If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to become star pupils once you take away their distractions. Perhaps kids attend more lectures than before knowing that they can always listen in while futzing with other things (and otherwise, they may skip some of the classes entirely).
The lecture format is what needs changing. You need a reason to go to class, and there was nothing worse than a professor showing slides from the pages of his own book (say) or droning through anything that could be Googled and read in less time. If there isn’t some live demonstration, or lecture-only material, regular quizzes or other hook, you can’t expect students to fully engage.
Yep, and the article does propose boredom as a possble cause BUT the data seems like excluding it being the major factor.
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
Most interesting, engaging class I have ever had was Philip Greenspun's short database class at MIT. All day for three days, a cycle of ~15 minute lecture, ~15 minute problem sets worked by each student on their own laptop, ~15 minutes of reviewing student solutions (and, if needed, presenting the "correct" solution).
I imagine that many classes could be presented in a similar format. I also imagine it would be a lot of work on the part of the educators to do this.
It was scheduled for 10-5 three days in a row, with a break for lunch, and a short break in the morning and afternoon. One of the days included a ~1-hour guest lecture from Michael Stonebraker, which did not fit into the lecture/problem set/review format. The last day fizzled out from the format a bit early, concluding with some random discussions.
+1 also had a professor who did this for his courses and it was a win. The theory being people only have ~20 minute attention spans, so instruction should be switched up as such. Result was I learned more, actually collaborated with classmates, and motivated me to prepare for class.
It's like we never left the Middle Ages, when books were expensive and the point of lecturing was to read the book, which was the only book, or one of a few, to students, who'd then copy it down in their notebooks so they'd have at least a copy of what was in the book.
These days, despite the textbook publishers' best efforts, the information is freely available (up until you run into paywalled research papers, but that's at a whole different level from undergrad work, mostly) but the lecture format has barely changed.
In some topics, the copying method still works perfectly well. As I've experienced it, the necessary component is time spent mulling over a concept. Sometimes copying is part of that, especially if you need to have facts in your head for later integration and application. Granted, it needs to be mindful (which I do by trying to look up as infrequently as possible, so I'm at least taking in sentences rather than individual words.)
> There's a reason why people demand you copy stuff down on your own.
If someone demands from you (instead of just suggesting) to copy stuff down by hand on your own it's probably because they want to fuck with you (or because they are too lazy to do actual teaching). I can see no other explanation. That was especially true during elementary, middle and high school.
As soon as a lecture brought out slides, I knew my mark was going to be abysmal in that class. Thankfully I recognized that and in my later years promptly dropped those classes.
When I was at uni 2004-2008 There was a weird amalgamation of tech used in the lectures. Some lecturers used power point slides and some used an overheard projector with transparencies.
Most lecturers tended to post their content online (either as a .ppt or as a scanned pdf).
People realised that with all of the notes provided in advance there wasn't a huge incentive for them to be physically present for the lectures and the theatre would get progressively emptier throughout the semester. I admit I skipped more than a few lectures during course of my degree did not feel like I missed anything particularly relevant.
At my university the lectures were supplemented by "tutorials" - wikipedia tells me this is an Australian thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial) essentially the lectures were 150+ people sitting in a theatre taught by a Professor and the tutorials were usually 10-20 people in a classroom overseen by a postgrad student. We'd spend the tutorial reviewing what was covered in the previous lecture and working through problem sets in a small group. It had the benefit that you would be able to get 1 on 1 attention from the tutor if you needed it. Most lecturers would not even field questions during their lectures whilst the tutors would allow you to email them question etc outside of classroom which was very helpful.
> If students aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to become star pupils once you take away their distractions
That's a bit of a straw-man - nobody said anything about turning every student in to star pupils, it's a matter of degrees.
There is no question in my mind that a device capable of being online, using social media, and that is constantly pushing information at you is going to be a higher level distraction than a pen and paper. Reducing that level of distraction will be beneficial for many students, even if they only pay attention to 30% of the lecture instead of 15%, that's still an improvement.
I don't think that there's any question about that, there’s not some kind of one-size-fits-all set of rules that you can make everyone follow. But I can tell you from personal experience that I did my best performance in classes where I brought my laptop to class. Why? The answer is obvious when you look at it—if a class was below my level, and I was only taking it because it was required for my degree, I brought my laptop to stave of the boredom and breezed through the homework and tests.
So the answer to “what if?” question is really just that students are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes, and figuring out that laptops are a liability is part of that.
Among other things, you're also describing what teaching using case studies looks like for example. There's pre-class reading and the class is built around interactive discussions. It's harder to see how this works for most technical topics outside of project-based courses.
Today it is considered expected to have a degree, but most students do not really understand why, and will not understand until it is too late. They are not motivated, but they know "dad" expects them to get the degree so they slog on learning just enough to get by.
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
I definitely feel my attentiveness and focus dropped dramatically after computers were introduced into my work life. It's a shame that computers provide such a thin line between work and entertainment.
You can make that line thicker. You can create a new user on your computer specifically for work, with a restricted environment. You could use VMs or dualboot or something.
Personally, I'm very happy that we have devices that are capable of doing so many things.
You can but you won't as long as it is possible to bypass the trick, because you are inevitably attracted (not to say addicted) to the online web content and interactions and you'll quickly switch back to it.
This is a fair position, but we shouldn't forget that companies have poured billions of dollars into making these "tools" as addictive as possible, because that's ultimately how they make their money. See [1] and [2] for more.
instructors are also better off without computers in the classroom. lecture has been reduced to staring at a projector while each and every students eyes roll to the back of their skull
I think this is a highly personal topic. As a student myself i find a laptop in class is very nice, i can type my notes faster, and organize them better. Most of my professors lectures are scatter brained and i frequently have to go back to previous section and annotate or insert new sections. With a computer i just go back and type, with a pen and paper i have to scribble, or write in the margins. Of course computers can be distractions, but that is the students responsibility, let natural selection take its course and stop hindering my ability to learn how i do best (I am a CS major so computers are >= paper to me). If you cannot do your work with a computer, then don't bring one yourself, dont ban them for everyone.
Some of us also have terrible handwriting, so taking notes by hand is out of the question. Though I will also surmise that they can also be a distraction.
Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.
