequently websurfing or chatting with each other or playing little games during class. I think it was a good thing for us academically as we progressed that we reached classes that had not yet really attempted to integrate them into the curriculum and most of us stopped bothering to tote them around. (Well, and technology was progressing at a fast enough pace at that point that they were really hunks of junk by the time we graduated. Woo, 486! Woo, 540 meg harddrive!)
learning. It is truly a sad reflection on the educational system, which everyone is compelled to attend thru high school, that only 76% knew that we declared independence from GB and even less (58%) knew it was 1776. The reaction to the NPR tweet of the declaration of independence on the 4th just defines the american education system. We are toast.
It just causes me to not pay attention. If you're not going to get anything out of the meeting or contribute in anyway, then either decline the invite or blow it off. Virtually every time I'm in some sort of meeting and someone has a laptop open, they're either wasting time or doing work that has nothing to do with the meeting. It's the same in school except worse because you're younger, more immature, and more likely to waste time and not pay attention.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's your problem. You expect people to be able to sit still and learn things for one hour and 40 minutes at a time? And then go to another class and repeat that pattern? That's not how most people work. Lower those classes to one hour with 15 minutes breaks between classes and you'll see drastic changes in learning abilities.
#DeleteFacebook
When I went back to do my Masters, I didn't use any technology in the classroom. Instead, I printed out a copy of all of the lecture notes (the lecturers made them all available to download) and brought them with me with a pencil. I was then able to follow the notes along with the lecturer and make any additional notes I needed in the margins, highlight passages, etc.
I found this worked very well for me. I knew any sort of tech in my hand would lead me to being distracted (as it always the case when sent on courses for work), so I kept it simple and old school.
Sometimes these ways are the best. Technology is great it many many areas of life, but there are some areas where the lack of it can be more beneficial - lectures being one.
(One lecturer would actually tell anyone with a laptop or tablet out to put it away in their bags!)
Granted it's been well over a decade for me since college, but it's the same story with technical conferences and work meetings. Inevitably you will run into people who spend 60 minutes saying something that should take 5-10. Allowing the audience to bring a laptop to do other stuff when this happening is the socially acceptable solution we've come up with as a society to let the lecturer save face while letting the audience quietly stop listening to them.
Perhaps it would be better in the long run if we were honest and just booed or walked out so lecturers were more forcefully encouraged to get better. I'm not sure it would really work that way though. It's already scary enough presenting in front of a lot of people. As it is, if you've got an audience full of people staring at their laptop instead of staring at you, it's them gently telling you that what you are saying is less important to them than whatever is on their screen.
I'm currently reading A Deadly Wandering by Eric Richtel. The central plotline is about a kid who is texting while driving and wanders across the median and causes a car accident that kills two people, but in investigating the event Richtel talks with a number of neuroscientists who specialize in human attention, distraction, focus, and multitasking loads. I find the subject of the limitations of the human mind to work in a distracting environment and a term they call task switching costs, as well as the subject testing they perform to try and measure some of these factors fascinating, and would recommend the book to someone who wants to just touch upon the subject.
Frankly, I see ZERO use for students to have cellphones, laptops, or tablets in school.
There is nothing they need to do that can not be done better with paper, and just having a few computers available in the room for research etc.
Constant possession of devices is NOTHING but a huge distraction in the classroom and contributes to the sick addiction behaviors I see in nearly an entire generation.
Not to mention that many schools put these devices in the hands of children and have no clue how to manage or police their use to only appropriate purposes.
The rush to add tables,laptops etc into classrooms is one of the biggest mistakes in educational history.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
asking students to voluntarily login to a proxy server at the start of each class,
Let me guess, this proxy lets students on to sites they wouldn't have had access to if they were on the school's network instead.
So they leave their brain inside a plastic bag on a table before entering the classroom?
When computers 1st started, they were provided by the schools. They were only networks to themselves and using DOS. Used mainly to learn stuff like word processing and programming and other little things in labs. Today, they are bought by the students, they are networked to everything on the internet and mainly using Windows and Mac OS. I'll assume some schools put filters and other network restrictions but figure this is more or less accurate.
