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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

#221

Post by mk89 »

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…

That's what private lessons are for.

If you really want something similar, record your lessons (with a phone or whatever) and listen to them as you wish - maybe transcribe them. It's tedious but worth it.

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

#222

Post by Griffinsauce »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #111
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…

People learn in different ways is the answer. Different people have different ways of cementing understanding in their heads. My ideal form is to record the meeting, and then later review it and write notes.

Ideal for learning yes but very time consuming. Do you feel it's worth it in that way?

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

#223

Post by Griffinsauce »

mjevans wrote: post #185
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,…

I hate the term "meeting" as that's merely a super-class of event. Technically a lecture is a meeting, a movie screening is a meeting, a concert is a meeting. I find things are more productive when there's an actual expectation about what people do when gathered. * brainstorming * problem identification (a type of brain storming) * solution identification (a type of brain storming) * Question and Answer* (I tend to n…

Your point needs to be applied to your first option. Brainstorming is a method, meetings should not be defined by their method but by their goal (and preferably with a known method to reach that goal).

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

#224

Post by Griffinsauce »

gowld wrote: post #193
hollander wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you read the article? Verbatim copying is exactly what is less effective than having to translate to your own words.

The best way to understand something is to have to explain it. Writing your own summarized notes is a light version of that.

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

#225

Post by Cu3PO42 »

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…

I would like to propose a different approach here that has in fact been practiced by some of my professors.

What if, instead of blanket banning laptops, you banned them to the last row. That way laptop users can only distract other laptop users. I realize this still isn't ideal for those of us who want to use a laptop in a way that may generally be perceived as productive, because they are still exposed to all those distractions, but they would still have the choice of not using a laptop and sitting somewhere else.

In the past I have generally chosen to sit in the back because for me the advantages of being able to follow the approach that works best for me have outweighed the 'visual noise' that I am mostly able to ignore, thankfully.

Another approach that I have personally witnessed was to ban laptops for everything but materials directly related to the class. This may sound impossible to verify, but somehow one of my professors managed to do that. I suspect it was using the very signs of distractions you just described, eyes flicking over, maybe small expressions of amusement displayed by those browsing Facebook/Reddit/9gag/... He consistently called out those people who were distracting themselves and others and left everyone looking at the slides in peace.

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

#226

Post by foldr »

Groxx wrote: post #209
foldr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or abandon the attempt at lecturing what's already in the book, and spend most of the time on Q&A (i.e. interaction, the stuff that actually benefits from having the teacher in the room). Bonus points: more people come to class having read the material, and people who already read it and don't have questions don't bother coming. The few I've had that did this were amazingly useful - alternate derivations for people s…

That can work with good students, but at most institutions, students don't do the reading and hence most learn nothing through this approach. It's the kind of thing that people who were good students tend to suggest because it would be ideal for them, but we have to think about the other 80% of the class.

The course I'm currently teaching has, in addition to lectures, weekly two hour seminars where people are supposed to do homework/reading and then ask questions about it. (Not my design, that's just how it's timetabled.) But students don't do the homework or the reading. So, I seriously doubt that switching the whole course to this approach would work.

I don't understand your last paragraph.

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

#227

Post by Cu3PO42 »

I dislike the style of note taking described in the article, i.e. mindlessly writing down what the professor is saying. I don't believe however that this is necessarily tied to typing rather than writing with pen and paper. I have a lecture where no notes or textbook is provided and it is required that you copy everything written on the board. Personally I'm not great at writing fast, so I usually lag behind a bit with writing which makes it that much harder to follow along with what the professor is saying. In a situation like this, writing with pen and paper may be worse than typing (except the specific course I'm talking about is maths and short of writing LaTeX in real time, handwriting is necessary).

From my personal experience as a student the most effective way for me to take notes is to annotate existing material, i.e. slides or lecture notes. In some classes where material is available beforehand that would be possible by printing it all, bringing it to class, annotating it and then digitalizing it again to make it searchable (and create backups). However I feel this is highly inefficient and a massive waste of paper. Suppose there are roughly 60 slides per lecture, 8 lectures a week across courses and I can get roughly 4 slides on a sheet of paper in such a way that I can work with them comfortably; that is 120 pages of paper a week!

For many lectures where material is not provided in advance, but only at the beginning of the lecture, presumably to prevent students to only selectively attend the lectures it would be impossible to work in the way I find to be best for me.

That is not to say, the problems described in the article don't exist. I remember many instances of people browsing social media rather than following the lecture. Ignoring any detriment it has on themselves (it is their choice to not pay attention after all) we are left with the negative impact it has on others.

As I outlined in another comment, there are approaches to combating this that I feel to be more appropriate than a blanket ban. One is to have people using electronic devices to sit somewhere else, usually behind people not using them, so they can only distract other people using electronic devices. This offers people the choice of either using their devices and being potentially exposed to visual noise or not use them and be free from these distractions.

I also had a professor that disallowed electronic devices for everything but slides of the lecture and related material. I can only hypothesize how he managed to do this consistently, but I believe he was able to tell by the expressions on peoples' faces and if people sitting nearby stole glances at other screens.

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

#228

Post by Dave_TRS »

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…

I doubt "externalized cost" is the real reason professors ban laptops because if that were the case, a simpler solution would have been used: reserving the first few rows for the minority of students to claim to be distracted by others' laptops. My hunch though is that professors use these occassional student complaint as a front for their own insecurity of being ignored when they talk (which bad professors are most likely to be susceptible to).

In my experience the laptop-banning professors are also the ones to practice other the other common destructive behaviors: 1) Deducting grades for missing class, 2) Dropping exam hints in class to encourage attendance, 4) Pop quizzes, 3) Not posting notes digitally. A professor doesn't need to be a charismatic entertainer to teach effectively, but they do need to somehow make their lecture a better use of students time than just reading the book or notes. Trying to make it HARDER to learn using any method that doesn't make them feel good (laptops in class, staying at home and reading the notes and book) may help their ego, but does not help students learn.

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

#229

Post by jimbokun »

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?

If this is a work context, they should probably be actually working instead.

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

#230

Post by djellybeans »

ptero wrote: post #45
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…

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 took notes a lot in college. But oddly enough, I rarely go back to look at them. It is probably due more to my reading and learning style than the lecture, though. I generally had a good mental memory, but the notes were only really important to fill in the missing gaps.
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