I've seen issues in meetings with this too. It's great for follow-up to be typing notes in the meeting, but it takes a lot of discipline for it not to devolve, and it's tough on speakers to discuss when everyone else is heads down.
I personally would be absolutely hamstrung without a laptop in meetings. My own handwriting is notoriously messy (I am only to blame for not practicing it enough to be any good, but that's almost a tradeoff for working in front of a computer nearly 24/7) and FAR slower than typing. I'm also unable to use text editor style shortcuts,reformat after the fact for clarity, or readily keep track off/move around documents. I found the exact things they claimed happened to laptop note takers, being a 'zombie', to be what happened when I tried to take notes by hand. This also doesn't convince me when taken in concert that when aggressively pushed onto the "YOU MUST TAKE PHYSICAL NOTES WITH NO DISTRACTIONS" bandwagon for most of my primary schooling, which was, to put it lightly, less than successful.
This overly rambly anecdote should serve to illustrate not that I think laptops are "the right answer", but getting rid of them unilaterally will really harm those who actually have learned to incorporate them into a useful workflow. Why not address some more root causes, e.g. why engagement is so low? Facebook doesn't "force" you to browse it, and maybe I'm acting snoody in this, but there are certainly classes that I wouldn't be caught playing my favorite video games during for the subject matter being so interesting.
Is the optimal situation where everyone can see what the note-taker is writing? Has anyone done this?
To stay engaged, I've used the scrawl now and type later method, which means the notes never get out early enough. They do allow me to reflect on them though.
I realize this is one of the "better" examples, but it's certainly close to home for HN, but would you really argue that recorded audio and drawn diagrams are more useful for CS/algorithms courses than some typed snippets and pseudocode? That was at least where having a laptop in class really paid off for me.
Different people process information differently; for me seeing an abstract diagram of say, a B-Tree, would be more useful than a pseudo-code overview of the structure (at least first - the code might be useful once I had an grasp of the idea from the diagram). That's just me, though, different people learn differently.
Hyperbole sure, but I was an on class student who paid for distance learning because I preferred the freedom to take the class on my time, on 2x speed, and with the ability to pause and look things up. It was never worth it to go back to class.
It begs the question: maybe it's the teaching method, and not the tool.
"These examples can be seen as the progeny of an ill-conceived union of twenty-first-century tools (computers, tablets, smartphones) with nineteenth-century modalities (lectures)."
Anecdotally fits in with my experience. I always sat at the back off the lecture theatre (but its only 20 rows deep), and the people with laptops were almost always doing something other than paying full attention to the lecturer. I used to leave my phone in my dorm lest I end up checking out a tech blog and be completely lost of the rest of the lecture
In the lower grades, I think a case can be made that during the time they are in class, students should not have any other demands on their time.
In contrast, with college students, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that -- at least occasionally -- a student may need to "check out" from a lecture momentarily to deal with some pressing business, even if it means that he has to spend time later asking a classmate to fill him in on what he missed.
For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away.
This is all the sort of stuff I encounter regularly in the working world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that college students encounter it, too.
Being able to keep open a laptop to deal with things like this is a lot less distracting than having to step outside the lecture hall to take an urgent phone call.
Yes, putting away the laptops might slightly increase students' abilities to soak up the material, but (sorry, professors) sometimes the class you're sitting in is not your top priority, and sometimes that's OK. I occasionally had to skip class to chase down a hot story for the school newspaper, and I don't regret it a bit. So long as the student is using the privilege responsibly, I say let 'em keep the laptop open!
As other posters have said, just leave the damn room to take a call.
But seriously, are you so incredibly important that you cannot spend 60 minutes listening to a lecture?
This generation (and yes I know that includes me) seem to have an incredibly inflated sense of self-worth, as if they're the centre of the universe.
It's like those idiots who can't stop texting in the damn movie.
The world will keep spinning if you don't answer that tweet for an hour - trust me.
I had this exact same argument with a friend last week when we went to a three-hatted restaurant, and she insisted she needed to check her phone every few minutes, because apparently people would "panic" if they couldn't get in touch with her via chat.
Surely if you're paying $200 for a dinner, you can at least enjoy the dinner and company around you without needing to tweet every 5 minutes.
I think it would be considered rude to open up a full laptop and type out an email in the middle of a business meeting. But I do occasionally check my phone and even reply on it during meetings if it's not distracting. Anything more should require leaving the situation to open up a laptop.
I think it's the norm where I've worked that everyone starts meetings with their laptops already open. Sometimes it's not even really possible to participate without one, since people will expect you to refer to a PDF in the last email or go to an intranet site and whatnot. And lots of people take notes on the laptop as well, rather than relying on pen & paper.
If it was a business meeting in the sense of meeting with someone external to the organization, that might be different, but internal meetings are very laptop-oriented.
I don't think I've ever been in a scheduled meeting where at least one person wasn't actively using a laptop. Hell, even in the mid-90s, when I'd visit my dad's offices, I saw people going into meetings with what then passed for laptops all the time.
