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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

#161

Post by another-dave »

I think banning laptops is a good idea, but I think it should be coupled with other study aids, like fully recorded lectures to let students learn in their own way.

One of the best lecturers I had at university passed round a printed copy of the lecture summary at the start, allowing students to concentrate on making their own notes & transcribing the lecture that the article talks about.

Many, many other lecturers objected though to lectures being recorded (by individual students, e.g. dictaphone, we didn't have campus-wide video/audio recording).

Most meetings are completely different beasts to lectures, I think — e.g. if you have ten people round a table in a room, people should be participants not audience members; the dynamic is completely different. That said, I would agree with banning laptops from meetings for the most part!

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

#162

Post by bsder »

mikebenfield wrote: post #132
ska wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own. > Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them. I've taken a lot of classes, I've been a teaching assistant for a lot of classes, I've observed a lot of classes, and I've never gotten the impression that the instructor expected the students to have alread…

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.

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

#163

Post by dgacmu »

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 reactions of people around them -- eyes keep flicking involuntarily to the interesting stuff happening on the screen, and then they peel themselves back to the lecture. It amounts to a long sequence of micro-distractions that have a pretty pronounced effect on learning. Humans are very attuned to things like motion, flickering, and changes in their field of view, and those are very present when browsing the web or reading facebook on your laptop in class. Second, laptop screens are backlit, which means that they may be the brightest object in someone's field of view in the class.

Zoning out on a kindle or printed newspaper has much less of an effect on the people around you. I don't care if someone ignores my class -- that's their choice. I used to not ban laptops, but I've become convinced that it's worth it for the other students.

Also, think about the numbers. It's very possible to have a lecture that's very engaging for about 95% of the class (which is a pretty impressive rate all-told). But the remaining 5% have about 10 students each in a field behind them that can see their laptop screen, so a very small number of students goofing off on laptops can have a disproportionate effect on the class.

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

#164

Post by bsder »

literallycancer wrote: post #124
ska wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

None, actually. If you know the material, feel free to skip my lectures.

The material I teach is generally considered "hard". Most students need my help to point out "This is the main path. Learn this. Let's go over this multiple times in different ways until you see the commonality. That stuff is auxiliary--ignore that for now. Once you have the main idea down, that stuff is just a little bit of extra work."

Every class is different. One class will get an idea very quickly while another will struggle--so my job is to tweak things for that in lectures. In addition, sometimes a class will have a huge gap that you will have to back up and fill.

Even with STEM subjects, teaching has a lot of art to it.

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

#165

Post by npsimons »

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…

> Lectures and meetings are broken, not the notes.

For as long I can remember, I have had trouble staying awake in lectures, meetings and watching videos. It has nothing to do with the content, nothing to do with how 'engaging' it is. It has everything to do with passively sitting and attempting to consume data. Having a way to take notes and edit them in real-time increases my retention enormously. It's also incredibly useful to me as I can org-capture a TODO item to look up references (from which I learn very well) later. If I could have afforded access to a laptop in college and org-mode existed back then, I can't imagine how much more I would have retained, not to mention having greppable notes, as opposed to my paper notes that have vanished over the years.

ETA: Lectures/meetings seem really inefficient and ineffective to me. It's a data stream you can't rewind, and if you wait for everyone to "get it", you'll never make any progress, and you can't pack enough information in to justify everyone being in the same place at the same time. Just record a video and make it really good (ala TED) or release your very well refined overview paper/slides with copious references.

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

#166

Post by dgacmu »

otakucode wrote: post #150

The problem here lies not with the laptops or with their use. It lies with the continued existence of such radically and absurdly inefficient and pointless traditions as 'lectures' and 'meetings'. They were started because physical co-location was necessary for knowledge transmission. Physical co-location is no longer necessary for, and indeed is severely hampering of, knowledge transmission. Anyone who proposes an i…

[Citation needed]

Here's a competing citation that disagrees with you and suggests that people pay more attention in-person: https://www.maritzmotivation.com/~/media/Files/MaritzInstitu...

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

#167

Post by mtpn »

timthelion wrote: post #139
mtpn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems awesome. I can’t get it to play from my phone but the concept is really really useful. I used to want to make something like this for audio-based exams for people with dyslexia, for example. In Ireland people with reading difficulties have a person sit with them and read the questions in a whole other room. It’s expensive compared to just having a group with headphones working through on computers.

I just tested it and it works with icecat mobile but not Androids default browser. Which browser are you using? Also, I haven't optimized for mobile with regards to "arrow keys" not being a thing on the cell phone. I'll probably have to add arrow buttons that are visible only on the cell phone or something. Perhaps a swipe...

I’m on chrome on iOS

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

#168

Post by npsimons »

usrusr wrote: post #56
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'…

Also before tablets and ubiquitous laptops, but after PowerPoint hit: whenever I had the opportunity to have slide printouts ahead of time, they were a surprisingly nice scribble sink (many slides per page, not a big stack). Those short bursts of details, questions or clarifications both from the talk and from thinking while listening that would be useless riddles without the context provided by the rough timeline of…

I really, really wish more professors had provided slides up front; many don't change them year to year anyway, and it would have helped immensely to prepare for the lecture and be more actively engaged. Syllabi are helpful, but even these days I insist on having at least a purpose if not a full blown agenda for meetings, otherwise what's the point?

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

#169

Post by npsimons »

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…

> Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own.

It's easy to realize this in retrospect, but I think it should be pounded into students' heads starting at least in high school. You can use the sink or swim metaphor if you like, but human beings aren't robots that can just flip a switch to change behavior.

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

#170

Post by npsimons »

bsder wrote: post #164
literallycancer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

None, actually. If you know the material, feel free to skip my lectures. The material I teach is generally considered "hard". Most students need my help to point out "This is the main path. Learn this. Let's go over this multiple times in different ways until you see the commonality. That stuff is auxiliary--ignore that for now. Once you have the main idea down, that stuff is just a little bit of extra work." Every c…

I get the impression that you and ska are very, very good teachers. Not to disrespect any of my professors, but a lot of times I ended up skipping lectures because I just wasn't getting anything out of them. Was I a model student who always reviewed material before lectures? No. But I definitely felt I got a lot more out of going directly to the source materials and working problems than I did watching a professor walk other students through problems.
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