I'm not saying that the old way was better. I recall some kids wiping out the PCs to load their games on them at the time and messing up things but for the most part, students were using them for the intended work and focusing.
Here's the important part of this comparison. I think when all this belief in computers for education was imagined as a benefit, it was during that DOS era. The idea of using these to enhance education was based on a system that wasn't able to sidetrack the student's from the task like it can today by opening a web browser. You couldn't even open a 2nd program back in the day and it no one seems to have come back to revisit the idea or are seeing the problem and turning a blind eye or making it the student's responsibility to manage themselves.
The access to the internet isn't all bad but to me, it's negated a lot of the benefits that computers are supposed to provide in the school system.
This study is ridiculous. Personal computers, specifically laptops, are now an integral part of almost all college curricula (with the possible exception of seminars on Milton's poetry). That's particularly true for the sciences. Having gone through college in the "good old" 70's, I can tell you that having a PC by my side in class would have been a huge benefit. it would also have been helpful to be able to conduct Internet searches for, and retrieve, related scholarly articles from a variety of sources in mere seconds, while a lecture was in progress. It could have made post-lecture Q&A significantly richer.
Pretty much every class I took notes on OneNote along with a synced audio recording and photos of the whiteboard drawings.
Personally I found my laptop to be invaluable for my college success.
I love technology, but the classroom is better off with with pen and paper. Studies and personal experience show you don't learn well taking notes on a keyboard. Not even considering the distraction that comes along with tech like games and such. Naturally we should have computer skills classes with computers.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Fuck school. It's conformist indoctrination. Tune in, turn on, drop out.
"I don't understand statistics or evidence"
When I was a kid, we didn't have laptops to kill time during boring lectures. We had to draw pictures of cars and stuff in our notebooks so the teacher would think we were taking notes.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are arguing how the computers *could* be used while the study is demonstrating how they are being used.
This was a study of college students, and I doubt most college instructors want the type of interactive environment that you describe. They see part of their job is to prepare students for the real world, not hold their hand.
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
Nobody was claiming it would enhance their engagement. They're bringing them anyway. The study is simply saying they'd be better off leaving them in their dorm.
What don't you get about that?
Perhaps you're the one creating strawmen?
Not everyone learns with paper and pen. If I try to take notes on paper, I'm going to miss getting any information from anything that's said, I'll be concentrating on trying to get something on the paper, I'll be concentrating on my hand hurting, and I still won't have any useful notes, because my handwriting is, has always been, and always will be that bad.
Having a laptop in class was the best thing that I ever did. I wish laptops had existed before I was in high school.
Today? I'd turn on voice recognition for the notes, maybe even video the lecture, and sit back and concentrate on the information without having to even think about typing it.
Blackjack backed by student loans?
OK HIT soft 17 / Black Jack pays 6-5 / no re split aces / 8 decks / min bet $25.
I remember more a few classes in high school and college that would have been better off without the teacher. Just leaving us the text book and materials would be better than subjecting us to the uncommunicative twat writing on the blackboard.
Nor smartphones, personal music players, handheld game consoles, and so on.
What we need in schools are talented teachers.
Also, as a sidebar: This is one area where so-called 'AI' will never do; humans need to teach young humans, ideally giving personalized attention where needed, to help them reach their intellectual potential.
Someoine manages to map out how human brains are conscious, cognizant, reasoning, and so on, so we can build TRUE 'AI'? Then that might change. The current level of not-as-smart-as-a-dog? Never.
It's possible to store media offline, such as games and videos, and use an ad hoc network to do multiplayer or chat
"Thus students who brought their laptops to class to view online course-related materials did not actually spend much time doing so, and furthermore showed no benefit of having access to those materials in class."
That's a separate and interesting finding, that I wish were highlighted more. It's not just that students are using their laptops for non-class-related activities instead of learning, and then suffering academically (duh!), but that *even if* they have access to class-related content they still do not benefit.
A statement like 'laptop in classroom is worse' implicitly treats all classes as alike, considers it a simple either/or matter, and disregards things like teaching children how best to make use if a laptop, and habits so as to avoid depending on them unnecessarily. Assuming away the complex nature of a real world problem makes for meaningless results, no matter how widely headline grabbing they are.