How many emails do you really get that are so urgent that they couldn't wait an hour? Why can't your babysitter text you (or, just IM on your smartphone)? Why are you the only person who can fix said critical bug (if it's fixable through the CMS, others should be able to handle it, if not, well, why are you running such terrible infrastructure when there are dozens of mature platforms?).
Also, for things that are legitimately small and quick, it's surprising what you can get done with an SSH client on your phone - if it needs more than that, you're likely going to miss the rest of the lecture anyway, so why not leave?
For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away.
This isn't strictly a reply to jawns, but it's on a related topic that I've wondered about.
Fifteen years ago, such instantaneous, ubiquitous communication was very rare. I went through college without having instant notification of anything whatsoever, as did pretty much everyone I knew at the time.
Babysitters ran into issues fifteen years ago; there were bugs in websites fifteen years ago; there were critical emails being sent out fifteen years ago, but nobody expected constant, instant feedback because it was implausible, and everyone was okay with that.
Are our problems today really that much more urgent than they were then, that we truly need to be constantly connected? Or is this imaginary, and since we in theory can respond instantly, people now expect that we must?
I don't think the issue is if we need to respond urgently, but rather if we want to respond urgently. Sure you can wait an hour until the end of lecture, but maybe you want to develop a capability and a reputation for putting out fires quickly. Do I really need to justify the value of this to the professor?
The question is if I'm paying for a lecture is it reasonable for them to mandate my own non-disruptive activities in lecture. I don't think so.
We also need to consider that professors are egotistical creatures (as all humans are), so they're going to oppose anything that detracts from the perceived value of their work. What's the balance here between improving student welfare and making professors happy?
A good point! After my comment above, I started thinking, well, a hundred years ago we expected response times in days or weeks via mail, rather than within hours via telephone or email. With the introduction of the telephone, there may well have been some people who felt communicating that quickly was needlessly rushed.
I guess I still retain the wondering, though; with possible response times reduced to effectively instantaneous, are we losing anything? Is it good that anything we are doing can always be interrupted by something else?
Most pressing mails can wait few hours and lecture will most likely end up after 90 minutes or sooner. Your critical bug will not be solved withing five minutes and campus newspaper's website being down for few hours is no big deal anyway. Finally, I would really like which school newspaper has so hot stories that you have to run to.
And if it is really so critical, they can send text message on your muted phone and you will have to leave the lecture anyway.
I'm not saying I want to ban laptops, just that your examples are very unconvincing. I get it, the class is very low priority to you, but if you are going to regularly fix bugs or write emails and then ask other to fill you in, you will be disturbing to others.
>> campus newspaper's website being down for few hours is no big deal anyway
I'm glad you didn't work for my campus newspaper.
Several other people have echoed your comment that these are things that you can just as easily handle on your phone. But I think that misses the bigger point. If a professor can ban laptops, he can ban phones and tablets and all other communication devices.
My overarching point is that devoting 100% of one's attention to a college lecture is not only not always necessary, but in some cases, not desirable; there are legitimate reasons why a student attending a lecture may want to receive communications, and legitimate reasons why he may wish to respond to those communications immediately.
UC Berkeley student here; laptop bannings are actually relatively common in lectures. I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away.
A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material.
> A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material.
If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office.
Full disclosure, I only skimmed this paper, but I'd say this study has very little in common with the actual scenario of a good professor giving a stimulating lecture.
People learn and take notes differently, students should be granted the respect to do whatever works best for them, professors' egos be damned.
EDIT: Not to mention these students are paying customers....if they choose to waste their time in class, that's up to them.
> I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away.
I had a professor that would make the student using the laptop come up to the front of the room and finish giving the lecture. He said he picked it up from Nabokov.
Not that laptops in the classroom are the solution, but in general we need to change the teaching strategy in lower and higher education any way. We need high-tech, 2014+ ready educational facilities, curricula and teaching strategies. Laptops can certainly be distracting but trying to maintain the status quo isn't going to benefit anyone.
Do you have some concrete suggestions? I personally think that the place for high-tech solutions is for homework and maybe lab sections, not disrupting lectures.
So, I could get on my soapbox of "your students are adults, let them make their own decisions on note taking" or go on about how useful I found a calendar for remembering class schedules, but:
> We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low.
Really? I found it fairly easy to type out full equations in LaTeX using LyX. Maybe the laptop isn't the problem, but that you only introduce your students to the most basic of word processors.
My mom's a music teacher and this reminded me of a letter she wrote to the local newspaper after discovering they want to buy more computers for the classroom. Here goes:
I'm not denying that I am hopelessly old and outdated, but reading the article on Technology Needs for School District (May 15, 2014) literally made me cry; for two reasons. First, because the people who are in charge of education are actually going to do it, and second, that the Livingston parent community is so enthusiastic about it.