True, but Compuguy was not referring to people with medical conditions in my opinion. He is referring to the "many" that don't want make a concentrated effort to improve their handwriting but could if they did.
If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.
I should of mentioned it earlier, but I do have a medical condition, which a previous poster mentioned (Dysgraphia). I also did "navigate" the college bureaucracy and sometimes had to push teachers to allow use of a tablet or laptop, even with an exemption.
Not physically able to use hands != perfectly able to use hands but was failed by their elementary school system and now rationalizes that learning to write legibly is somehow a waste of time ;)
Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.
On the other hand, I had some number of years of handwriting class in grade school (Palmer script) and handwriting was consistently my lowest grade as I recall. It's never been good in spite of considerable practice--and it's slowly deteriorated to almost illegible today.
There's a very specific part of the brain responsible for the movement planning and fine motor control required for writing. Some folks have it underdeveloped, and need to spend an inordinate amount of effort and concentration in order to write. And even then, their writing will often degrade over time as they fatigue.
Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).
I can say that in my case my 6th grade teacher started paying close attention and noticed that when I was trying my hardest to be neat I was doing like my peer at their worst. He had the school counselors do some tests which didn't result in anything other that agreement that I have an inability to write neat.
I first head about Dysgraphia 10 right here though - the symptoms a familiar enough for a self-diagnosis, but as all self-diagnosis there might be something else.
My teachers noticed it in the 3rd grade. I was able to write cursive, but it took me far longer. The result of this is me using a device called an Alphasmart (they stopped making them a couple of years go), through the rest of my education.
I'm in the same situation, my handwriting is illegibly bad, even by myself - the main reason I don't want to improve it is that I just don't use it, haven't for years, it'd be an incredible waste of time and effort. There's no motivating reason to do it except for perhaps some very abstract learning benefit - which hasn't to my knowledge even been proven out in the software engineering or computer science field, where it arguably makes the least sense.
Another bad handwriting guy here. For me, the answer is "I have better things to do". Learning to cut out distractions on a laptop will serve me better (IMO).
Although in grad school I never used to a digital method of annotating papers and did it by hand anyway.
In 15 years of studies, I have never ever heard anyone complaining about his own handwriting. Even with a handwriting that can be very bad for others, one can always reread 99.9% of what one has written, because it is one's own handwriting and one knows its quirks.
This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school.
That's bullshit of the same level as "I can take faster and better notes with my laptop". No you can't. You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams, you can't draw small maps quickly and properly as you can by hand. You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
"But it is searchable". Wonderful. As if you used to be lost in a 30 pages long course (which has a logical organisation and/or progression) that anyway you have to learn one way or another, by practice or rote memorisation.
There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Laptop in a classroom are used to play, browse the web and social networks; the rest are made-up justifications to be allowed to bring them.
It's worth first noting that there are indeed people for whom a laptop would be much, much better, due to some disorders which produce very quick pain or tiredness in the muscles from writing, with handwriting that may be unreadable even the next day. Such people obviously greatly benefit from laptops.
>There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Have you used org-mode? I really like the ability to organise many notes, link them together (like a small personal wiki) and others. Typing is also significantly less fatiguing, at least for my hands, and I suspect at equal or even faster speed, though I have nothing to back that up, I can type at around 110wpm comfortably.
Typing notes also comes in quite handy if the course comes with digital material. You can copy that graph in, you don't have to draw it out. Tablet-laptops (if there's a word for them, I don't know it) let you draw diagrams with ease. It may also benefit to record what the lecturer is saying with the laptop's microphone, though you can do that with a separate device, it's more useful and convenient to have that as embedded media in your notes.
It also means you can do things other than note-taking. If the course requires some amount of memorisation of facts with definite answers, you can use spaced repetition flashcard programs such as Anki, and fill them in during the lecture, or better, copy-and-paste from your typed up lecture notes. This is especially useful for definitions of things.
Whether laptops are used as they could be used is a different matter, and my own lecturers have told me anecdotes of their misusage, though I think it's unwise to stop people who would otherwise use them well from using them. The people who misuse their laptops will find that not paying attention has consequences.
> This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school.
I had the same kind of problem since elementary school, I was first allowed to use a computer during class in uni.
> That's bullshit
Just because it doesn't occur to you it does not mean that it's not true. Just because you started paying attention to it now it does not mean that it wasn't there before either.
> No you can't
Well, you might not be able to but many people can.
> You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams
Sure you can. There are many tools for this job, both text and graphical ones.
> You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
With Latex + Emacs I can type fancy mathematical formulas much faster and much more aligned than when writing them down.
> There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down
Except that writing down notes for me and for many other people is useless, tiresome and distracting.
>Laptop in a classroom are used to play, browse the web and social networks; the rest are made-up justifications to be allowed to bring them.
As a side note, if you actually need/want to take notes on an electronic device such a laptop, it doesn't mean that the device MUST have a browser AND be connected to the internet.
If there was a word processor ONLY laptop with no browser nor games on it, air-gaped from the internet, THEN it would be just a matter of preferences.
And I would go a bit further on the handwriting (excluded medical conditions) having a decently readable handwriting only costs some time in exercising wanting to better it, and it is a form of respect towards yourself (when you have to re-read your notes) and towards others that may need to read what you write.
Maybe you will manage to live your whole life only writing "electronically" but why risking to be unable to communicate in handwriting?
Once upon a time you couldn't get past first few years of elementary schools unless you had a decent handwriting, no need for it to be "beautiful" or "calligraphic", only readable.
The fact that it may be slower than typing ( and this BTW happens only for exceptionally fast and accurate typists) it's not in itself a bad thing, while you write by hand you somehow need more concentration to avoid mis-spelling as you haven't the equivalent of a backspace (or in some cases a spelling corrector) and this usually helps for memorizing what you are writing while you write it.
I guess, you haven't read up about Dysgraphia then. When I was made aware/diagnosed (mid 1990's), we didn't have Internet-enabled lightweight laptops, but Alphasmarts (which are no longer made).
I'd be more impressed if they also did the same study with notepads and doodles and daydreams, and compared the numbers.
I have a feeling that people who aren't paying attention weren't going to anyhow.
