News Blog Comments
When she was a boy, everyone took notes with four-color click pens, by gum! It was much easier to analyze and think, and nobody ever got distracted by, you know, doodling or anything.
File this under silly luddites, I think.
It's not the keyboarding she should be worried about, but kids checking the web/emailing/instant messaging during class. Being a law student, i definitely check this site and a few others at times.
Well, at the tender age of 51, my handwriting can't compete with my keyboarding. I can type 90-some words per minute. My handwriting isn't as good as it used to be, it's less legible, and while I'm typing I can use Word to complete half-spelled common words as I type.
Laptops also are usually pretty damn quiet, keyboard-wise.
I just took a laptop to cover a conference, and I think my tap-tapping was pretty quiet.
Maybe this teacher actually is more concerned that her students aren't typing notes, but instead are doing PhotoShop or something else.
But if not, and she's really worried about noise, I think she needs to look at other options...
the horror! how can any young lawsprouts function without a laptop? Why, back in my lawschool days (early 90s), we regularly flunked our classes because we had to take handwritten notes. It's painful to think about.
I'm still in therapy over it. Fire this professor.
I understand the teacher's position. students have been trained to be typists, just writing down what the teach says. But some teachers want the students to actually listen, in real time, to what's being said, and, in real time, to think about it. Revolutionary! Take a look at William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, as an example of how people used to be able to speak, and listen. Sentences that go on and on, but in a beautiful, crafted way. The letters from Civil War soldiers are another example. Not to belabor the point, but it would be better if in at least some classes we went back to the old ways. As McLuhan said, any time we come up with a technological extension of a human ability, the human ability withers.
One of my co-workers has a sweet laptop that has a special screen and software and you fold it open and then flat again so that you can take hand written notes and then save them as either a .jpg or a Word document. The screen looks like a sheet of legal paper. It is way impressive in meetings and she can instantly e-mail her notes to her team back in the States.
My life's mooto is WWMD-What would MacGuyver do? Methinks he would adapt to the situation without acting like his whole world was collapsing.
Laptop screens can be distracting for other students, not to mention the sound of keys clacking. Haven't these people heard of tape recorders?
I'm sure that IM and email are the key concern of a lot of the petitioners.
As a law student, I agree with the prof. You don't have to process when you are typing. It goes stright from the ears to the keys without any analysis.
But am I going to not use my laptop today in Basic Income Tax? No way in hell. I just have to remind myself that every word is not important, but the concepts behind the words are. The problem is that most students think that getting everything down is enough to understand everything.
Think of the children!!! Won't someone please think of the children!!!!
The real problem isn't the laptop or typing, it's that people are doing other things on the computer - surfing, writing papers, solitaire - and are paying more attention to what is on the screen than the lecturer. And when lots of people start doing that the energy in the room just deflates. I don't think that the quality of lecture is to blame. Sitting still and listening, your mind just has a tendency to wander. And if you are able to follow that trail instead of pulling yourself back into the room...
Stand in the back of most lecture halls and you'd be amazed. (Or not.)
OK - for how many years did I sit in lectures hand writing notes as the lecturer talked away? During that time, for the most part, I was copying not thinking about what was being said. In the end, I didn't bother going to those lectures and just photocopied a friend's notes - copying was all I was doing anyway.
Lecturers who provided printed books of the lecture notes got my attention and attendance. I could devote most of my attention to the subject, and make my own written notes on their printed ones to clarify points. As a consequence my understanding of the subject was much better.
If someone is doing something other than typing, then why are they in the lecture? Is there an attendance sheet that students must sign? If so, it's the lecturers own fault - if you want attendance, don't force them, do a class that makes them want to come.
If you've prepared for the class....if you've read and briefed the cases....if you understand the concepts....you'll hit some key passages in the case book with a highlighter, and you'll jot down some critical observations by hand. And you'll understand the material. As everyone who's attended law school will recall, law school teaches you to think like a lawyer, not to type like a court reporter.
Stenography is not study any more than it is journalism. Verbatim notes aren't much help if you don't understand what you've typed.
Full disclosure: I did not attend law school in the age of typewriters, carbon paper and actually looking in the reporters, as opposed to searching Lexis or Westlaw. Those people were giants.