There is no doubt that computers are useful and that the Internet gives access to such a scope of information so quickly that is not available nor accessible through any other means. But how do they impact children's overall DEVELOPMENT? How do they impact their attention? With the pandemic of Attention Deficit Disorder, how can we be so blind not to notice the connection between children's attention span and the time they spend on the computer? I started teaching piano more than 30 years ago. EVERY child was capable to remember which note he had to play, with which finger, how to hold the finger and whether he had to play long or short, loud or soft - simultaneously. Now it is typical that when a child pays attention to what note it is, he does not notice which finger; if he remembers the finger – does not notice how loud, etc. I rarely see children that can actually focus on the task for longer than 20 seconds. I often ask parents, “How much time does your child spend on the computer?” The connection is direct: the less time on computer – the better the student's focus, the longer she can concentrate on the assignment. I happened to teach an elderly lady who brought a music book with her teacher's remarks dated 1958. She was nervous, “Will you quit on me? I forgot everything.” I answered (only half-jokingly), “Of course not, you are my only student with a normal attention span!”
Even though I observe 400+ students in my music school, can it be just coincidence?
What does the beloved Internet tell us about the impact of computer use has on the brain? Nothing encouraging. As an example, there is a student work in biology (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336, 2007) that summarizes finding on the topic. It states what I suspected: computers often conflict with the activities that are needed for one to develop the ability to pay attention; the list of scientific works is attached there. And if you still like long books, N. Carr addresses the issue in his “The Shallows: What Internet is Doing to Our Brains.”
What are we doing? Are we trying to compensate for having poor teachers with technology? Why do we adhere to such a naive belief that computers are the solution to problems in schools, thinking that “the more of them - the better” automatically? Maybe it's better to invest in teachers' training? Maybe we need to raise the prestige of the teaching profession? I participated in a “professional orientation” day in LHS several years ago. Seniors had an opportunity to meet with representatives of their prospective field. I saw crowds of seniors following “Lawyers” and “Accountants”. In the “Teachers” room, a retired Harrison school teacher and myself, who were assigned to lead the meeting, found 4 or 5 girls. Only one of them really wanted to be a teacher, knew what is involved and why she wanted it. Everyone else said, “I do not know”, “I am not sure”.. . Why do we expect our children will be enthusiastic about learning if teachers themselves “do not know”?.. And how computers can help?
The more that children use computers, the less opportunities they have for human interaction. By increasing the role of computers in children's lives we bend human nature, we consciously under-develop the younger generation; we deprive our children of full development of their communication skills, ability to build relat...
I don't find this convincing at all. I'm a classically trained pianist and cellist. I studied music at the undergraduate level, and am a former part-time working musician, and a current computer programmer. I grew up with computers and used them far more than my classmates, and I got onto the internet before the world-wide web existed. I continue to take music lessons and feel like I'm learning and performing better than ever.
If what she's saying were true, we'd be seeing a significant drop in the quality of students entering music school and entering the job market. I don't see that happening. Does she? Are there fewer qualified students entering music programs? While symphonies are having trouble finding funding due to lack of interest, I don't see finding qualified musicians being a problem. What about other types of music? Are they seeing these issues? There seem to be plenty of bands of various styles out there playing in my town.
When I was a kid, I spent hours per day on my computer - mostly CREATING music. (Listening to music the way it's done today on the computer wasn't feasible.) I spent hours communicating with other musicians about how to improve my skills as a musician, and nowadays, I spend hours on the computer finding, listening to and studying music as well. It can be a wonderful tool for music.
Perhaps there's something else going on with your mother's students in addition to or besides the computers? Maybe the problem isn't the computers but specifically social media, or something along those lines? Regardless, her conclusions about what computers do to students are out of line with reality.
One of the side points the author raised was interesting: namely, that there's a lack of good tooling for taking mathematical-notation heavy notes efficiently on laptop ... maybe some sort of Markdown with inline LaTeX (plain LaTeX is too much of a hassle to do paragraph/list formatting in). It shouldn't be technically difficult to build, it just oddly doesn't seem to exist yet.
In my experience, LaTeX is not really a worthy alternative to writing formulas by hand. Sure, you should absolutely use LaTeX for typesetting mathematical reports and the like, but LaTeX does not stand a chance against pen and paper when it comes to taking notes or doing calculations. The world needs tooling that is much more similar to writing formulas on a paper in its interface. At the moment, I also fail to see any benefit at all in using laptops in mathematics education.
If instructors really wanted to raise the quality of their classroom environments, instead of banning laptops, they'd commit to posting all their lectures, slides and announcements online and tell students that if they don't want to be there in person that they don't need to be.
Many people don't see the point in being physically present to hear someone talk and point at slides. Those that do, and aren't just attending because you might spring a surprise announcement or pop quiz on them, will be there to pay attention.
Because a good lecturer will do more than just read off his or her slides, and if they tell students the slides will be available than many of them won't show up, and will miss out good material.
Video-recording the lectures is another thing entirely, but if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises.
(I do realize that there are lots of horrible lecturers out there who do nothing more than read off the PowerPoint that comes with the textbook, but I think the correct approach to that is to re-work the tenure system to promote good lecturers as well as good researchers, not abolish lectures.)
One of the problems with lectures is that they tend to be geared towards the lowest common denominator. The great thing about the few of my college courses that provided online lectures was that I could go through them at my own pace and not be bored out of my mind for 90min of a 2hr lecture.