John_Chalisque
This comment is spot on. Out dated curriculum delivery (i.e. lectures) is the issue. For most subjects (not all) and for most students/learners (but not all) don't want to listen to someone tell them something they can learn on their own. Very few lecturers are so engaging that everyone will be hanging on their every word all of the time. By forcing interaction as CHK6 mentions: " through in-class surveys and problems while class is going on" The instructor will know if the students are engaged and if the material they are presenting is being understood and obtained. The issue is most instructors have been "teaching this way for the past 20 years..." and don't want to change.
Do people that zone out a lot in lectures get lower grades? Yes
Do people that use their laptop while zoning out a lot in lecture get lower grades? Yes
HOWEVER, does the laptop cause people to zone out more????? THE LAPTOP EFFECT WAS NEVER TESTED.
This study is useless. It's similar to asking people who do drugs in college for their GPA and concluding the drugs are what lowered their GPA.
What they need to do is track laptop-less people for a year, then give them laptops, then track them for another year.
Or, remove all distraction from some volunteer's laptops and compare their grades against the previous year when they had the distractions.
Useless Study. Distracted people get lower grades. Water is wet.
My college banned laptops in pretty much every class but core comp sci classes. It was the at the educator's discretion, but they all followed the same understanding. There were countless kids angry about it, trying to shift blame saying the content was dull, or their snowflake generation was better than every previous generation and they should be entrusted with more responsibility, claiming they could multi task better with laptops, etc.
The reality was, we all took in way more information when we had to write it down and then copy it to a computer and there were never giant distractions between my professor and I.
The benefits to banning electronics far outweighed the benefits to having them in the class room.
I believe that note taking is generally a bad thing. At least some brain power has to be diverted from paying attention into taking notes.
Note taking CAN be useful. It just usually isn't and most people do it very poorly. If the material in question is in your book, it's probably a waste of time. Annotate the book or handouts instead of transcribing.
In my grad school they usually just handed out some notes before class which you could then annotate as needed. WAY more helpful than trying to transcribe the discussion. In medical schools they usually assign one person to take notes for the whole class and that person rotates so nobody has to do it more than once or twice. They then work really hard to make a very detailed set of notes which everyone can benefit from and everybody else just spends their effort paying attention.
Maths is the correct short form of mathematics (notice the "s" on the end of both words) in the English language. Only ignorant Americans say "math", as though it were the only one.
Do you study econs and physs too? Why leave the s on mathematics but not economics or physics or any other word in the language for that matter. The word math is plural and understood to be. Nobody say "I did a math today" because it refers to the subject, not an instance of it.
This didn't need a study, a little common sense would have sufficed. Students who aren't invested in their own learning/future -distracted, disinterested or otherwise- will obviously not score well when tested on the material. Don't blame the laptops, blame the kids without focus dedication or self control.
In high-school tier, math equations are easy to type.
You type derivatives and integrals? Not to mention geometry and trig. What kind of weak math were you taking in high school? And even the equations that are easy to type are generally still easier to write with a pen/stylus.
In college tier, you probably should have a copy of Matlab, Mathematica or some other similar program that makes it easier to type those equations. If not, that's a case to have subsidized software infrastructure.
Why would I buy a heavy duty program like that to take notes? It's faster and more helpful to do it on paper. There isn't a program I've ever seen that is as fast to write equations as a pen and paper. I'd love it if there were one but nobody has made it yet. Not even the current generation tablet computers have nailed that particular problem adequately.
In case of a diagram, there's MsPaint. Or if necessary, you can take said diagram from the textbook instead.
Great, now you want people to take notes in two applications at the same time? No thanks.
Humans just can't concentrate on a speaker for very long before their minds get bored and wander. As a communications channel, speech is slow compared to the rate at which we can process information. Even for dull folks.
There are endless theories about how to adjust for this, but generally the answer is frequent breaks and practical work between brief lectures. Brief as in '15 minutes is pushing it quite a bit'.
And of course you could always put institution-owned computers at the desks with limited software and access, dumping student work to an externally-accessible file share.
I believe there are certain situations where laptops should be allowed. Certain people with disabilities that involve motor skills do benefit from having a laptop since it helps them write. But it does require discipline and those who are ruining it for everyone else should be disciplined. Technology is a wonderful thing and should be embraced--not hindered.