I'm at a small women's liberal arts college on the West Coast (getting a grad degree) and I assist in an undergrad course. One student uses her laptop to take notes. One student clearly uses it to surf the internet. Guess which one is flunking class?
THe dean just sent around a memo reminding students that surfing, shopping, playing games or viewing offensive material while in class distracts other students.
Some students do have motor issues that make note taking by hand a problem - they should get a note from a trained professional such as an occupational therapist or just the resource people in the student services center. I think a professor has the right to ban laptops unless student has proof of a disability requiring note taking.
And you know, there's always the Alpha Smart, a fab text machine that uploads text to a PC. Costs $139 retail. I'm getting one for my 6 year old soon, since he has motor issues that make it hard for him to write - he types well.
My sympathies are wiht the professor.
A great article in last week's Newsweek (Technology Section) is about the concept of "continuous partial attention".
Author states that some activities require full attention for comprehension, or (sometimes) for reflection.
Further, being continuously "available" (by cell, email or text" actually makes us CONTINUOUSLY UNAVAILABLE
Somehow I managed to get through school and grad school without taking a laptop to class. Granted they were a bit bulky back then and no one did it. But still...
I do remember the cluster of tape recorders sitting front and center in many lectures though. People taping for their future use and people taping for their hungover friends who were skipping.
I can certainly see a professor wanting the electronics shut down if he/she is trying to develop a classroom discussion socratic-method of teaching with lots of give and take and exchange between professor and students. That's how education was in most of my classes, especially as an undergrad at a small liberal arts college.
What amazes me most about this is the sense of entitlement amoung the students. That they are somehow Entitled to turn their lecture hall seats into some sort of mini-office with all forms of electronic gadgets. What's next? Sean Penn ordering pizza to class like in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
Seriously if the professor wants students to sit there and get engaged then more power too him.
Good. Schmucks on their laptop tapping on their keyboards (especially if they pound on it) is the most annoying thing I have dealt with in university classes.
I've actually have had professors stop lecturing to tell people to stop typing because they type so hard.
I'm a relatively-late returnee to law school. I think the prof has a point, but my ability to take notes and outline on MS OneNote far surpasses what I could by hand as an undergrad 15 years ago. I would not go back.
Her beef is lack of engagement in the classroom -- but I would bet that she's fortunate just to have them showing up for class. The Socratic method, from what I've seen so far, is a pretty crappy approach to teaching law, and most of my profs so far have either abandoned it, treated it like a joke, or modified it drastically. What matters for their exam is black-letter law; they know it, we know it; and taking down what's said in class, even if it's rote at the time, is the best way (for me) to get a sense of what's important to the prof. I can digest it later, while reading the cases and supplements.
Not to say there isn't a lot of shoe-shopping and IM-ing going on during class, however....
drattted enter key!
CONTINUOUSLY UNAVAILABLE . . . for real human interaction.
I teach educational technology classes for teacher in-training. Have to remind them (of all people) that not paying attention to the teacher is distracting to the teacher, and can be considered a form of disrespect.
Cheers,
xog
Where does this desire to be continuously connected come from?
The Newsweek article refers to the desire of the individual to "be a live node on the network".
Interesting . . .
xog
I'm guessing Prof. Entman doesn't teach patent law -- in order to do that you have to have some understanding of how tools and technology operate in the world.
Consider pencil and legal pads -- they can be used to take class notes, but -- horrors! -- they can also be used to doodle (Photshop!), write a letter home (e-mail!), write a note to the cute chick across the aisle (chat!), or play tic-tac-toe (Solitiare!). And don't get me started on that annoying scratching sound...
By Prof. Entman's "logic," the students shouldn't be taking notes at all in class -- they should be memorising her no-doubt compelling and engaging lectures.
Sheesh, what is it with Tennessee law profs, anyhow...?
Anyone who becomes helpless or disoriented when separated from their electronic devices is ill prepared for reality. The lights will go out someday.
Also, a room full of people hunched over their keyboards is a very different learning environment from a room full of people actively discussing or ready to be called on. The professor is well within his rights to demand the latter environment at least some of the time.