>> if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises.
I strongly disagree. Many lectures aren't structured to include or allow these activities, and many students don't need or want to participate in them. Those students are the ones who sit behind their laptops the whole period, and everyone would be better served if they didn't have to come to lecture in person.
This is so true for me though. I've discovered that I learn more when I'm not taking notes.
Especially in Maths or CS where classrooms are great for building intuition or easing into a subject but textbooks are ubiquitous and easy to read.
Copying down a proof doesn't help me at all but doing it along with a professor (each mental step is easy to hold on to) gives me so much better results.
College students are adults, why don't we let them decide how they use their class time. If someone wants to pay to go to a university just to waste class time on a computer, that's their loss. For others, note taking on a laptop might be more efficient. Personally, I have terrible handwriting and would prefer to take notes digitally.
If someone is seriously distracting people around them, then it makes sense to tell them to put their laptop away
Personally from my college experience I know that I have used my laptop in lectures for both good and evil. I have legitimately used it to google work, ideas and to open tabs on papers/etc. to read later. I also used to write code in all my programming lectures because programming lectures were dull otherwise, might as well make use of the time. However, there are many times I have opened up reddit or HN during lectures and 'checked-out' as the article suggested.
Sometimes I have paid for not listening to the lecture but the majority of the time it doesn't matter. The idea that I learned my college curriculum in lectures would be a joke. As a computer science student I learnt my trade in the labs and tutorials and interactive courses rarely from listening to a lecturer explain X, Y or Z.
The better the lecturer or the harder the module the more laptops that were closed in my lectures. My compiler design course for example, infamous for being the most difficult module no one dared open the laptop as there was too much knowledge to consume.
Lecturers can easily do a self-assessment survey of how engaged their class is and how interestingly they are presenting their material but how many heads are hidden behind laptop screens.
For the one lecturer who did ban laptops I have to say I went to absolutely none of his lectures unless I had coursework to submit. I found it a bit presumptuous that he could demand I close my laptop, I was not distracting him or disturbing the class.
You don't learn in lectures where lecturers read their slides to you laptop open or not. If the lecturers are going to waste my time with pointless reading of slides then I might as well do something useful on my laptop like my coursework or just read hacker news.
> "A wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed."
The problem is the lecture!
Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing rarely engages anyone -- push students away from material they don't care about. If students are engaged and laptops impede them, they'll put them away themselves. If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than being lectured at will make them care.
If you have to ban something, ban the lecture and teachers who rely on lecturing at the expense of empathy and compassion for students.
Students are people like you and me. We use laptops in our work when they help and put them away when they don't. If we want students to learn about the world and how to succeed in it, let them work like we work, solving problems like we solve. Experiential, project-based learning does this automatically, at least with effective teachers. Lecturing doesn't. If you had a job you couldn't quit where your manager lectured at you all the time you'd get out your computer too.
> Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing will rarely engage anyone -- are the problem ... If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than you droning on in front of them will make them care.
University students who have no interest in a course's material have no business being enrolled in that course. These are adults who are there voluntarily, and should be expected to participate in their own education without instructors jumping through hoops to engage them. A lecture is an opportunity for students to hear from an expert about a topic that should be of interest to them. Of course teachers should strive to present information in a way that's accessible and captivating, but even the driest lecture is no excuse to space out. It is not really feasible to compete for students' attention with the information equivalent of junk food while presenting and explaining serious, in-depth material.
I entirely disagree. You cannot put all the onus on the students when departments and degrees require classes that hold no interest to the pupil.
Sure, I'll give you that this may apply for 4th (and perhaps 3rd) year classes and post grads. However, most entry level courses are mindless drivel and a complete waste of both the student's and instructor's time (English 100 anyone?), although are 'required' to continue on (or get that degree). Academia doesn't fit happily into your little box.
The dryest lecture may not be an excuse to space out, but good luck. You may be the perfect pupil, attentive to every single word a lecturer says for 3 hours—most people though can't even listen and process past 45 minutes. I personally can listen for a while, but get bored... lectures rarely move fast enough for me and can rarely keep my attention unless actually stimulating.
Academics is a two way street, both the pupil and instructor must participate in order for a successful transfer of knowledge. How many instructors have you had that teach their course right from a textbook without anything added? Lazy instructors create lazy and bored students.
And yet you are quoting the description of a study that concluded that closed laptops = better understanding of the lecture, regardless of whether the students find the teacher engaging or not.
Your reply is a bit like saying "the solution to conflicts around the world is for people to love each other". How does one go and apply this solution to make the world a better place now?
It could be the case that the ideal solution is better teachers, but we aren't talking about ideal solutions, we are talking about practical ones. If banning laptops makes student achieve better grades - then it's worth considering doing so.
How about teaching students not to distract themselves?
I am serious about it. Students are going to live and work with Internet and all distractions. They need this ability that like others it is learned and nurtured.
There are lots of good programs out there. Today this knowledge is as important as Mathematics. Probably more important for some people.