"Not everyone learns with paper and pen. "
Dumbest statement ever. Nice job Potsy...
Not everyone learns with paper and pen.
We have the last 1,000+ years of human learning as evidence to validate how false this statement truly is.
Today? I'd turn on voice recognition for the notes, maybe even video the lecture, and sit back and concentrate on the information without having to even think about typing it.
Today? You'll speak to the lawyer representing the person you wish to record, along with reviewing your student handbook regarding the rules of audio or video recordings. You should think about how consent and copyright laws work.
and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class."
You don't say? A fact you say? Okay then.
I love it when research justifies such conclusions unambiguously. God forbid I should need to weigh facts against each other and come to my own conclusion about what is better or not.
Thanks unknown researcher. You are awesome. That is one less thing I need to think about today. If only more researchers were like that.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I was diagnosed with a handwriting disability in year 12 (final year of high school). I was given a laptop to use at school. That laptop did more 3d modelling and Linux tinkering than it ever did the work assigned in Class. Ironically I now work as a network engineer and some of our clients are schools. In my opinion laptops just do not belong in schools at all and schools shouldn't have access to the internet. They should have a very tightly locked down network with 0 social media access and only access to academic materials. This is a major problem with modern schooling which needs to be addressed. Too many idiots think that kids need access to everything and that it's bad to limit what they can buy/use. Sure they filter offensive content in schools, but they won't censor the mundane/unimportant garbage that distracts from school work. Maths, Reading, Writing, these are king, nothing else will help you more in life. If I could change anything about my time in school I would get proper help with my mathematics. I have big ideas I've always wanted to pursue and I am completely hobbled by how bad my algebra/trigonometry skills are. Kids that dream of being game developers and engineers are being let down every day by distractions in classrooms and bad maths teachers. Computers don't help maths students.
Smartphones, tablets, etc. Same at work. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
asking students to voluntarily login to a proxy server at the start of each class,
Let me guess, this proxy lets students on to sites they wouldn't have had access to if they were on the school's network instead.
big difference between a university and a high school. A normal university won't restrict sites.
True, but neither the headline or 2-paragraph summary mentions what level this study was done at. Am I supposed to read the articles now?
25 years ago, in an "Engineering Management" course that I was forced to take, there was a guy with one of those giant, primitive laptops. He spent every moment typing lecture notes, correcting his typos, formatting his notes, saving various file versions... You get the idea.
I asked him why he was wasting his time taking notes on a computer, when it was far faster to just scribble-down your own mental paraphrasing of the professor's lecture – with the bonus that this process requires thought, whereas transcribing a lecture word-for-word gains you nothing. With a huff, he said that with electronic notes, he had access to all of his notes, for any class he had ever taken, stored forever. LOL.
I don't know if he can still open his WordStar documents, but I do know that he did not do well in that "easy-A" class. I think he got a C.
I'm not sure why you say his comment is dumb. When I was in college, if I tried to take notes, I'd inevitably end up with less understanding than if I was simply paying attention and interacting with the instructor when I didn't understand something. Taking notes meant I went from actively listening to passively listening while I tried to transcribe the words as quickly as possible. It didn't matter whether I was typing or writing, it was the act of writing that seemed to induce this response. Even worse, because I had no understanding of the material by the end of the lecture, the notes rarely even made any sense to me later. Different strokes for different folks.
Good job you were here with your opinion to refute this actual research on the subject, otherwise we might have accidentally reached a conclusion based on evidence!
I am a lecturer who also design electronic learning systems; the number one problem we have is distraction, the number two is plagiarism. Miniquiz? Survey? Instant-response problems? Answers immediately shared on the unofficial class chat, almost everyone submits same answers. We use question banks that randomly picks problems for each student and randomises answers for multiple-choice problems, but it just slows down the plagiarism a little at the cost of much more prep time.
Some people are terrible at multitasking, and some are extremely terrible. The myth that you can pay attention to a complex subject whilst listening to music in one ear and chatting on social media is extremely harmful to education. I've had students come to me and complain that the kid in the row ahead of them is playing Overwatch or watching porn, and it's causing them distraction issues. Although it's mostly harming the student who isn't paying enough attention, as educators we try and create an engaging environment conductive to learning, and network access often undercuts that more than it helps. It's infeasible to actually do anything about it, because there are many very valid uses of the same technology, some of which you have highlighted, but we shouldn't pretend that it isn't a problem.