Simple. Her classroom, her rules. Unless there's a general policy on such things. But I seriously doubt that.
I second PigInZen. Somehow, people managed to learn in classes for centuries before laptops were invented.
Just wait till one of the students files an ADA lawsuit against her.
There are at least a dozen conditions, mostly under the umbrella "disgraphia", that she is not accommodating.
The professor would gain far more sympathy if she were to frame her argument in terms of whether a someone with a laptop in her class distracts OTHER students, as some commenters here have done. That would be a valid reason to ban laptops.
However, it seems like she's arguing that students are hurting themselves by using laptops. Whether or not you agree, it's not her role to protect students from what she deems are their own bad habits. She can and should clamp down on individual students who are making it difficult for others, but she can not force students to conform to methods that she feels are optimal to learning.
And as someone who was a full-time student just months ago and didn't have a laptop at the time, I can tell you that during the actual class lecture I was too busy handwriting notes from the teacher's lecture to think and analyze what he or she was telling us. The thought and analysis comes OUTSIDE the classroom.
I'm with the prof. I remember watching a public TV show years ago where a college professor was actually campaigning for young kids to NOT use computers in school. He was no luddite, though. He just said that computers were such a powerful tool that if you gave it to young kids, they adapted their learning and thinking to the processes of the computer rather than standing on their own.
Mike
When did "keyboard" become a verb?
The life of an English teacher is a life of anguish...
I am sooooooo envious of today's college students. Back in the 80s we had to hand-write notes. If I'd had a laptop -- oh, what joy! I type much, much faster than I can write by hand; using a laptop in class would have given me more opportunity to think about what the lecturer was saying.
Using a laptop instead of scribbling into a notebook is such a mark of progress -- it's so, so much better -- that I can't imagine anyone opposing the use of laptops in a lecture hall.
I'm so happy for (and, as I said, envious of) today's college students, with their laptops and network connectivity. I'd like to find a way to measure the college experience before and after these technological advances. Today's students have it so much better, and they can learn more if they use their tools right.
Yeah, I'm sure some of those students are IM'ing during the lecture. And I'll bet some of those IMs say, "What did she just say? I didn't understand that." It beats passing a note or whispering to a neighbor.
Am I being naive? I'm firmly convinced that having laptops and Wi Fi in a lecture hall makes for a much better learning environment. Slam-dunk, hands-down better.
What others said RE distraction. It's a lot harder to goof off while taking notes by hand.
You got a fancy-pants doctor who will make up a diagnosis for some condition so that you can tote your Powerbook to class? Groovy, but it better be verifiable. I don't think that half the class has such a condition.
Hell, when I was in law school I took copious longhand notes... I switched to a fountain pen because I could write with it faster. And it wasn't because I didn't have a laptop.
Kids these days.
None of it matters anyway -- Mr. Winsett is bluffing. As a local, I can assure you: if Mr. Winsett is studying law at the University of Memphis, it's because he's got nowhere else to go. Which isn't to disparage the school or its students, only to say that it's generally a school of last resort for students who lack the financial or academic means to attend elsewhere. If he were studying something besides law, he might have some options -- though I suppose he could always transfer into U of M's celebrated hotel management program.
Good luck getting into Vanderbilt, kid.
Long ago professors lectured (read) because no one else could afford the book, which was not in print anyhow, because print didn't exist.
Eventually we got to the point where most students could afford a "textbook" but profs wanted them to come to class and take notes -- write a new book -- by hand. Was this worth doing?
Now there is improved technology for creating that new book. But is it worth doing?
Really, if this is what lectures are for, maybe they should be abolished.
I don't think they should be abolished, but I don't think creating a new, inaccurate book by hand or by typing is a good use of student or professorial time.
I make my notes available on the web, or use a textbook. My lectures are still well-attended because I comment on the lecture notes or on the text in a useful way. As well as commenting on primary source excerpts relevant to the topic at hand. My students could print out a set of notes on the first day of class, but the personal contact -- even in a class of 50 or more -- still has its use.
My guess is that the usefulness of lectures is to see a living human being taking the subject seriously, acts as a motivator.