I have studied a lot in order to be able to work productively from home. It is very easy once you know lots of little things.
I could scientifically proof to any person how much she destroys her productivity just multitasking, using very simple things, like video cameras(which everybody has in her phone) and paper, because I have studied the psychology that fools ourselves into believing we could watch facebook and a lecture at the same time.
In my experience teaching people this works wonders. Without it, they are lost. They want something(get good grades, work with less effort), but they don't know how to do it.
About a programming class without computers, I will fire the teacher whose idea is banning laptops instantly. I am engineer and program computers for a living, with experience teaching people. They are incompetent if they can't control students with computers. If they are so boring the students prefer to browse Internet in class, then the problem is the teacher, not the student.
Programming lectures without laptops work great (though it may help for the lecturer has a laptop and can show examples). If you want the students to follow along, that's what lab section is for (at least where I did undergrad, most of the programming classes had one). I've TA'd some of those lab sections, and there are a shocking number of ways the students can fail to manage to follow along with the examples without extensive hand-holding. Which they absolutely should get, and which they absolutely need a computer for, but a lecture with dozens of students and a unit of theory to get through is not the time for it.
I agree with the comments about lectures being bad (usually) and teachers needing to engage with students, but electronic distractions also make it harder for teachers to effectively engage.
This is not meant to denigrate the posters in this thread, but I get the sense that most a) are different than the average student and b) have not been teachers. The second point in particular is important because people who have faced the challenges teachers face may have domain knowledge that non-teachers lack.
If I chose to spend thousands of dollars so I can goof off during a lecture, that's my prerogative. I don't need some to dictate what's in my best interest.
My PowerBook was a huge boon for me in college. I write far better notes with a laptop than with pen and paper. What's more, I was able to multitask in ways that are simply impossible without a computer. If I were to encounter a teacher arrogant enough to ban laptops from his presence, I would simply refuse to take any of his classes, even if they were mandatory. I would literally chose another school before leaving my laptop at home.
It's not just about you though. In a lecture of 100+ people on laptops, you're bound to have plenty of distracting people browsing youtube, watching flashy videos or somesuch.
That sort of thing can affect the people around you negatively. In that regard, it's hardly any different than asking the hall to be silent while the lecture is on, rather than everyone chatting out loud.
Multi-tasking seems to be the way most people nowadays operate, but it doesn't mean people are doing a better job at more things. It means they are addicted to multi-tasking and they are incapable of actually being present for longer than a few moments. Perhaps these people are better at transitioning from one thing to the next, but I wonder if that applies to disparate tasks - my guess is that it doesn't transfer itself particularly well to new, complex skills.
Being able to say "no" to distraction is crucial to the ability to be "in the present". This isn't license to be an a-hole of course, just permission to say to yourself "I have many things I need to do, but I'm going to focus on this ONE THING right now".
I used class time mostly as a chance to VPN and work, for the scant amount of time I was actually in class.
I did not give two shits about the lectures; the material is presented better in the book. Professors, from my perspective, were paid to administer tests.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadThis overly rambly anecdote should serve to illustrate not that I think laptops are "the right answer", but getting rid of them unilaterally will really harm those who actually have learned to incorporate them into a useful workflow. Why not address some more root causes, e.g. why engagement is so low? Facebook doesn't "force" you to browse it, and maybe I'm acting snoody in this, but there are certainly classes that I wouldn't be caught playing my favorite video games during for the subject matter being so interesting.
The meeting needs a fast and accurate note taker to shorthand or type what everyone is saying and distribute those notes.
That leaves you free to make the important notes and mark your action points. (This can be paper or laptop).
To stay engaged, I've used the scrawl now and type later method, which means the notes never get out early enough. They do allow me to reflect on them though.
Compare note taking with keyboard typing in a class with several dozen people and you will see noise is a big problem if you are the teacher.
I personally believe the best solution is audio record anything the teacher says, automatically transcribe it and just draw diagrams and stuff.
But it will take some time before people start doing it.
Hyperbole sure, but I was an on class student who paid for distance learning because I preferred the freedom to take the class on my time, on 2x speed, and with the ability to pause and look things up. It was never worth it to go back to class.
It begs the question: maybe it's the teaching method, and not the tool.
"These examples can be seen as the progeny of an ill-conceived union of twenty-first-century tools (computers, tablets, smartphones) with nineteenth-century modalities (lectures)."
In contrast, with college students, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that -- at least occasionally -- a student may need to "check out" from a lecture momentarily to deal with some pressing business, even if it means that he has to spend time later asking a classmate to fill him in on what he missed.
For instance, maybe I'm in class, and I get an extremely important email and need to send an immediate reply. Maybe I'm a working-adult student and my babysitter has just IMed me. Maybe I manage the campus newspaper's website and someone just sent me a report of a critical bug that I need to deal with right away.
This is all the sort of stuff I encounter regularly in the working world, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that college students encounter it, too.
Being able to keep open a laptop to deal with things like this is a lot less distracting than having to step outside the lecture hall to take an urgent phone call.