However, I'd also guess that at least some people use the computer to look up additional information instead of stopping the class and asking, which helps everyone involved.
> However, I'd also guess that at least some people use the computer to look up additional information instead of stopping the class and asking, which helps everyone involved.
No it doesn't. Practically the only point of lectures is so students can ask questions. Otherwise just read the material and don't go. Moreover there are probably others in the class too shy to ask the same question, but at worst it reinforces everyone else's learning.
I hated when people asked not needed questions in lecture for over hundred people. At least attempt to answer it yourself, don't slow other 99 people down.
> I'd also guess that at least some people use the computer to look up additional information instead of stopping the class and asking, which helps everyone involved.
Are you sure about that? Intuitively, wouldn't it be the opposite? Asking questions results in the teacher giving an answer that can benefit the whole class, whereas if you just look something up yourself you're the only one who benefits from that additional piece of information.
While I won't deny that it's possible the question might help multiple people, it's more likely that if it's simple enough to look up online, it's better for everyone to do their own research.
Lectures still serve to help for more difficult questions, and the time is better spent on them instead.
But its easy to see how having a computer can make someone intending to pay attention be distracted and miss critical information. A distracted mind is not going to create connections to understand the material as a whole, but rather will simply grab bits and pieces as their concentration is split.
So you're saying raising stupid, uneducated kids that have learned to be bullied or be bullies, are better off than smart, educated, properly socialized children?
Shocker. I remember being part of Clemson's laptop pilot program in 1998. If you were ever presenting you basically had to ask everyone to close their laptops or their eyes would never even look up.
Even without laptops I see this in the workplace. In a meeting, if there is a PowerPoint presentation with words on it, people instinctively look at the bright and shiny screen. That's why I recommend throwing a few black slides in your presentation when you want people to focus back on the presenter.
I ban laptops from meetings I run. We're here to meet, present information, receive information, share information, make arguments, come to conclusions: we're not in a meeting in order to futz about tweaking our personal blogs.
I also like 15-minute meetings or less. Other folks seem fine with multi-hour meetings where everyone is goofing off on his laptop.
I feel like the conclusion is a bit off base: that students lack the self control to restrict the use of laptops laptops to class-related activities is somehow a sign that the problem is the laptop and not the students? I think it's very possible that younger generations have big issues with self-control and instant gratification. But I think it's wrong to think that laptops are the faulty party.
Riiight, because teenagers and young adults are so known for their long-term planning skills and self-control.
We're not animals, we don't get born with instincts. This is why humans require education and upbringing to teach. And yes, this (gasp!) sometimes means you need to make a non-adult person to do something against their first whim.
To be pedantic, we do have instincts as humans and common scientific consensus is that we are animals as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes (note that instinct and reflex are essentially the same thing in biology)
I don't disagree except for the fact that college students are supposed to be at least semi-adults (though perhaps young and silly ones) and getting through a 50 minute class without giving in to digital temptations is really something that people ought to be capable of well before college.
Yeah, kids these days have self control problems. Somehow human nature has been fundamentally altered between the previous generation and this one. It has nothing to do with external variables such as the creeping omnipresence of distraction machines like laptops.
I don't think I ever implied any changes in human nature.
And I don't disagree that there's a degree of difference between hiding a comic book behind a textbook and having a machine that can likely grant instant access to the majority of comics, movies, games, etc., known to humankind, not to mentions texting, chatting, snapchats, social media, etc.
But I think it's ludicrous to think someone's ready for college if they don't have the self control to not give in to that temptation for a 50 minute lecture.
It's not the laptop that created uncommitted just-show-up-ism and incessant digital nothing-chatter or the thoughtless and blasé acceptance of app-based magic voodoo without thought towards its implications.
There's a much larger and more omnipresent failure at play. Deciding not to put games on your phone shouldn't be an amazing and praiseworthy anomaly.
Human beings don't lack for volition when sufficiently aware of it.
Why are lectures still being conducted in the classroom? Students shouldn't just be sitting there copying what the teacher writes on the board anyway. They should be having discussions, working together or independently on practice problems, teaching each other the material, or just doing anything that's actually engaging. Lecturing should be done at home via YouTube.
I had a laptop and left it home most of the time. And just stuck with taking notes with a pen and sitting upfront.
I took lots notes. Some people claim it's pointless and distracts from learning but for me the act of taking notes is what helped solidify the concepts a better. Heck due to my horrible handwriting I couldn't even read some of the notes later. But it was still worth it. Typing them out just wasn't the same.
As I get older, I find that physical notes help me more and more. I write in fairly neat cursive, using a fountain pen, and make it a point to never write down the words I'm hearing unless they're an important quote or something. Doing this helps me process the information while it's still fresh in my mind, which in turn leads to more thorough understanding.
My experience from college is pretty much the same - as soon as I stopped bringing laptop to courses and started using a paper notebook, my recall improved significantlly. If you don't have a distraction device on-hand, it's significantly harder to get distracted as soon as a lecture gets a bit more boring and doing notes forces you to pay attention to those boring bits as well.
>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)
I wonder if that could be skewed, because it only takes one request to pull up a course syllabus, but if I have Facebook Messenger open in another tab, it could be receiving updates periodically, leading to more time recorded in this experiment.
Where have vouchers proven effective? If anything, we need to follow Finland's lead and ban paying for school. Segregating students by economic class has not improved education in the United States, about the only effects are 30+% unvaccinated rates in private (mainly Catholic) schools, and strong clique effects that allow so so students from said schools to do notably better than those from nearby public schools.
Also, the local Archdiocese across the US need to get their shit together, its fucking disgusting that they are the leading cause of whooping cough, mumps and so on coming back in force and killing people.
> Also, the local Archdiocese across the US need to get their shit together,
Local dioceses, which include but are not limited to archdiocese; metropolitan archbishops have extremely limited authority over the diocese of suffragan bishops within their province, so archdioceses have no real special status here other than that they also happen to be dioceses.
> its fucking disgusting that they are the leading cause of whooping cough, mumps and so on coming back in force and killing people.
They aren't, anti-vaxxers are. There's some cases where the vaccination policy of the a particular diocese is less strict than those of public schools in the same area, and cases where the reverse is true [0]; and Catholic schools are the most common private schools in the country. So, where they have more lenient vaccination policies than public schools, they are where anti-vaxxers tend to end up, but they aren't the cause.