This doesn't work so well if you hate the prof, but this is an imperfect world.
I wonder if this law prof should consider the usefulness of her current approach.
I took notes the hard way in the 70's (with a fountain pen, to boot!) and I always had to rewrite them at the end of the week in order to be able to read and understand them later. I scribbled madly in a sort of shorthand which got progressively less legible as time passed. When I returned to school years later, I ended up using a laptop partway through the term after injuring both arms in a bicycle wreck. While the typed notes were infinitely more legible and substantially more literate, nonetheless I feel that I had better recall of what I actually wrote versus what I typed. It was also much harder to include images in my typed notes, as searching and downloading took longer for me than simply making my own lousy sketches. FTR, this was in archaeology. Ben Domenech Memorial Note: your own lousy sketches will never lay you open for a charge of plagiarism.
I have a friend in his first year of law school. LITERALLY the only time I ever hear from him is between 6-9 pm on weeknights, when he routinely IM's me from his law school lectures. I cannot imagine he is getting much out of class, considering his engagement in the IM conversation.
I'm all for technology, but I think the issue here is internet access, not laptops. But as someone pointed out, you could just as easily get distracted screwing around in Photoshop, or doodling on a piece of paper. I say the professor should just grade on class participation and those whose minds are elsewhere most of the time will fail.
i've read steve's site in my share of classes, usually the ones with required attendance and a worthless lecture. but, in the classes i want to pay attention to i'll fire up word and take some notes. but, suprise! i've still got those note AND i can read them, unlike all the math and physics classes (don't ever try wasting all that time putting formulas into word). the laptop is best for those professors who don't work from and outline and jump around a lot.
she's welcome to do this and the students will vote with their feet. unless she's the only one teaching it they'll just catch it next semester and the department will drop her empty class. want to guess how many times they'll do that?
Is she correct in suspecting they aren't paying attention to her? Simply turn off the WiFi transmitter into that classroom and watch the laptop use dwindle to almost zero in a few days. I know; I'm an IT guy at a University and we get to see the results of these (inadvertent) "experiments" all the time.
The real problem isn't out-of-touch professors or lap-tops. It's self-indulgent crybabies like the student quoted who would rather change schools than experience even the slightest inconvenience. Or maybe I'm just jealous because back in the pre-laptop, pre-internet days when I attended law school I had to smuggle newspapers and magazines into class to entertain myself.
This amuses me. I still use handwritten notes, on a PDA instead of a notepad, but still handwritten and I type fast.
Why? Because I have to LISTEN to people speak. You can't do that when you type and I can type nearly as fast as I think.
And my handwritting sucks.
My partner enforces this rule on her freshmen ethics students. She's really mean -- she makes them divide up into small groups and talk with each other about the material.
She has also been known to enforce this rule on me when we were both sitting in the back of some boring meeting. I don't take in information very well by ear, so a computer provides something better to do.
bahh I was takign all my notes via laptop in the early to mid ninties..then again my handwriteing is worse then my spelling (I should have been a doctor) and I was a CS major.
Instead of tape recorders, get the kids voice-recognition software. That way they can kick back and actually listen to the lecture instead of being mindless stenographers.
My son and daughter are both enrolled in a j-school that "requires" laptop purchase by all its students. PowerBooks are "highly recommended," of course -- and does the university bookstore have a fantastic deal on them! (I'm not sure, but I think the Asst Dean who writes the annual letter about this "requirement" had a real-world background in junkmail copywriting.)
My kids decided to try and skip going $1800 further in debt for as long as they could. Result: My son will soon graduate, never having seen a need for the "required" laptop. My daughter might get a PowerBook in her junior year, since she will be entering a fairly (Apple-) intensive design program and her ancient desktop PC is about to blow up, anyway.
Er... the point? According to them, if it weren't for IM and media search and download, the "required" laptops would get almost no use at all in the classroom setting.
Okay, this is just one anecdotal observation that gives me an opportunity to bitch about this 'requirement' repeated annualy by this darn Asst Dean in offensive ad-copy/ad-ministration terms. I'm sure that laptops could be useful in class. (Especially if wi-fi connections are disabled.)
how will he get through class without solitaire, freecell, snood, and, of course, an NES Simulator?
