21–28 of 28 posts
Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write & talk to himself for an hour.
This is also one of the best ways to teach computer programming. Let also students write programs by hand on paper first. Too many students acquire bad programming habits by brute forcing solutions rather than solving by thinking and researching.
Programming on paper is amazingly bad (I've done it, mostly for exams). Even worse, you will teach programmers that you develop linearly (from top to bottom) and once a line of code is written it cannot be changed. Those are terrible coding habits. Really brute forcing a solution isn't bad for a first run. If they done it, tell them to make it faster or smaller. Given that they've solved it once, they should understa…
Simulating code in your head goes a long way towards writing solid code, you'll be able to hold a model of the data and your code together and see whether it will work or not and fix bugs before your first compile.
Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write & talk to himself for an hour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write & talk to himself for an hour.
Depends on the professor. Some of the most intellectually challenging lectures I've heard were delivered with no more equipment than a chalkboard.
Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.
Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write & talk to himself for an hour.
You could probably use Powerpoint to simulate that, but most professors don't. Even if you do show the intermediate steps, I think the gradual process of watching something being written out (as well as then having the time to write it out yourself) let's it sink in better.
Even something like having to decipher the professor's handwriting contributes to better understanding. If it's ambiguous what a particular symbol is, you're forced to think harder about the context it's in to figure it out. I'm not saying lectures should be given with obfuscated notes or anything, but that split second of interpretation your brain has to do adds value in the end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding math on paper, I actually find it's easier to do math on computer than on paper. Quick and easy calculations (e.g., less than half a page) are often faster on paper, but the long and involved ones require a computer to manage. I might have different feelings if I didn't use emacs.
Are you one of those people who TeX's their notes while sitting in class? I'm always amazed by that. Wish I could pull it off :) Long calculations are a pain, but I find doing it by hand is good, so that I can go back and find mistakes. I tend to use one long scratch pads, so that I have a sort of ongoing, live revision control. When I use LaTeX I tend to erase stuff, because I want LaTex to look nice, and of course…
Basically, my calculations usually look like this:
interesting quantity I've found it's very easy to copy mess[j] to a new line, edit, and repeat. It's harder to rewrite mess[j] on paper. Storing complicated expressions in emacs registers is also quite nice.