Finland does not have compulsory union membership for teachers, they just happen to have a large and fairly reasonable teacher's union which serves most teachers well under threat of competition.
In the U.S. and here in Canada, you are (in most places) under compulsion to pay and participate in a specific union.
Disengaged and uninterested students will find a distraction; yes, perhaps a laptop makes it easier but my education in distraction seeking during middle school, well before laptops were even close to schools, shows that the lack of a computer in front of me was no obstacle to locating something more interesting to put my attention to.
The real solution is to engage students so they don't feel the urge to get distracted in the first place. Then you could give them completely unfiltered Internet and they would still be learning (perhaps even faster, using additional resources.) You can't substitute an urge to learn, no matter if you strap them to the chairs and pin their eyeballs open with their individual fingers strapped down, it won't do anything. It just makes school less interesting, less fun, and less appealing, which makes learning by extension less fun, less appealing, and less interesting.
For real though. Many large undergrad lectures kinda run this way. I'll take the video of the lecture (many large universities record all lectures now) and just play it back at ~1.3x speed later. I can rewind, stop, and fast-forward to the stuff I know I need to know. Since the tests/HW are the only thing that matters, why would I not do it this way? It's a better use of all of our time.
A counter argument for the sake of discussion: students in the classroom can add value to the recorded lectures by engaging the professor with questions that ask to clarify, extend, etc. If there are no students left, the students rely fully on the profs ability to monologue. Could be a risk. Could dilute the lecture's potential.
I suspect a lot depends on what is meant by lecture. If it's a 500 person lecture (or conference talk, etc.), questions are mostly a distraction. In fact, at large events, I find that most speakers prefer to defer questions to the end.
In a 25 person class, even if it's nominally a lecture, I'd expect it to be far more interactive.
Yeah, at most large US universities, that's not really occurring anymore. Maybe the upper division classes in smaller majors, but most of college is a joke now. TAs really do the teaching, if at all. Lecture is not really something that is valued, even by admin. If you get more grant money, you get to teach less, or so I hear. Project based learning, where you actually build a race-car or a app or make a bronze sculpture, does prove you aren't drooling your way through. Combine that with years of using the same test over and over, and you get rampant 'cheating' issues, but I hesitate to call it cheating when the profs are confronted with it and just send out a 'strongly worded email' and that is it. Look, don't be the person at the orgy counting wedding rings. That's 'college' now. It's little surprise that most Eng. jobs won't take anyone without a MS/MSEE/MSME/etc anymore, they know college is a joke too, they were just there like 10 years ago.
As a professor, I'm increasingly trying to avoid using a computer to lecture. I'm making a lot more use of a whiteboard pen to explain things, backed up by powerpoint slides, video and audio only when I think it adds. The nice thing about using a pen is there isn't a set script - I can digress, or add extra explanation as needed. I do have detailed notes for how I plan to do the lecture, but I very rarely use those notes in lecture. As far as possible, I lecture from memory, which avoids the students thinking I'm regurgitating a script. This means the students feel much more free to ask questions, as it doesn't seem to disturb the "powerpoint show". I find lectures I give this way are much more interactive. I've asked my students which they prefer, and 95% prefer me using a pen. It seems to show in our student feedback too - I'm consistently at or very near the top in our student ranking of lecturers. The one downside is the videos of the lectures are less useful, as pen doesn't work so well on video.
This is how almost all the lectures I attended in the mid 70s (Physics, Exeter Uni.) were done. The one useless lecturer who just read the set book we tried to get fired and when that didn't work just formed a rota and noted the page numbers so that we could just precis the relevant pages at leisure. He also set the exam in the same way and as all the exams were open note we all passed with flying colours.
The other course were more challenging and more interesting.
Good on you! However, most PIs aren't like this. Their preparation is half-assed at best, and even then begrudgingly so. Thanks for taking the time and actually trying to do something. It's funny, in the ivory tower the word 'professor' has changed it's meaning somehow in the last 25 years or less. They think it means something like manager/grant-writer of grad students you get to boss around (and at least at some places, sexually harass with impunity). However, the rest of the world is still on the old definition of teacher/mentor/disseminator-of-knowledge. It's real strange to see these two ideas mix and the PIs come out on top, oddly.
Also, make sure to never ask:"Ok, now does that make sense?" after going through some real crazy math or something. It makes us feel real dumb when you do that and we then can't ask questions about it. Many PIs do that and it ticks me off to no end. It's like they really don't want to teach at all or have us interrupt their flow in any way.
We really need to begin ditching most studies. We have the ability now to collect vast amount of data and use that to make conclusions based on millions of endpoints, not just 10, 100 or 1000 pieces of information.
informed consent for scientific research is very specific and very important. It's history is somewhat intersting, but goes back to the Geneva conventions in the aftermath of WW2 and the Axis efforts on human experimentation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2328798/
This is the same as laptops not being allowed in meetings. A company where it's common for meeting participants to "take notes" on a laptop is dysfunctional. Laptops need to be banned in meetings (and smartphones in meetings and lectures).
Also re: other comments: A video lecture is to a physical lecture what a conference call is to a proper meeting. A professor rambling for 3h is still miles better than watching the same thing on YouTube. The same holds for tv versus watching a film on a movie screen.
Zero distractions and complete immersion. Maybe VR will allow it some day.
If you keep your laptop open during class, you're not just distracting yourself, you're distracting everyone behind you (that's how human attention works - if you see a bright display with moving things, your attention is drawn towards it), and that's not right. That's why at my uni, there was an unspoken (de-facto) policy that if you keep your laptop open during lectures, you're sitting in the backrows, especially if you play games or do stuff like that. It worked great - I was always in the front row with pen & paper.
However, a laptop is very useful to get work done during breaks or labs when you're actually supposed to use it.
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> In contrast with their heavy nonacademic internet use, students spent less than 5 minutes on average using the internet for class-related purposes
This is a potential methodological flaw. It takes me 5 minutes to log onto my university's VLE and download the course materials. I then read them offline. Likewise, taking notes in class happens offline.