Gah - another "Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn" moment for me. I can't imagine typing class notes - holy smokes. I went to college/grad school in the late 70s/early 80s when we had to write on flat rocks with sooty sticks. To this day, I'm a 2-fingered typist, even after earning 2 liberal arts degrees and working as a writer for 20 years. In fact, I'm rather pathetically trying to teach myself to touch type now, using a "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" program after I tuck young Miss Smoochy in for the night. I would still be trying to pass English 101 if I had to type my class notes.
I took notes the hard way in the 70's (with a fountain pen, to boot!) and I always had to rewrite them at the end of the week in order to be able to read and understand them later.
I took notes the hard way (easy for you! 
) in the late 80s -- no snazzy laptops, but I had an Apple II back at the dorm. So I'd take notes longhand (slacker that I am, I used a ballpoint) and type them up on the computer later. It definitely had the benefit of "re-running" the lecture for review (once in class, once that night, and once for exams), but I wasn't really digesting the lecture in-class. And in any case, my longhand notes tended to be sparser in direct relation to how engaging the lecturer was, although the typed product usually came out in equal or greater density to those from the boring lecturers or topics.
These days, I'd probably record the audio of the lecture (probably another proscribed activity in her class), jot diagrams and notes on paper, and enjoy the luxury of listening rather than writing frantically. I'd transcribe the results onto computer later on.
The point is, there are lots of ways of taking in a lecture, and lots of tools available to implement those methods. Denying students the use of certain tools basically assumes that all students should learn the same way, which is nonsense -- especially in a graduate setting.
If only law had existed before computers! Damn this higher education and its advent of new systems of regulating society and their overnight development! However will people survive without computers?
It's the professor's class and she makes a good point. When people aren't dutifully and mindlessly typing notes on their portables, they're surfing the internet and sending text messages (or reading blogs). The lack of eye contact alone would drive me mad, were this professor.
Maybe the students have a point in that this is the 21st century; protestations that handwritten notes are not enough, though, ignore the--oh, I don't know--last 600 years where students have had to write out notes by hand.
I use my laptop in class all the time, and I am passing all my classes. I see it all, from one girl who uses it for DVD watching, to those who uses it for note taking, to one guy who ocasionally fires up UT2K4 when bored. I only have played one game in a class, GTA3 when I had a very disrespectful stats prof who was flunking most of the class for grammer on math tests. He truely was the prof from Hell. He would actually interupt class about once a week to lecture about Jesus.
Me, I type away notes as I have handwriting disabilities, and I have "fancy" doctors and school notes incase any prof wants to take away my tools. To avoid distraction, I leave my wifi card at home.
When I was in law school, my laptop was indispensable. Without those endless games of freecell and hearts during lecture, I would have fallen asleep every day.
Shorthand is a very helpful skill.
cont: An advantage is that most other people won't be able to read it.
A photog acquaintance and his journalist co-worker got out of Zimbabwian jail sentence because no one could read the journalist's notes.
I f'ing hated lectures in college and grad school. Bored me to death. I learned so much more just reading the material and doing the homework. Hell, half the time I was doing crossword puzzles during lectures. If I had a laptop back then it'd probably have been sudoku or freecell.
Kevin de Bruxelles -
Was it the Gateway M280 notebook. I am so buying myself one of those.
I am simply amazed at the reactions on this thread.
I honed my note-taking skills to a high level as an undergraduate. My notes were legible and well organized, and I added to them and annotated them regularly. They helped me make the Dean's List and to get into graduate school,
But that was 40 years ago! I would have *killed* for a laptop!
Who *cares* if the students let the computer distract them? That's on *them!* The professor will be paid whether her students learn anything or not.
The students should stand firm and should negotiate laptop use in class with this professor. I have no sympathy for her or for her position.
Being from the 5-subject spiral notebook days, I guess I understand her point. But this is 2006 and students are tied to their devices. Most certainly, if I took my laptop to class, I'd be doing everything but paying attention. But then again, I was a compulsive doodler too so I figure my note taking and comprehension would have been about the same.
Technology rules and you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube in that regard. I predict a defeat - one way or another - for this teacher.
