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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

#211

Post by emodendroket »

> The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.

I mean, that's possible, but my experience is if I'm using my laptop during a lecture I'm more likely to start surfing the Web and not pay attention to the lecture.

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

#212

Post by emodendroket »

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…

The value of taking notes is in my opinion less about going back to them (often I'll never look at them) and often more about the help in recall having to summarize the information is. Similarly, people remember books better if they go through highlighting stuff.

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

#213

Post by emodendroket »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #208
jimbokun wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not describing a meeting. Meetings should only invite people who will actively participate and provide their input. Anyone not meeting that description should not be invited. You are describing a lecture, or perhaps a presentation, or series of presentations. Which classically have all the problems you cite of losing the thread and not being able to catch up again. In meetings where you actively participate,…

What's wrong with inviting people who wish to observe the input provided by others, and subsequent discussion?

The problem is more having people who don't really want to be there and won't pay attention, or having too many people sidetracking the discussion or making it difficult to reach consensus.

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

#214

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

Student here.

200 people in a class, I can't even get my questions answered. True story, miss one sentence, and you're lost at a point of no return. It makes sense for me to learn it on my own pace outside of class and visit during office hours. Let me use my laptop in class so that I can still continue to be productive during the hour. (doing other work)

Whether I take notes or not should be up to me as a student. Banning electronics does not guarantee learning. If I don't want to learn/listen, then I won't. You can take a horse to the water, but you can't get it to drink.

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

#215

Post by racecliffer »

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #214

Student here. 200 people in a class, I can't even get my questions answered. True story, miss one sentence, and you're lost at a point of no return. It makes sense for me to learn it on my own pace outside of class and visit during office hours. Let me use my laptop in class so that I can still continue to be productive during the hour. (doing other work) Whether I take notes or not should be up to me as a student. B…

From the article: "The strongest argument against allowing that choice is that one student’s use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them. In a series of lab experiments, researchers at York University and McMaster University in Canada tested the effect of laptops on students who weren’t using them. Some students were told to perform small tasks on their laptops unrelated to the lecture, like looking up movie times. As expected, these students retained less of the lecture material. But what is really interesting is that the learning of students seated near the laptop users was also negatively affected."

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

#216

Post by nitwit005 »

ska wrote: post #103
amorphid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why lectures suck for me. I can't "listen fast enough", and I lost track of the lecture when I try to take notes. This is where something like Khan Academy is way awesome-r for my style of learning.

Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own. That way you know what to look out for, and your notes will be a concise revision. Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them. Trying to write down everything the lecturer says is at best inefficient, and at worst a complete waste of time when you lose th…

No they aren't. Half of my university classes weren't following anything I could review in advance, and a number of them tested on things that only appeared in lecture.

I had a single class where the professor handed us a sheet of paper with all the reading and assignments in advance. It was wonderful.

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

#217

Post by greggman »

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…

I agree lectures are a waste of time. I'm imagining conferences when I think of this.

While I enjoy seeing a good presentation live I've mostly realized I can just watch the recording later. Of course I want to meet others between presentations/lectures but the lectures themselves can be more easily consumed on youtube at 2x speed and more easily skipped if the first 5-10mins make it relatively clear it's unlikely to be a good lecture/presentation.

A meeting on the other hand, actually discussing things, at least in my situations the notebook is required as reference for things in the discussions. If it's really just a lecture held in a meeting room (no discussion) then it seems like a waste of time.

The original article seems to be about lectures at school. Wasn't Khan Academy kind of founded on the principle that lectures are bad schooling? IIRC the suggestion was that lecture material should be something watched at home and classroom time should be for getting help with the material.

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

#218

Post by dredmorbius »

sandworm101 wrote: post #82

I always allowed laptops in my lectures. I encouraged the kids to google things and challenge me when they thought me wrong. If i was unsure of a fact id have them look it up. That back-and-forth kept them engaged, and made my life much easier. If your lecture isnt more interesting than facebook you have to up your game.

Education isn't entertainment.

That's not to say it cannot be entertaining, at times, but there's also a lot of POHW: plain old hard work.

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

#219

Post by com2kid »

amha wrote: post #46
SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this especially true for my STEM classes, I can't for the life of me derive anything of value from lectures in math or anything math based unless we're talking about the broad overarching concept (like what an integral represents or what cache memory is for). If its the details of what some code does or how to do some operation on a matrix, forget it, I'm not going to glean anything more in that time listening…

One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn dire…

> One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.

I'll argue the exact opposite of this in math class. I preferred lectures here the prof walked through the problem step by step and I could copy those steps down to my notes, and then apply those same steps for other problems.

The textbooks always skipped a lot of steps in the middle, making them hard to follow along. It ended up being the beginning, a bit in the middle, some magic, then the end.

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

#220

Post by wutbrodo »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #125
ptero wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People learn in different ways and my experience is completely different: note taking, on paper , was critical for me to learn. Whether it is a differential geometry lecture (in college) or a test planning meeting having written notes is very important for me -- it allows me to think through the topics again at leisure. The most important thing for me is to keep note taking at the "high secondary" importance level: n…

I never took notes, I doodled. All my learning came from doing after the lectures were done.

Did your lectures take attendance? My attendance rate throughout college was probably about 10%, and I certainly wouldn't say I learned any less than my peers. Naturally, this is more suited to some majors than others, but I never understood what compelled people to go to lecture.
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