Please excuse me for relating an experience, but it's relevant. To get into my IT grad program I had to take a few undergrad courses (my degree is in music, and I didn't have all of the pre-reqs). One course was Intro to Computer Science, which unfortunately had to be taught in the computer lab used for the programming courses. It was sad to see how undisciplined the students were. Barely anyone paid attention to the lectures as they googled the most random shit (one kid spent a whole lecture searching through images of vegetables). The final exam was open-book. I feel a little guilty, but I enjoyed seeing most of the students nervously flip through the chapters the whole time, while it took me 25 minutes to finish (the questions were nearly identical to those from previous exams).
I think its a double edge sword; not just paper > laptop or laptop > paper. As many people have already stated, its about engagement. Since coming back for my PhD, I've subscribed to the pencil/paper approach as a simple show of respect to the instructor. Despite what we think, professors are human and flawed, and being in their shoes, it can be disheartening to not be able to feed off your audience.
That being said, you can't control them; however, I like to look at different performance styles. What makes someone binge watch Netflix episodes but want to nod off during a lecture. Sure, one has less cognitive load, but replace Netflix binge with anything. People are willing to engage, as long as the medium is engaging (this doesn't mean easy or funny, simply engaging).
[Purely anecdotal opinion based discussion]
This is one of the reasons I think flipping the classroom does work; they can't tune out. But, if its purely them doing work, what's your purpose there? To babysit? There needs to be a happy median between work and lecture.
I like to look at the class time in an episodic structure. Pick a show and you'll notice there's a pattern to how the shows work. By maintaining a consistency in the classroom, the students know what to expect.
To tie it back to the article, the laptop is a great tool to use when you need them to do something on the computer. However, they should be looking at you, and you should be drawing their attention. Otherwise, you're just reading your PowerPoint slides.
>That being said, you can't control them; however, I like to look at different performance styles. What makes someone binge watch Netflix episodes but want to nod off during a lecture. Sure, one has less cognitive load, but replace Netflix binge with anything.
I personally find that if the air quality is not perfect for my needs, I tend to go drowsy really fast. Since I hate the artificially dry air, in any setting where there is either excessive heating in the winter, strong AC in the summer or too many people in a classroom where you get excessive CO2 concentrations, the attention span plummets. A 15 min break every hour helps, where you can get outside for at least 5 minutes and get some fresh air. Also, rooms that have windows that actually open are a lifesaver.
Not to be a jerk, but that's a discipline matter - you need to do what you need to do to maintain attention. Too much heating in my car in the winter and I get drowsy as well; and that's a situation where I need to be VERY engaged! If I fall asleep at the wheel, I can't blame it on the car, that was my fault. I do try to practice mindfulness, so I never let myself fall into "auto-pilot".
Breaks help and are definitely needed, the classes I've taught have been anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. I'd typically do a 1 hour block, 10 minutes and finish (or 50 min then break depending on room vibe and natural progression of material).
However, I cannot control things like AC or number of people. AC in a large-scale building is an unsolved problem as-is, I have no control over every person's thermal comfort level (plus everyone's different). In that situation, I view it more internally as "What can I do to stay engaged?" rather than "What can they do to keep me engaged?"
With more students enrolling, all you can do is offer ways to let them receive the material outside the prescribed time. No one has a photographic memory and can remember literally everything - that's why I make Khan Academy-style videos of my lectures.
I'd love to mirror a martial art class, where I can rely on more experienced students to help others, as they may be able to offer another viewpoint I skipped over (since, I already understand the material, they just figured it out). However, in a college setting, it's a harder thing to do, given its hard to convince TAs attend the class again and act as an assistant.
Repetition is a very important tool for learning, but current Western education philosophy dislikes it. I could go on, but I'm starting to ramble on a tangent...
I'd argue that students are better off without a classroom as long as they have a laptop (and internet, but that is often also better at home/cafe than in the classroom).
I went to college just as laptops were starting to become ubiquitous, but I never saw the point of them in class. I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type. Even for topics where you can write prose notes, I always found it more helpful to be able to arrange them spatially in a way that made sense rather than the limited order of a text editor or word processor.
I went to a state engineering college that provided students with tablet-style laptops so that you could fold the screen down and jot notes+diagrams with a stylus. It was really nice because some of the professors were flexible enough to accept tablet-written homework (one even required it as everybody had the requisite device).
I knew plenty of fellow students that eschewed paper notes during their time there.
The school has been purchasing laptops from the Fujitsu Lifebook T series for a few years now. They swapped out old models for each student after 4 years of use.
I loved those tablets, the stylus and screen digitizer felt top notch back when I used them.
Software-wise, most students used OneNote for note taking/annotating text and a few professors required https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Journal for assignments. Not sure the preferred approach these days as Journal seems dead.
Speaking for myself, in college (2008-2012) I used an HP EliteBook 2760p. It was a very solid device and I was able to completely eliminate carrying paper binders/folders by using that machine.
The software I used for handwritten notes was Microsoft OneNote. It was even somewhat successful at translating my scrawl into text behind the scenes in order to make my handwritten notes completely searchable.
I just want to point out that laptops for maths, engineering and science are not useless if you type sufficiently fast [1] and "master" [2] LaTeX.
And I know of one person who actually does it in chemistry, his notes are stunning and complete (which makes him love to look at them and improve them).
As for myself, I use pandoc (Markdown + LaTeX + a long set of custom commands accumulated during lectures) to take notes of mathematics (and it can get ugly sometimes with matrices, which require me to resort to SAGE generating the good LaTeX instead of me.)
And, the advantage? I can actively listen and participate to proofs while taking complete notes quickly.
As for the spatial problem, I agree that for certain topics, it makes sense, but the cost / quality provided by a laptop was a lot higher, though I take the time to do some sketch on paper and work my drafts on paper because it's a lot faster than on a computer.
Second point regarding spatial organisation: You can use mental maps to build spatial representations, along the way, there should be some tool to build any kind of spatial representation.
tl;dr: It is actually possible to take notes on laptop for subjects like maths, engineering and science thanks to tools like Pandoc and LaTeX, though it's still preferable to use paper for drafts and problem solving or to organise spatially your knowledge.
[1]: depends on your lecturer's speed, in fact.
[2]: mastered for the stuff you have to type (e.g. diagrams, advanced maths, etc…).