> it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content
Well, no shit, there's nothing else to say about this particular story beyond this, really.
It's been well over 20 years now I've been in college, and I can tell you there was no social media for me to waste time on back then, nor YouTube, and while there were forms of instant messaging such as IRC, I didn't have the wireless connectivity to use it. If you allow yourself to be distracted in a class environment, of course you're going to be better off without the devices that provide this distraction. That includes phones and tablets. If you don't have the discipline, leave that crap at home.
Bonus points: Even as adults today, I hear from way too many people who claim to be so busy they have no time left at the end of every day to enjoy the simple things, yet they're the ones who keep talking about things they've seen on Facebook. No, *I* didn't see any of that useless shit firsthand, and no, I don't consider myself to be enriched in one form or another you tell me about it. If you don't use that shit, you can automatically gain a few hours worth of free time every day.
And ban this shit from the workplace while you're at it.
Needless to say, why yes, I *would* like you to get off my lawn.
> As it is, if you've got an audience full of people staring at their laptop instead of staring at you, it's them gently telling you that what you are saying is less important to them than whatever is on their screen
You're delusional. The reality is that this is people who would be glued to their screens whether what you're telling them is important or not.
The idea of using a Surface to annotate notes downloaded from the LMS is nice, but in practice too many students lack the discipline to leave their messages alone while they do it. Divided attention is little better than inattention. I would love to run one physics tutorial group with latest tech and a second one with paper and basic scientific calculators only, and see what happens. Ah well. Ethics approval...
There is ZERO evidence that writing down things as they're spoken is a valid learning technique for the entirety of the human population. I am living evidence that it does in fact NOT work for everyone, and in fact hampers learning for some people.
Taping lectures has been a thing for as long as there have been tape recorders. While I can't say that a student handbook doesn't exist that prohibits it, I've certainly never seen one. And I would very seriously doubt that one exists that prohibits speech to text transcription, there's certainly no law against it anywhere in the US, probably not in the world.
And there is no expectation of privacy in a lecture hall. Good luck with those lawyers, they're not going to do much good. Add in that most professors, offered the chance to have their lecture recorded on video at no cost, will respond by asking you where you'd like them to stand, and could they please have a copy.
Consent: Not required for video at all, not required for audio recording in most states (in one party consent states, if I'm in the room and I say one word, I'm a party to the conversation), not required for speech to text anywhere it would not be required for audio, and probably not required anywhere.
Copyright: Attaches to the recording, not to the lecture - the recording is what affixes it in a tangible means of expression. Not applicable if I'm recording for personal use anyway. Fair use applies to educational use, so I can share it with my study group without question. Personality rights don't apply if I'm not publishing it.
Of course you went old skool. You have a 4 digit UID. You're old and should feel old for being old. Things have changed, gramps, and we don't do things like you did "back in the day." You're advocating for doing things the old way because that's all you know. It's the exact opposite of innovation and the kind of complacency that has brought about the demise of so many giants. You or fellow geezer will invariably claim that things were "better" back in your day so you must be right, but statistics tell us our numbers today are better in most every category. So step aside, old timer, and let us younguns do the heavy lifting while you bitch incessantly about it.
You don't see any use, gramps, because you're old. The eyesight isn't what it used to be and all that. So just like I told another 4 digit old bastard a few threads up, we aren't doing stuff your way any more. You're irrelevant. Our statistics are better than yours. You'll continue to suck up oxygen to sustain your endless bitching while OUR technology, products, and labor keep your old ass living until 100. And we'll be happy to do it, but you should be happy instead of crotchety. The world "you" built is slipping away just like you are. Enjoy the time you have left and stop shitting on others' parades.
Water is wet. More at 11 PM.
Unless it was made by melting dry ice. :D
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Which is exactly my issue. I found that by far the most effective technique was to listen to the lecture, and type a few keywords in TeachText to jog my memory.