Yes, putting away the laptops might slightly increase students' abilities to soak up the material, but (sorry, professors) sometimes the class you're sitting in is not your top priority, and sometimes that's OK. I occasionally had to skip class to chase down a hot story for the school newspaper, and I don't regret it a bit. So long as the student is using the privilege responsibly, I say let 'em keep the laptop open!
I can understand not letting high school students use phones, but in college you are an adult with sometimes conflicting responsibilities.
fail the course.
Some are even known to demand everyone place their phones, very much powered off, in a box on their desk at the start of class.
But seriously, are you so incredibly important that you cannot spend 60 minutes listening to a lecture?
This generation (and yes I know that includes me) seem to have an incredibly inflated sense of self-worth, as if they're the centre of the universe.
It's like those idiots who can't stop texting in the damn movie.
The world will keep spinning if you don't answer that tweet for an hour - trust me.
I had this exact same argument with a friend last week when we went to a three-hatted restaurant, and she insisted she needed to check her phone every few minutes, because apparently people would "panic" if they couldn't get in touch with her via chat.
Surely if you're paying $200 for a dinner, you can at least enjoy the dinner and company around you without needing to tweet every 5 minutes.
If it was a business meeting in the sense of meeting with someone external to the organization, that might be different, but internal meetings are very laptop-oriented.
How many emails do you really get that are so urgent that they couldn't wait an hour? Why can't your babysitter text you (or, just IM on your smartphone)? Why are you the only person who can fix said critical bug (if it's fixable through the CMS, others should be able to handle it, if not, well, why are you running such terrible infrastructure when there are dozens of mature platforms?).
Also, for things that are legitimately small and quick, it's surprising what you can get done with an SSH client on your phone - if it needs more than that, you're likely going to miss the rest of the lecture anyway, so why not leave?
This isn't strictly a reply to jawns, but it's on a related topic that I've wondered about.
Fifteen years ago, such instantaneous, ubiquitous communication was very rare. I went through college without having instant notification of anything whatsoever, as did pretty much everyone I knew at the time.
Babysitters ran into issues fifteen years ago; there were bugs in websites fifteen years ago; there were critical emails being sent out fifteen years ago, but nobody expected constant, instant feedback because it was implausible, and everyone was okay with that.
Are our problems today really that much more urgent than they were then, that we truly need to be constantly connected? Or is this imaginary, and since we in theory can respond instantly, people now expect that we must?
The question is if I'm paying for a lecture is it reasonable for them to mandate my own non-disruptive activities in lecture. I don't think so.
We also need to consider that professors are egotistical creatures (as all humans are), so they're going to oppose anything that detracts from the perceived value of their work. What's the balance here between improving student welfare and making professors happy?
Life changes. If people don't like that, there are still some very nice remote forests they can go live in.
I guess I still retain the wondering, though; with possible response times reduced to effectively instantaneous, are we losing anything? Is it good that anything we are doing can always be interrupted by something else?
And if it is really so critical, they can send text message on your muted phone and you will have to leave the lecture anyway.
I'm not saying I want to ban laptops, just that your examples are very unconvincing. I get it, the class is very low priority to you, but if you are going to regularly fix bugs or write emails and then ask other to fill you in, you will be disturbing to others.
I'm glad you didn't work for my campus newspaper.
Several other people have echoed your comment that these are things that you can just as easily handle on your phone. But I think that misses the bigger point. If a professor can ban laptops, he can ban phones and tablets and all other communication devices.
My overarching point is that devoting 100% of one's attention to a college lecture is not only not always necessary, but in some cases, not desirable; there are legitimate reasons why a student attending a lecture may want to receive communications, and legitimate reasons why he may wish to respond to those communications immediately.
A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...
If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office.
Full disclosure, I only skimmed this paper, but I'd say this study has very little in common with the actual scenario of a good professor giving a stimulating lecture.
People learn and take notes differently, students should be granted the respect to do whatever works best for them, professors' egos be damned.
EDIT: Not to mention these students are paying customers....if they choose to waste their time in class, that's up to them.
Yes, open offices are a terrible idea because many people lose a lot of their productivity in those distracting environments.
I had a professor that would make the student using the laptop come up to the front of the room and finish giving the lecture. He said he picked it up from Nabokov.
> We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low.
Really? I found it fairly easy to type out full equations in LaTeX using LyX. Maybe the laptop isn't the problem, but that you only introduce your students to the most basic of word processors.
I'm not denying that I am hopelessly old and outdated, but reading the article on Technology Needs for School District (May 15, 2014) literally made me cry; for two reasons. First, because the people who are in charge of education are actually going to do it, and second, that the Livingston parent community is so enthusiastic about it.