I think devices like the surface pro have shown that we have the technology needed for more advanced io now - we just need proper CAD programs and symbolic math packages that work well with pen/touch input - much along the lines of original Sketchpad[s].
In the same vein, I think "notebooks" of the Jupyter style for R, mathlab or Julia etc - could be a great addition to many classes - allowing interactive exploration etc.
It's an odd time to think computers won't be transformative to learning (also in the classroom) - because we just got useful hardware in affordable packaging.
True, the past decades, computers could probably help better with writing projects - but I know of few places that for example simply let students cooperate on writing up projects with their own wikimedia instance - rather than using crappy dtp/word processors.
On the other hand, I don't think I knew anyone that got top marks on essays in high school who worked only by hand - it's a slow process to work through two-three drafts of a multi-page essay by hand.
TBH Surface Pro, iPad Pro et al compared to paper is like NTSC vs 4K. The resolution and precision on digital writing surfaces are abysmal compared to paper. I tried taking notes on Surface Pro with OneNote and gave up because it feels like writing with crayons.
> I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type
I use latex for special symbols and some diagrams. I do the rest of the diagrams with some form of painting/vector program or ascii art.
> rather than the limited order of a text editor or word processor
They should try this study again, but with laptops heavily locked down. Disable just about everything that isn't productive including a strict web filter. I am willing to bet the results would be much better for the kids with laptops. Of course if you let them have free reign they are going to be more interested in entertainment than productivity.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 355 ms ] threadThe lecture format is what needs changing. You need a reason to go to class, and there was nothing worse than a professor showing slides from the pages of his own book (say) or droning through anything that could be Googled and read in less time. If there isn’t some live demonstration, or lecture-only material, regular quizzes or other hook, you can’t expect students to fully engage.
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
I imagine that many classes could be presented in a similar format. I also imagine it would be a lot of work on the part of the educators to do this.
I can imagine that taking a lot of planning and refinement over multiple offerings to get the timing just right on the exercises.
Web page for the course here:
http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/
These days, despite the textbook publishers' best efforts, the information is freely available (up until you run into paywalled research papers, but that's at a whole different level from undergrad work, mostly) but the lecture format has barely changed.
There's a reason why people demand you copy stuff down on your own.
If someone demands from you (instead of just suggesting) to copy stuff down by hand on your own it's probably because they want to fuck with you (or because they are too lazy to do actual teaching). I can see no other explanation. That was especially true during elementary, middle and high school.
Most lecturers tended to post their content online (either as a .ppt or as a scanned pdf).
People realised that with all of the notes provided in advance there wasn't a huge incentive for them to be physically present for the lectures and the theatre would get progressively emptier throughout the semester. I admit I skipped more than a few lectures during course of my degree did not feel like I missed anything particularly relevant.
At my university the lectures were supplemented by "tutorials" - wikipedia tells me this is an Australian thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial) essentially the lectures were 150+ people sitting in a theatre taught by a Professor and the tutorials were usually 10-20 people in a classroom overseen by a postgrad student. We'd spend the tutorial reviewing what was covered in the previous lecture and working through problem sets in a small group. It had the benefit that you would be able to get 1 on 1 attention from the tutor if you needed it. Most lecturers would not even field questions during their lectures whilst the tutors would allow you to email them question etc outside of classroom which was very helpful.
That's a bit of a straw-man - nobody said anything about turning every student in to star pupils, it's a matter of degrees.
There is no question in my mind that a device capable of being online, using social media, and that is constantly pushing information at you is going to be a higher level distraction than a pen and paper. Reducing that level of distraction will be beneficial for many students, even if they only pay attention to 30% of the lecture instead of 15%, that's still an improvement.
So the answer to “what if?” question is really just that students are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes, and figuring out that laptops are a liability is part of that.
1) Eager learners who have reflected on the same material before coming in, to the extent that they know the gaps in their understanding.
2) A lecturer who is above the students' level (on the material) and willing/able to answer arbitrary questions about the topic.
3) Students keeping up and asking questions to ensure that they stay that way (but not so often that progress crawls to a halt).
That was probably typical of medieval universities that taught that way (just a guess though, haven't actually researched it).
Today? Not so much, and so the typical lecture is almost pure waste.
If so why are there any non-eager learners?
>In this case, however, boredom was not the answer – at least not entirely. Students who reported lower interest in the class did tend to have lower exam scores, but this relationship did not account for the relationship between internet use and exam performance.
Personally, I'm very happy that we have devices that are capable of doing so many things.
There are technological tools to help you. There are psychological tools to help you. You can call upon your friends and family for help.
But for gods' sake, don't blame the computer. That's not going to help anyone.
[1] - Addiction by Design (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Addiction-Design-Machine-Gambling-V...)
[2] - Chomsky on Advertising (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CFwSQiTu3I&t=186s)
I think most solutions to the problem are far too complex and this shall suit my needs just fine.
If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.
Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.
Most people do grow up tho.
There's a very specific part of the brain responsible for the movement planning and fine motor control required for writing. Some folks have it underdeveloped, and need to spend an inordinate amount of effort and concentration in order to write. And even then, their writing will often degrade over time as they fatigue.
I first head about Dysgraphia 10 right here though - the symptoms a familiar enough for a self-diagnosis, but as all self-diagnosis there might be something else.
Although in grad school I never used to a digital method of annotating papers and did it by hand anyway.
This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school.
That's bullshit of the same level as "I can take faster and better notes with my laptop". No you can't. You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams, you can't draw small maps quickly and properly as you can by hand. You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
"But it is searchable". Wonderful. As if you used to be lost in a 30 pages long course (which has a logical organisation and/or progression) that anyway you have to learn one way or another, by practice or rote memorisation.
There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Laptop in a classroom are used to play, browse the web and social networks; the rest are made-up justifications to be allowed to bring them.
>There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Have you used org-mode? I really like the ability to organise many notes, link them together (like a small personal wiki) and others. Typing is also significantly less fatiguing, at least for my hands, and I suspect at equal or even faster speed, though I have nothing to back that up, I can type at around 110wpm comfortably.