In the classes I had with study sessions, I'd be explaining the material to the other students, and they'd ask me for a copy of my notes. I'd show them the screen, they'd say "never mind".
If I tried to do the same thing on paper, it would block everything else out, I'd have garbage notes and not know what happened in class.
The thing I liked best was when the prof would hand out the lecture notes at the start of class, then immediately start a lecture/discussion. There was no need to even think about writing anything, because it was all there in the handout.
Until you find out that you can't ctrl z and compile on the paper.
Maths is the correct abbreviation
You are claiming it is a contraction, not merely an abbreviation. Typically when you do a contraction you put in an apostrophe to indicate the missing letters. So the proper contraction would be "math's" not "maths" if you want to get pedantic about it. Of course common usage in the UK allows for dropping the apostrophe but that doesn't make it technically correct if you give half a shit about consistent grammar. Mathematics is both singular and plural as it refers to both the subject as a whole (singular) and the components of that subject (plural). Likewise "math" is both singular and plural in the same way. Adding the s on the end does not add any value to the contraction because unlike other contractions (it is = it's != its) it doesn't change the meaning. So why add an unnecessary s?
What really blows your argument out of the water is that it is NOT a contraction. People use maths as a short version of both mathematics and mathematical. So it cannot be a contraction, it has to be something else. To my mind it's just unnecessary complication.
"Mathematics" both singular plural and "mathematic" is not a word, you would shorten it to be conjugated with an s as there is no singular form without one.
Mathematic is not a word but math is the most sensible shortening of the word mathematics. Math also is a proper shortening of the word mathematical. Do you shorten mathematical to mathl? Math is a sensible shortening of both mathematics and mathematical. Maths is not. If you want a contraction then you need to throw an apostrophe in there to indicate letters are missing. (yes we all understand what you mean but english is inconsistent enough without you aiding the process)
Economic is the singular, economics is a plural
Economics is both singular and plural depending on usage Anyway missing the point. You don't shorten Economics to Econs. You don't shorten Physics to Physs. QED it is illogical to shorten Mathematics to Maths.
Finally, yes "I attended a Maths class today" is correct and proper English.
In England maybe. Definitely not in the US. If you say I went to maths class in the US people are going ask you when you developed a lisp.
And incidentally, I have NEVER heard anyone say "phys" or "econ". They might abbreviate it like that in some writing, but it's not spoken.
If you haven't heard someone shorten economics to econ in the spoken language you clearly have never actually studied the subject or been inside of a business school. The word economics is routinely shortened to econ when talking about the subject.
"Maths" is correct. "Math" is what illiterate people say.
"Maths" is what illogical people say who want to sound like they have a lisp. Maths is only "correct" if you live in england or parts of the commonwealth. Say it in the US and they'll look at you like you just grew horns.
What makes you think it wasn't just a squid instance running on the school's network? That would be the path of least resistance: free, no legal hassle with student info going to a third party, etc. Alas the article doesn't elaborate and I don't have a login to the Pubmed/SAGE cartel to read the actual study.
Measuring internet usage is a terrible way of attempting to determine how students are using their laptops in class. Services like Facebook and its messenger send and receive data constantly whether you are actually actively using them or just have it running in the background. Conversely downloading the profs notes and powerpoint slides and following along can use only seconds on actual internet time even if they are diligently reading along and annotating them on their hard drive the entire class.
I've sat through enough lectures with students zoned out on Facebook to know that it is a genuine problem (though I suspect those students would have skipped class or distracted themselves in other ways in the past) but Social 'Scientists' need to stop performing 'studies' when they have no understanding of the underlying technologies or concepts because their 'results' are worse than useless because they have no bearing on the reality and create false beliefs and narratives.
Most students would just have their phones out, if the laptop was not there. The laptop and the cell phone are merely distractions. Kids are likely to pay attention based on their own desire, more than some ridiculous rule made up by someone who is not currently a student of college age. The bottom line? Students pay attention because they want to, not because they are forced to. The laptop is not the problem. It never was, and it never will be.
Pardon my lack of technical expertise here. I am assuming these students are connecting via WiFi, which goes through a router. Isn't it possible to whitelist only those sites you want to make available to the students, and blacklist everything else? Aren't these just router settings?