There is no doubt that computers are useful and that the Internet gives access to such a scope of information so quickly that is not available nor accessible through any other means. But how do they impact children's overall DEVELOPMENT? How do they impact their attention? With the pandemic of Attention Deficit Disorder, how can we be so blind not to notice the connection between children's attention span and the time they spend on the computer? I started teaching piano more than 30 years ago. EVERY child was capable to remember which note he had to play, with which finger, how to hold the finger and whether he had to play long or short, loud or soft - simultaneously. Now it is typical that when a child pays attention to what note it is, he does not notice which finger; if he remembers the finger – does not notice how loud, etc. I rarely see children that can actually focus on the task for longer than 20 seconds. I often ask parents, “How much time does your child spend on the computer?” The connection is direct: the less time on computer – the better the student's focus, the longer she can concentrate on the assignment. I happened to teach an elderly lady who brought a music book with her teacher's remarks dated 1958. She was nervous, “Will you quit on me? I forgot everything.” I answered (only half-jokingly), “Of course not, you are my only student with a normal attention span!”
Even though I observe 400+ students in my music school, can it be just coincidence? What does the beloved Internet tell us about the impact of computer use has on the brain? Nothing encouraging. As an example, there is a student work in biology (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/336, 2007) that summarizes finding on the topic. It states what I suspected: computers often conflict with the activities that are needed for one to develop the ability to pay attention; the list of scientific works is attached there. And if you still like long books, N. Carr addresses the issue in his “The Shallows: What Internet is Doing to Our Brains.”
What are we doing? Are we trying to compensate for having poor teachers with technology? Why do we adhere to such a naive belief that computers are the solution to problems in schools, thinking that “the more of them - the better” automatically? Maybe it's better to invest in teachers' training? Maybe we need to raise the prestige of the teaching profession? I participated in a “professional orientation” day in LHS several years ago. Seniors had an opportunity to meet with representatives of their prospective field. I saw crowds of seniors following “Lawyers” and “Accountants”. In the “Teachers” room, a retired Harrison school teacher and myself, who were assigned to lead the meeting, found 4 or 5 girls. Only one of them really wanted to be a teacher, knew what is involved and why she wanted it. Everyone else said, “I do not know”, “I am not sure”.. . Why do we expect our children will be enthusiastic about learning if teachers themselves “do not know”?.. And how computers can help?
The more that children use computers, the less opportunities they have for human interaction. By increasing the role of computers in children's lives we bend human nature, we consciously under-develop the younger generation; we deprive our children of full development of their communication skills, ability to build relat...
If what she's saying were true, we'd be seeing a significant drop in the quality of students entering music school and entering the job market. I don't see that happening. Does she? Are there fewer qualified students entering music programs? While symphonies are having trouble finding funding due to lack of interest, I don't see finding qualified musicians being a problem. What about other types of music? Are they seeing these issues? There seem to be plenty of bands of various styles out there playing in my town.
When I was a kid, I spent hours per day on my computer - mostly CREATING music. (Listening to music the way it's done today on the computer wasn't feasible.) I spent hours communicating with other musicians about how to improve my skills as a musician, and nowadays, I spend hours on the computer finding, listening to and studying music as well. It can be a wonderful tool for music.
Perhaps there's something else going on with your mother's students in addition to or besides the computers? Maybe the problem isn't the computers but specifically social media, or something along those lines? Regardless, her conclusions about what computers do to students are out of line with reality.
Many people don't see the point in being physically present to hear someone talk and point at slides. Those that do, and aren't just attending because you might spring a surprise announcement or pop quiz on them, will be there to pay attention.
Video-recording the lectures is another thing entirely, but if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises.
(I do realize that there are lots of horrible lecturers out there who do nothing more than read off the PowerPoint that comes with the textbook, but I think the correct approach to that is to re-work the tenure system to promote good lecturers as well as good researchers, not abolish lectures.)
One of the problems with lectures is that they tend to be geared towards the lowest common denominator. The great thing about the few of my college courses that provided online lectures was that I could go through them at my own pace and not be bored out of my mind for 90min of a 2hr lecture.
I strongly disagree. Many lectures aren't structured to include or allow these activities, and many students don't need or want to participate in them. Those students are the ones who sit behind their laptops the whole period, and everyone would be better served if they didn't have to come to lecture in person.
Especially in Maths or CS where classrooms are great for building intuition or easing into a subject but textbooks are ubiquitous and easy to read.
Copying down a proof doesn't help me at all but doing it along with a professor (each mental step is easy to hold on to) gives me so much better results.
I imagine that I'm not the only such one.
Sometimes I have paid for not listening to the lecture but the majority of the time it doesn't matter. The idea that I learned my college curriculum in lectures would be a joke. As a computer science student I learnt my trade in the labs and tutorials and interactive courses rarely from listening to a lecturer explain X, Y or Z.
The better the lecturer or the harder the module the more laptops that were closed in my lectures. My compiler design course for example, infamous for being the most difficult module no one dared open the laptop as there was too much knowledge to consume.
Lecturers can easily do a self-assessment survey of how engaged their class is and how interestingly they are presenting their material but how many heads are hidden behind laptop screens.
For the one lecturer who did ban laptops I have to say I went to absolutely none of his lectures unless I had coursework to submit. I found it a bit presumptuous that he could demand I close my laptop, I was not distracting him or disturbing the class.
You don't learn in lectures where lecturers read their slides to you laptop open or not. If the lecturers are going to waste my time with pointless reading of slides then I might as well do something useful on my laptop like my coursework or just read hacker news.