She ought to podcast her lecctures, then.
Her class, her rules. This law students are pussies - threatening to leave the school if they can't use their laptop? what the fuck?
One should think of the law professor as a future judge you might face in court ... one learns to deal with them and their rules, whether you like them or not.
fuckin' hell - whatever happened to taking notes on a piece of paper - that kills these kids?
the more i think about this, it's really a non-story. who cares? let her do what ever she wants, if the students don't like it they can take the class from another professor. if the students are forced to be there they can bring a magazine to read. there's plenty of other ways to ignore a boring professor. fortunately i'm a cs major so people expect you to have a laptop out.
That's funny- supposedly it is bad to have time on your hands in lecture, unless the reason is that the lecturer wants you to talk with your neighbor.
When I'm paying for education, that lecturer damn well better have something to say that I can't learn from my neighbor. If I'm sitting there and the lecturer is saying nothing worth writing down, why am I there at all?
Of course, our profs thought we had a lot of content we had to learn, so we could pass the big bad licensure test after we graduated, so we didn't spend a lot of time on touchy-feely stuff. (Anyone remember T-groups?)
Likewise, our profs figured if we wanted to waste our time and flunk out, well, that was up to us. They were pretty good at writing tests, and supervising clinicals, and I can assure you there was no whispering or game-playing in any class I took during the last three years of a B.S.
Most people can't talk more than about 45 wpm and most people can think about 300 wpm, so you better keep your brain connected to the topic being discussed. I did it by restating what I believed the lecturer was trying to tell us, and writing it down so I could review it later.
You're paying with time, money, and opportunity cost when you attend school- are you getting your money's worth? And, if not, who does that hurt?
I'm not impressed by the arguments of the teacher or the students. Life is about making adjustments and compromises. Something future lawyers should want to know a thing or two about.
I know nothing of laptops in the classroom. I went to school during the Stone Age. But if I had a laptop in class, I'd be on the Internet and all that jazz. It may be tres passe but IMO, nothing beats a tape recorder getting the lecture down with me making supplementary notes that will be my guide when I play the lecture back and set up my REAL notes. I'm big into subliminal learning. I used to go to sleep listening to certain lectures I taped or play them while doing other things. Worked for me.
Well, since I type faster than I write by hand, I love the idea of laptops in class. I wish they'd been around when I was in school.
Just a point of information: Laptops constantly at our fingertips *can* make us much more efficient. Our company is issuing laptops as the standard employee work platform and has set up a network of wireless transmitters over the corporate campus.
Many employees carry their laptops to meetings for the purpose of taking minutes that can be transmitted almost instantly after the meeting adjourns, sharing and readjusting presentations and project schedules on the fly based on feedback from other participants.
That being said -- some managers have taken to banning laptops from *their* meetings after determining that many of the attendees are using their computers to carry out non-meeting related tasks. Bad.
Computers would be so useful if only they allowed us to do the things we should do and didn't allow us to do the things we shouldn't. I'd be way ahead if they did that ; )
Shit, I almost never took any notes, not in my caveman education in the early 1990s nor in my high-tech grad school a few years ago. I usually spent the class period actually doing the homework for the following week.
Wow. This comment thread explains something to me. I was the type of guy who listened well and took accurate notes in class, and I could ace my tests without doing homework. Now I understand why classmates couldn't do the same -- they weren't paying attention. I was so focused on my tasks, I never noticed.
People did crossword puzzles during lectures? Seriously?
I gotta ask -- if you do crossword puzzles, and sudoku, and you're IM'ing your friends about nothing in particular, who is paying for your education? Are you there on daddy's dime?
If she lays down this rule in her syllabus before the open entry/open drop date, I guess the kids can just shuffle to another class if they can't lose the laptop.
It's a Civil Procedures class, though. Is it a gateway to a bunch of other classes? Does everyone have to take it?
I think this is really lame. I take notes with a pen, but I don't know if I would do that in law school.
I'm in my last semster in law school now, and I have largely given up taking notes. Many of my fellow students take voluminous notes, but I have found that typing everything down really does interfere with my thinking. Whenever I spend effort to get stuff onto the computer, I'm not tracking what is going on in class.
