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Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

nytimes.com

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Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#191

Post by foldr »

Groxx wrote: post #183
foldr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever done any teaching? You might be surprised at how uncomfortable it feels to talk to a room where 50% of people are looking at their laptops or phones instead of at you. This tends to go in a vicious cycle. If people are bored for 5 minutes, they get our their laptops. Then there's no chance for me to unbore them in the next 5 minutes, because they're not listening to a word I'm saying. In most of the cla…

I imagine the "frantically trying to transcribe everything" comes somewhat from how we've been trained by grading-on-attendance and grading-on-note-taking classes. We're used to going to classes that are far less useful than the book, and getting nothing from it except a waste of everyone's time. Some schools are of course different, but IME the most-useless lecturers were also the ones who graded on attendance and/o…

Ok, but there is no grade for attendance in my classes, and I keep reminding people that they don't need to take comprehensive notes.

The expectation that a class should be more useful than the book seems odd to me. In a typical undergrad class, you're teaching a subset of what's in a decent textbook (with maybe a little additional meterial thrown in for color). So I mean, sure, you could just read the book if you're smart and motivated. The only way to really make the classes more useful than the book for smart and motivated students is to do exactly what you don't want - grade the students on note taking.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#192

Post by nambit »

foldr wrote: post #174
valine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.

Then why go to the lecture? You don't want to be there, and the lecturer probably doesn't want you there either.

My university classes had mandatory attendance. If not for that, I would also attend only 5% of lectures like a commenter above.

I find most of my learning happens through books on my own time.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#193

Post by gowld »

hollander wrote: post #62
lvoudour wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. I went to college before tablets and affordable laptops became ubiquitous, but the same problem applied to handwritten notes. After a few tries to keep notes and re-read them at my leisure I gave up, it was exhausting to take them and in the end I was missing too much. The best solution is audio/video recording. I think every lecturer can record their lectures and publish them online later in the college'…

I went to college before laptops as well. Taking notes has two purposes. First to remember what was said in class, extras that are not in the book, and it's a good indicator of the exam questions. Second is processing what is said. Research has shown that writing down what you hear makes you better understand and remember what is said, then when you type it on your laptop. Even if you don't use the notes afterward, t…

> First to remember what was said in class,

Why is your professor not writing down or recording this important information? At worst, 5 people per lecture should be transcribing and merging notes and sharing with everyone else, not 100 people per lecture.

> writing down what you hear makes you better understand

Yes, you should handwrite a copy of the book/notes/whatever, at an appropriate pace for you.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#194

Post by gowld »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #190
lvoudour wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. I went to college before tablets and affordable laptops became ubiquitous, but the same problem applied to handwritten notes. After a few tries to keep notes and re-read them at my leisure I gave up, it was exhausting to take them and in the end I was missing too much. The best solution is audio/video recording. I think every lecturer can record their lectures and publish them online later in the college'…

There was a note taking service I used. They hired students to type up lecture notes. Available the next day. On red paper so it could not be photocopied. It was money well spent during my undergraduate tenure.

> On red paper so it could not be photocopied.

Rediculous. Luckily today we have computers that can scan and color-correct. And social media so students can organize and cut out the middle-men

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#195

Post by nambit »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #6

NY times makes an amazing discovery: being distracted from whatever it is you're trying to do isn't good for productivity. The idea of 'multitasking' is a foolish thing, and I think most people have discovered now that to be successful at any task you need to focus without distractions. Singletasking is much more productive than multitasking. I might even argue that multitasking isn't possible, since humans can't swi…

The finding is more than that. People taking notes using pen and paper are more productive than those taking notes in a laptop.