Typing notes also comes in quite handy if the course comes with digital material. You can copy that graph in, you don't have to draw it out. Tablet-laptops (if there's a word for them, I don't know it) let you draw diagrams with ease. It may also benefit to record what the lecturer is saying with the laptop's microphone, though you can do that with a separate device, it's more useful and convenient to have that as embedded media in your notes.
It also means you can do things other than note-taking. If the course requires some amount of memorisation of facts with definite answers, you can use spaced repetition flashcard programs such as Anki, and fill them in during the lecture, or better, copy-and-paste from your typed up lecture notes. This is especially useful for definitions of things.
Whether laptops are used as they could be used is a different matter, and my own lecturers have told me anecdotes of their misusage, though I think it's unwise to stop people who would otherwise use them well from using them. The people who misuse their laptops will find that not paying attention has consequences.
I had the same kind of problem since elementary school, I was first allowed to use a computer during class in uni.
> That's bullshit
Just because it doesn't occur to you it does not mean that it's not true. Just because you started paying attention to it now it does not mean that it wasn't there before either.
> No you can't
Well, you might not be able to but many people can.
> You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams
Sure you can. There are many tools for this job, both text and graphical ones.
> You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
With Latex + Emacs I can type fancy mathematical formulas much faster and much more aligned than when writing them down.
> There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down
Except that writing down notes for me and for many other people is useless, tiresome and distracting.
As a side note, if you actually need/want to take notes on an electronic device such a laptop, it doesn't mean that the device MUST have a browser AND be connected to the internet. If there was a word processor ONLY laptop with no browser nor games on it, air-gaped from the internet, THEN it would be just a matter of preferences.
And I would go a bit further on the handwriting (excluded medical conditions) having a decently readable handwriting only costs some time in exercising wanting to better it, and it is a form of respect towards yourself (when you have to re-read your notes) and towards others that may need to read what you write.
Maybe you will manage to live your whole life only writing "electronically" but why risking to be unable to communicate in handwriting?
Once upon a time you couldn't get past first few years of elementary schools unless you had a decent handwriting, no need for it to be "beautiful" or "calligraphic", only readable.
The fact that it may be slower than typing ( and this BTW happens only for exceptionally fast and accurate typists) it's not in itself a bad thing, while you write by hand you somehow need more concentration to avoid mis-spelling as you haven't the equivalent of a backspace (or in some cases a spelling corrector) and this usually helps for memorizing what you are writing while you write it.
They stopped making them in 2013.
Tons of journal articles on this are available if you look.
I have a feeling that people who aren't paying attention weren't going to anyhow.
However, I'd also guess that at least some people use the computer to look up additional information instead of stopping the class and asking, which helps everyone involved.
No it doesn't. Practically the only point of lectures is so students can ask questions. Otherwise just read the material and don't go. Moreover there are probably others in the class too shy to ask the same question, but at worst it reinforces everyone else's learning.
Are you sure about that? Intuitively, wouldn't it be the opposite? Asking questions results in the teacher giving an answer that can benefit the whole class, whereas if you just look something up yourself you're the only one who benefits from that additional piece of information.
Lectures still serve to help for more difficult questions, and the time is better spent on them instead.
15 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the US.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
Choose any other well-regarded ranking and you'll get similar results.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/shanghai-r...
You're part of the problem.
I also like 15-minute meetings or less. Other folks seem fine with multi-hour meetings where everyone is goofing off on his laptop.
We're not animals, we don't get born with instincts. This is why humans require education and upbringing to teach. And yes, this (gasp!) sometimes means you need to make a non-adult person to do something against their first whim.
And I don't disagree that there's a degree of difference between hiding a comic book behind a textbook and having a machine that can likely grant instant access to the majority of comics, movies, games, etc., known to humankind, not to mentions texting, chatting, snapchats, social media, etc.
But I think it's ludicrous to think someone's ready for college if they don't have the self control to not give in to that temptation for a 50 minute lecture.
It's not the laptop that created uncommitted just-show-up-ism and incessant digital nothing-chatter or the thoughtless and blasé acceptance of app-based magic voodoo without thought towards its implications.
There's a much larger and more omnipresent failure at play. Deciding not to put games on your phone shouldn't be an amazing and praiseworthy anomaly.
Human beings don't lack for volition when sufficiently aware of it.
I took lots notes. Some people claim it's pointless and distracts from learning but for me the act of taking notes is what helped solidify the concepts a better. Heck due to my horrible handwriting I couldn't even read some of the notes later. But it was still worth it. Typing them out just wasn't the same.
That's the key I think! The forced paraphrasing (while summarizing) helps process the information better.
I wonder if that could be skewed, because it only takes one request to pull up a course syllabus, but if I have Facebook Messenger open in another tab, it could be receiving updates periodically, leading to more time recorded in this experiment.
Maybe the best way out of this mess is vouchers.
If the schools are functioning, it should be obvious to them that the laptops are not working out.
Also, the local Archdiocese across the US need to get their shit together, its fucking disgusting that they are the leading cause of whooping cough, mumps and so on coming back in force and killing people.
Local dioceses, which include but are not limited to archdiocese; metropolitan archbishops have extremely limited authority over the diocese of suffragan bishops within their province, so archdioceses have no real special status here other than that they also happen to be dioceses.
> its fucking disgusting that they are the leading cause of whooping cough, mumps and so on coming back in force and killing people.
They aren't, anti-vaxxers are. There's some cases where the vaccination policy of the a particular diocese is less strict than those of public schools in the same area, and cases where the reverse is true [0]; and Catholic schools are the most common private schools in the country. So, where they have more lenient vaccination policies than public schools, they are where anti-vaxxers tend to end up, but they aren't the cause.
[0] Texas is, apparently, an example of the latter, since public schools accept religious exemptions but the Catholic schools do not. http://staugustinecs.org/archdiocese-statement-on-immunzatio...
In the U.S. and here in Canada, you are (in most places) under compulsion to pay and participate in a specific union.
The real solution is to engage students so they don't feel the urge to get distracted in the first place. Then you could give them completely unfiltered Internet and they would still be learning (perhaps even faster, using additional resources.) You can't substitute an urge to learn, no matter if you strap them to the chairs and pin their eyeballs open with their individual fingers strapped down, it won't do anything. It just makes school less interesting, less fun, and less appealing, which makes learning by extension less fun, less appealing, and less interesting.