There are other issues, with the laptops. If you close your eyes and listen to a big lecture hall, it sounds like the place is fool of giant insects. The rustling click of all those laptop keyboards sounds like the cockroaches invading from Mars.
More to the point is that at any given time in a lecture hall, some seventy five percent of the students are surfing the web, emailing or IMing. But it's their tuition money.....
I agree with the professor. I went a "few" years ago but I cant imagine a whole class of say 100 students in a big Uni auditorium all clicking away.
I would literally go bonkers and start slapping people. Or worse.
Yawn....
.
jumping in, but this just horrifies me:
The Socratic method, from what I've seen so far, is a pretty crappy approach to teaching law, and most of my profs so far have either abandoned it, treated it like a joke, or modified it drastically.
you're not really saying that you think the socratic method has no value in the classroom are you???
that's just depressing if you are...
and hello: what's so hard about doing both? i've taught, i've been a student, i own computers and i'm old enough to have been a student who took notes by hand, often from profs who didn't speak english so well. it's totally possible to have the best of both worlds here.
want engaged students? give good lectures, ask questions of people at random, mandate certain behaviors like a 'class participation' credit as part of the final grade.
want good classroom experiences? pay attention. do the reading. ask questions. take notes as best you can, don't use your tech (paper margins or poker websites) to distract you from the class. don't go if you're not going to participate, and let people who want to learn learn.
really, i think this is a false dichotomy.
I have to agree that notetaking becomes unproductive, especially when you become more focused on recording and not listening. But personally, I wish that more classes were built around doing - to do is to be honest the best teacher one can have.
And OT, Steve might be interested in RMS's interview with Forbes (part 1, part 2), especially the last part:
" Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?
It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it)."
For the English teacher who asked when "keyboarding" became a verb:
Bare minimum, the late eighties. I actually had to take a class called "keyboarding" in middle school.
If you can't sneak a look at porn in class (paper of electronic), the world is coming to an end.
I can't imagine going to class with everybody using their laptops. It certainly wasn't that way when I went to law school, but that was before the personal computer, so what do I know?
However, the teacher has the right and duty to control her classroom. I never took notes because it distracted me from what the professor was saying. (Still, I had friends who took notes, heh, heh.)
note to Steve: There. I'm not a 'lurker' anymore.
This is not a Luddite issue. It is, as a previous commenter noted, as issue of 'partial attention'. I commend the professor for trying to change the dynamic in the classroom.
I hated lectures. Why? Because I'm not a quick writer. I don't do handwriting. I print with my pen. I'm trying to catch up with everyone else, and getting a sore arm out of the deal. The only advantage was that my notes were a lot neater than anybody else's.
So, if I could, I'd skip the class. I'd just be careful to arrange with another student (or possibly the lecturer) a copy of the notes. Attendance had little relation to what mark I got. Self-study and homework were everything.
I studied the hard sciences (engineering, maths, computer science) at Uni in the early 90s. Not much of the "Socratic" method, as I recall. A lot of the work involved equations - which are not as easy to type in as straight text. I did borrow my dad's laptop for one class (Thermodynamics as I recall). The notes were neat, but I got a bare pass out of the class. The rest of the time, it was "paper and pen".
Ahhhh, the timing. Today my laptop died and I had to go back to taking notes by hand as I had to do last semester before I'd saved up enough for a laptop. I don't think I'm less engaged having taken notes on a laptop this semester. I think the problem is less the tools of the trade than the attitude of the students. I sat through a meeting with a professor a couple of weeks ago where students had the gall to complain that he wasn't laying out the meaning of the cases clearly enough for them. It's law school, knucklehead-that's YOUR job. There's a sense of entitlement among these kids that boggles my mind sometimes. Laptop, pencil, whatever...the real issue is doing the damn work. Don't get it? Read it again! Still don't get it? Read it again? And again and again and again and...you think law school is really the place for you?
In property class, first semester, maybe the second week, our brilliant (seriously) prof was interrupted by a student who asked him to repeat a salient point so she could write it down word-for-word.
He refused.
When she started to protest, he held up a hand. "I'm training lawyers, not legal stenographers,"
he said.