You're assuming that the people using the laptop are multi-tasking but I don't know that that's necessarily true.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#196

Post by evanmoran »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #120
brndnmtthws wrote: post #6

NY times makes an amazing discovery: being distracted from whatever it is you're trying to do isn't good for productivity. The idea of 'multitasking' is a foolish thing, and I think most people have discovered now that to be successful at any task you need to focus without distractions. Singletasking is much more productive than multitasking. I might even argue that multitasking isn't possible, since humans can't swi…

Agreed that this seems to be a no-brainer. But then again, if you look at the responses in this thread, apparently it's not a no-brainer to some people. On the other hand, if you read the article in full, the debate isn't just about distractions and multi-tasking. Even when not being distracted, the use of a laptop to take notes is less effective than hand-writing notes. This is because laptops encourage a note-takin…

This was a thoughtful response, thank you. I'm not sure why you're down voted here, but you make an interesting point that laptop "transcription" is so much worse then pen-and-paper transcription. I wonder if there's some note taking tablet app that wouldn't have this issue. Maybe because free hand drawing promotes connections and associations in a way that typing/outline-focused notes doesn't?

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#197

Post by [deleted] »

nambit wrote: post #192
foldr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why go to the lecture? You don't want to be there, and the lecturer probably doesn't want you there either.

My university classes had mandatory attendance. If not for that, I would also attend only 5% of lectures like a commenter above. I find most of my learning happens through books on my own time.

[deleted]

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#198

Post by gowld »

mikebenfield wrote: post #176
bsder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply professors acknowledging reality. If I taught my class to those who "previewed the material" I'd be teaching to 1 or 2 students ... maybe. In reality, the best students do exactly this.

Fine, but then you are agreeing with me: most instructors do not expect their students to read material ahead of time and do not structure their classes as if that is the expectation. In fact, in my experience it's not even usually possible to read material before the lecture because students are only given at best a vague idea of what specifically is coming next.

If most instructors are failing at their job, that's a shame. There's no reason save ego for an instructor to assume that students only learn by listening to the instructor speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#199

Post by gowld »

r00fus wrote: post #151
cjsuk wrote: post #2

I will sit there in a meeting (or retrospectively in a university lecture) and regularly derive nothing of value at all from my notes, be they written or typed. It's the media that is wrong, not the note taking medium. You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle. Everything is immediate, transient. If you lose the pace, then everything after that point is…

> You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle. I disagree about meetings. I often ask to repeat a pivotal discourse in a multi-party meeting simply to emphasize it's being understood by all participants. Also notes help to structure the meeting so you don't take 1hr to discuss 30m of content. I prefer to share my notes on screen (either as email minutes I…

Why are you wasting so much meeting time on non-pivotal discourse?

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#200

Post by xenophonf »

dgacmu wrote: post #163
Dave_TRS wrote: post #58

My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren't phased by the laptops and rarely ban them. But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it's almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That's what I've seen over and o…

I have a counterexample - CMU's 15-112 bans laptops. The professor for it for the previous 8 years, David Kosbie, is one of the most highly regarded professors in the university. His primary rationale for it is the "externalized cost" effect described in the article, which I can attest is quite true in my experience teaching. When you look out at a sea of faces, you can see where the laptops are because of the reacti…

People like Professor Kosbie drive me up the wall. Let me show you why. Here are the notes I took on my tablet PC for a week-long Tandberg TCTE+TMS certification class:

https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf

Admittedly, it's a big PDF because I didn't bother converting my handwriting to text, but it's still a pretty useful reference when it comes to video conferencing stuff, even though I don't do that kind of work any more.

Now here are my notes that I was forced to take on paper for a week-long ITIL V3 Foundation class, because the instructor thought he knew better than I did on how to learn:

''

Oh that's right, they were on paper, so I can't easily back them up, digitize, and share them. In fact, over the course of several moves, I've managed to misplace both the notebook and the PDF scans. I live and breathe enterprise IT operations management and support. It'd be nice to have more than my memory as a reference, especially since I think ITIL had some useful models for conceptualizing this stuff. None of the official ITIL materials are public, so instead of my curated notes, I have to make do with what I can scrounge off the web. In my mind this wastes the time and money I spent taking the class.

I realize that I am paying for my instructors' knowledge, experience, and insight---that sometimes I won't agree with them but need to trust them regardless. Conversely, as an engaged student I need them to stop actively interfering with the tools and methods that I've developed over my academic and professional career to teach myself and to retain what I've learned.

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