The problem is the lecture!
Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing rarely engages anyone -- push students away from material they don't care about. If students are engaged and laptops impede them, they'll put them away themselves. If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than being lectured at will make them care.
If you have to ban something, ban the lecture and teachers who rely on lecturing at the expense of empathy and compassion for students.
Students are people like you and me. We use laptops in our work when they help and put them away when they don't. If we want students to learn about the world and how to succeed in it, let them work like we work, solving problems like we solve. Experiential, project-based learning does this automatically, at least with effective teachers. Lecturing doesn't. If you had a job you couldn't quit where your manager lectured at you all the time you'd get out your computer too.
HN just had a thread -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 -- on the problems with lectures based on a Science Magazine article, "Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds.” Here is my blog post with related notes from that thread -- "Why I avoid lecturing when I lead and teach" http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach
University students who have no interest in a course's material have no business being enrolled in that course. These are adults who are there voluntarily, and should be expected to participate in their own education without instructors jumping through hoops to engage them. A lecture is an opportunity for students to hear from an expert about a topic that should be of interest to them. Of course teachers should strive to present information in a way that's accessible and captivating, but even the driest lecture is no excuse to space out. It is not really feasible to compete for students' attention with the information equivalent of junk food while presenting and explaining serious, in-depth material.
Sure, I'll give you that this may apply for 4th (and perhaps 3rd) year classes and post grads. However, most entry level courses are mindless drivel and a complete waste of both the student's and instructor's time (English 100 anyone?), although are 'required' to continue on (or get that degree). Academia doesn't fit happily into your little box.
The dryest lecture may not be an excuse to space out, but good luck. You may be the perfect pupil, attentive to every single word a lecturer says for 3 hours—most people though can't even listen and process past 45 minutes. I personally can listen for a while, but get bored... lectures rarely move fast enough for me and can rarely keep my attention unless actually stimulating.
Academics is a two way street, both the pupil and instructor must participate in order for a successful transfer of knowledge. How many instructors have you had that teach their course right from a textbook without anything added? Lazy instructors create lazy and bored students.
Your reply is a bit like saying "the solution to conflicts around the world is for people to love each other". How does one go and apply this solution to make the world a better place now?
It could be the case that the ideal solution is better teachers, but we aren't talking about ideal solutions, we are talking about practical ones. If banning laptops makes student achieve better grades - then it's worth considering doing so.
I am serious about it. Students are going to live and work with Internet and all distractions. They need this ability that like others it is learned and nurtured.
I mean, something like this: http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Gett...
There are lots of good programs out there. Today this knowledge is as important as Mathematics. Probably more important for some people.
I have studied a lot in order to be able to work productively from home. It is very easy once you know lots of little things.
I could scientifically proof to any person how much she destroys her productivity just multitasking, using very simple things, like video cameras(which everybody has in her phone) and paper, because I have studied the psychology that fools ourselves into believing we could watch facebook and a lecture at the same time.
In my experience teaching people this works wonders. Without it, they are lost. They want something(get good grades, work with less effort), but they don't know how to do it.
About a programming class without computers, I will fire the teacher whose idea is banning laptops instantly. I am engineer and program computers for a living, with experience teaching people. They are incompetent if they can't control students with computers. If they are so boring the students prefer to browse Internet in class, then the problem is the teacher, not the student.
I agree with the comments about lectures being bad (usually) and teachers needing to engage with students, but electronic distractions also make it harder for teachers to effectively engage.
This is not meant to denigrate the posters in this thread, but I get the sense that most a) are different than the average student and b) have not been teachers. The second point in particular is important because people who have faced the challenges teachers face may have domain knowledge that non-teachers lack.
If I chose to spend thousands of dollars so I can goof off during a lecture, that's my prerogative. I don't need some to dictate what's in my best interest.
My PowerBook was a huge boon for me in college. I write far better notes with a laptop than with pen and paper. What's more, I was able to multitask in ways that are simply impossible without a computer. If I were to encounter a teacher arrogant enough to ban laptops from his presence, I would simply refuse to take any of his classes, even if they were mandatory. I would literally chose another school before leaving my laptop at home.
That sort of thing can affect the people around you negatively. In that regard, it's hardly any different than asking the hall to be silent while the lecture is on, rather than everyone chatting out loud.
http://squatrx.blogspot.com/2008/12/being-present.html
Multi-tasking seems to be the way most people nowadays operate, but it doesn't mean people are doing a better job at more things. It means they are addicted to multi-tasking and they are incapable of actually being present for longer than a few moments. Perhaps these people are better at transitioning from one thing to the next, but I wonder if that applies to disparate tasks - my guess is that it doesn't transfer itself particularly well to new, complex skills.
Being able to say "no" to distraction is crucial to the ability to be "in the present". This isn't license to be an a-hole of course, just permission to say to yourself "I have many things I need to do, but I'm going to focus on this ONE THING right now".
I did not give two shits about the lectures; the material is presented better in the book. Professors, from my perspective, were paid to administer tests.