The next cut some students come to class, put a recorder on their desk and leave, then pick it up later.
Eventually there's a scene of the professor lecturing to a bunch of empty desks with just recorders.
And the final scene there's the professor's tape player playing to the student's recorders.
In a 25 person class, even if it's nominally a lecture, I'd expect it to be far more interactive.
The other course were more challenging and more interesting.
Also, make sure to never ask:"Ok, now does that make sense?" after going through some real crazy math or something. It makes us feel real dumb when you do that and we then can't ask questions about it. Many PIs do that and it ticks me off to no end. It's like they really don't want to teach at all or have us interrupt their flow in any way.
No lectures.
Office hours if needed. Had to listen to tapes in chem building
(jimmy Carter president)
Also re: other comments: A video lecture is to a physical lecture what a conference call is to a proper meeting. A professor rambling for 3h is still miles better than watching the same thing on YouTube. The same holds for tv versus watching a film on a movie screen.
Zero distractions and complete immersion. Maybe VR will allow it some day.
However, a laptop is very useful to get work done during breaks or labs when you're actually supposed to use it.
This is a potential methodological flaw. It takes me 5 minutes to log onto my university's VLE and download the course materials. I then read them offline. Likewise, taking notes in class happens offline.
Internet use does not reflect computer use.
That being said, you can't control them; however, I like to look at different performance styles. What makes someone binge watch Netflix episodes but want to nod off during a lecture. Sure, one has less cognitive load, but replace Netflix binge with anything. People are willing to engage, as long as the medium is engaging (this doesn't mean easy or funny, simply engaging).
[Purely anecdotal opinion based discussion] This is one of the reasons I think flipping the classroom does work; they can't tune out. But, if its purely them doing work, what's your purpose there? To babysit? There needs to be a happy median between work and lecture.
I like to look at the class time in an episodic structure. Pick a show and you'll notice there's a pattern to how the shows work. By maintaining a consistency in the classroom, the students know what to expect.
To tie it back to the article, the laptop is a great tool to use when you need them to do something on the computer. However, they should be looking at you, and you should be drawing their attention. Otherwise, you're just reading your PowerPoint slides.
I personally find that if the air quality is not perfect for my needs, I tend to go drowsy really fast. Since I hate the artificially dry air, in any setting where there is either excessive heating in the winter, strong AC in the summer or too many people in a classroom where you get excessive CO2 concentrations, the attention span plummets. A 15 min break every hour helps, where you can get outside for at least 5 minutes and get some fresh air. Also, rooms that have windows that actually open are a lifesaver.
Breaks help and are definitely needed, the classes I've taught have been anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. I'd typically do a 1 hour block, 10 minutes and finish (or 50 min then break depending on room vibe and natural progression of material).
However, I cannot control things like AC or number of people. AC in a large-scale building is an unsolved problem as-is, I have no control over every person's thermal comfort level (plus everyone's different). In that situation, I view it more internally as "What can I do to stay engaged?" rather than "What can they do to keep me engaged?"
With more students enrolling, all you can do is offer ways to let them receive the material outside the prescribed time. No one has a photographic memory and can remember literally everything - that's why I make Khan Academy-style videos of my lectures.
I'd love to mirror a martial art class, where I can rely on more experienced students to help others, as they may be able to offer another viewpoint I skipped over (since, I already understand the material, they just figured it out). However, in a college setting, it's a harder thing to do, given its hard to convince TAs attend the class again and act as an assistant.
Repetition is a very important tool for learning, but current Western education philosophy dislikes it. I could go on, but I'm starting to ramble on a tangent...
I knew plenty of fellow students that eschewed paper notes during their time there.
Back when I attended, most people were on the Fujitsu Lifebook t901 I think, but looking at their IT site now, the latest models the school uses are http://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/pc/tablets/....
I loved those tablets, the stylus and screen digitizer felt top notch back when I used them.
Software-wise, most students used OneNote for note taking/annotating text and a few professors required https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Journal for assignments. Not sure the preferred approach these days as Journal seems dead.
The software I used for handwritten notes was Microsoft OneNote. It was even somewhat successful at translating my scrawl into text behind the scenes in order to make my handwritten notes completely searchable.
I just want to point out that laptops for maths, engineering and science are not useless if you type sufficiently fast [1] and "master" [2] LaTeX.
And I know of one person who actually does it in chemistry, his notes are stunning and complete (which makes him love to look at them and improve them).
As for myself, I use pandoc (Markdown + LaTeX + a long set of custom commands accumulated during lectures) to take notes of mathematics (and it can get ugly sometimes with matrices, which require me to resort to SAGE generating the good LaTeX instead of me.)
And, the advantage? I can actively listen and participate to proofs while taking complete notes quickly.
As for the spatial problem, I agree that for certain topics, it makes sense, but the cost / quality provided by a laptop was a lot higher, though I take the time to do some sketch on paper and work my drafts on paper because it's a lot faster than on a computer.
Second point regarding spatial organisation: You can use mental maps to build spatial representations, along the way, there should be some tool to build any kind of spatial representation.
tl;dr: It is actually possible to take notes on laptop for subjects like maths, engineering and science thanks to tools like Pandoc and LaTeX, though it's still preferable to use paper for drafts and problem solving or to organise spatially your knowledge.
[1]: depends on your lecturer's speed, in fact.
[2]: mastered for the stuff you have to type (e.g. diagrams, advanced maths, etc…).
In the same vein, I think "notebooks" of the Jupyter style for R, mathlab or Julia etc - could be a great addition to many classes - allowing interactive exploration etc.
It's an odd time to think computers won't be transformative to learning (also in the classroom) - because we just got useful hardware in affordable packaging.
True, the past decades, computers could probably help better with writing projects - but I know of few places that for example simply let students cooperate on writing up projects with their own wikimedia instance - rather than using crappy dtp/word processors.
On the other hand, I don't think I knew anyone that got top marks on essays in high school who worked only by hand - it's a slow process to work through two-three drafts of a multi-page essay by hand.
[s] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
I use latex for special symbols and some diagrams. I do the rest of the diagrams with some form of painting/vector program or ascii art.
> rather than the limited order of a text editor or word processor
What do you mean by that?