I thought of this moment hundreds of times during the next four years as I worked a full time job and went to school 4 or 5 nights a week. And I still think of it now. I have Westlaw right on my desktop and I still can't write do research without the books. When the pile of tan books (NJ Supreme Court) and green books (Appellate Division) reach a certain height, I am sure I have the answer.
But then, I'm a friggin dinosaur. I think people ought to vote on paper, too.
Holdie Lewie: those of us that read the text books aced all of the tests without haveing to bother with notes during the lectures.
Then again CS major, most of our class tiem was spent workign on projects. I never took notes in any of my other classes though and had no trouble, laptop keepet me from snoring
I teach in a humanities discipline at a small school where *everyone* has a laptop, and I tell the students to turn the blasted things off before they get in the room. My reasons have more to do with attention and engagement than noise, of course. Our students are IM junkies (they IM their roommates and friends while they're sitting two feet away from each other in a quiet room. Talking, apparently, is too much effort...), which means that when the machines are on, even the really dedicated note-takers allow themselves to be interrupted constantly.
Granted, I also make it clear that preparation (doing the reading, preparing and submitting questions to our electronic discussion forum ,etc.) is done before class, application and discussion happens IN class. I don't provide essential material through lecture, as a rule. This may not be practical for teachers in disciplines in which lecture turns out to be more important. (I teach philosophy and religion, and my primary interest is less in their ability to regurgitate Aristotle or Aquinas than in their ability to read, understand, and argue about what they read.)
What I've noticed is that I get better student engagement with the material and better critical work *on* the material when I structure my classes so they do quite a lot of preparation before they ever hear a word from me about it. It frustrates them quite a lot at first, but at some point in the term, more of them than not start really getting into it. It turns out to be fun!
The clackety-clackety sound of people chatting on msn in my class drives me completely insane.
Ebee,
I agree with you. I want my students to be active learners- I want them to be engaged rather than disengaged. The more I teach, the less I like to lecture and the more I want students to work on cases, discussion questions, and other activities to apply the ideas from the text. Of course, they need to read the text and other readings before class.
One college president about ten years ago forbade the sale of hilighters in the student store.
It wasn't motivated by the damage to library books, but to the lack of processing that happens when you highlight something and leave it at that.
I know underlining is bad for the same reason, and try not to do it.
I encourage students to write in the margin, in their words, instead.
That's the first step in grappling with a text.
When I was an undergrad (87-91) there were no such things as laptops in schools. When I went back to grad school in 98, the rich kids had them at the beginning and most of the other students had acquired one by the second year. Now, the school hands them out to incoming grad student as part of the program.
I have seen what students do with laptops and they *should* be banned in the classroom. With wireless, students are checking stocks, IMing, checking other email, surfing news, anything but listening. Even without wireless, you can waste a 90 min session just goofing around.
Outside the class, you need it. It goes with you and campus wireless makes it practical as well as statusy. But in the class, the instructors know what's going on behind that open cover. Good for the prof.
I used to grade papers for a prof at my alma mater while looking for my first job, and it's pretty annoying to see the mental cut and paste that's going on.
It would be nice to see students think for themselves, but in reality most kids are going to do cut and paste boilerplate work.
Most students choose law for pragmatic reasons.
Not many students have the critical thinking skills, or honestly, the interest in becoming great thinkers.
Most have the urge to follow the pack and "succeed" and if that means laptops give them an "edge" to get to the top third and maybe Law Review, then they'll do it whether it's good for them, or not.
Also, if your idiot enough to ignore the prof who's argued in front of the Supremes to check your mail or IM in a class costing 200 bucks+, you get the education you deserve.
I think there should be a breakout box in each chair to plug a voice recorder into the chair broadcasting the prof's lesson. No noise, total retention, and thinking can get done. Although, I am sure profs would not like podcasts of their lectures, - why go to class?- it would make a ban on laptops marginally fair, and those 1st years who do show then would be able to engage in discourse with the prof.
People had the same comp vs. book battle when LEXIS first appeared. People ended up using both.
I wish I could type fast enough for it to be an issue.
Commenting by HaloScan
