Huh. I could never take notes with a pen and paper, since I suck at handwriting. So for me, it's either notes on the laptop, or no notes at all.

I wonder why ban laptops, rather than blocking internet use. The 'stenography' argument strikes me as weak -- I'd bet typed, computer-searchable notes are more useful than handwritten. But the distraction argument is solid.

Not practical to turn off WiFi in one classroom only, or the prof just didn't think of it?

He lets two volunteers take laptop notes, which are then distributed to the class.

Blocking the internet isn't very practical, since the wireless signals don't really respect walls, and now, with high-speed cellular access, you don't even need the wifi.

1: You're young enough that you never really had to handwrite notes, aren't you? If you had to, you'd manage, I'm sure. But I still think typed notes are probably more useful.

Back in my day, I had to read novels if I wanted to tune out of a boring lecture.

You're young enough that you never really had to handwrite notes, aren't you?

In a manner of speaking, this is true; more precisely, robot technology wasn't sufficiently sophisticated at the time of manufacture to give pdf23ds the requisite manual dexterity to take "handwritten" notes.

Relatedly, China passed a law requiring that online games cap users at 3 hours of play per day to prevent addiction.

Everything my friends going through law school tell me about the way classes are conducted suggest pretty much no reason for them to take notes at all. Lectures are delivered from comprehensive notes and are then posted online or in podcasts.

Stupid question here - what's wrong with being paternalistic or authoritarian in the classroom? I mean, I could see a criticism on the basis of pedagogical efficacy (I'd probably disagree, but it would certainly be relevant) but his responsibility in the classroom is to teach. Teachers should be judged on things like student learning, not things like classroom administrative techniques.

And I know washerdreyer has commented from class, so if he shows up and tries to sing the praises of laptops, remember to shout him down.

He lets two volunteers take laptop notes, which are then distributed to the class.

That would be next to useless for me. Most of the value I get from notes comes from the actual note-taking process, not simply the future reference purposes.

I would love at this point to experiment with laptop notes, just to see how useful they might be. I went to LS in the early eighties, and took notes in the old, Bramble Bush style.

On the one hand, I find having my laptop extremely useful, because I can use it to do real-time google research on the subject being discussed, which leads to more educated questions on my part. Also, in e.g. math or programming classes I can test the methods being explained as I'm learning them, which helps me with comprehension.

On the other hand, guess what activity I usually pursue.

I might not be a good test case, though, because I'm generally unconvinced about the efficacy of note-taking as a comprehension aid. Better for me to just listen and then have access to transcripts/notes later. The fact that I have the handwriting of a harbor seal doesn't help, either.

Also, when sitting in on slow-moving classes, I regularly take my work laptop along and multitask. And by "multitask", I mean "pay attention 20% of the time".

12: he doesn't ban taking handwritten notes.

11. I have im'd leblanc and she's replied, in passing, that she's in class.

Wattle Time.

I have im'd leblanc

You dirty old man.

Neil is right: you don't need digital technology to tune out of a lecture. (That's what doodling was invented for.) I wonder if perhaps there's a certain generation to whom it simply no longer occurs to "draw" things on "paper," though; a friend of mine recounted a story to me the other day about his son trying to learn the IRL version of solitaire, and how he had unconsciously tried to "click" on a stack of cards as though he was using a mouse.

I'm not saying that it would be a huge problem for me. But I'm generally opposed to the lecture format, since it really sucks for me, and I think it sucks for most people more than they might know.

he doesn't ban taking handwritten notes.

Right, I just meant that, if I wanted to take computer-based notes (for whatever reason--poor penmanship, hand fatigue, searchability, etc.), having them provided to me by someone else wouldn't be much help at all.

From the link in 18: I very much enjoy reading Petticoat Discipline Quarterly; it seems to be unique.

Truer words were never spoken.

18. JM, that was one weird link.

Who can I contact to ban myself from the internet during the day?

Since B ain't here (yet), I'll speak as the other teacherly sort and say that laptops are a distraction in the classroom, but as that link evidences, there's something you can do about it (sometimes). Seriously though, the Cornell method works precisely because it forces you to think through what you've written down, which is better than bald stenography. Also, stenography only works in lecture courses; end up in a discussion-oriented class like mine, and you'll give equal weight to the feints, traps, assorted discussion-starters and the actual point ... which would mean you missed the point.

Also, note that it's distracting both to the student not taking notes and the dutiful ones who are.

2, 4: At my law school, WiFi access always requires us to log in using our university u/p. At times when the registrar expects us to be in class, we are barred from logging in, and booted off if it happens that we're on when the hour begins. That's pretty effective at keeping me offline, although I'm aware that some of my more tech-savvy classmates have ways around it (including but not limited to using their friends' passwords, which seems risky to me). Of course, being offline != paying attention, as others have noted. Solitaire is still available, as well as garden-variety spacing out.

The most common response to this, from students, is to say "I've had professors who held my attention; with them I didn't use the internets or play solitaire or anything. All you others are just whiny because you're boring." Which has a grain of truth to it.

Oh, and we definitely don't get our professors' teaching notes. That'd be pretty sweet, although it would indeed make going to class just about completely pointless.

24.--Yes, significantly weirder than I'd thought when I posted it.

I could never take notes with a pen and paper, since I suck at handwriting.

I can't sight-read my own handwriting, but I always take notes with a pen and paper. Why? To avoid distractions/multitasking (synonyms in this case), and because the only way I can actually get things into my brain is FIRST to familiarize myself with everything and enable myself to recall the lecture by writing it down as fast as possible, and THEN to go back and type up my notes and organize them a little better.

It took me until my 15th and last year of class-taking to figure out this method of note-taking, by the way. Virtually every class I'd ever had before that, my notes were basically worthless except for the side benefit of forcing me to pay attention slightly better than I would have if I weren't taking notes.

The link in #26 is very interesting. I had no idea there were named styles and strategies for note-taking. Do they teach a class in that anywhere?

Although there does not seem to be anything questionable about the url itself, link-in-18 is blocked here at "corporate headquarters"

27: Ayuh. If I am going to distract myself on the internet while in class I do my best to (a) sit with my laptop screen out of other's sightlines, and (b) keep my typing as quiet an infrequent as possible. Which probably is only a partial solution, but, but. I think of it as an additional incentive to actually get my ADD'd ass to boring lectures consistently.

Starting grad school last fall, I was actually excited about the prospect of taking notes on my laptop (which was still new enough to be an exciting toy). Tried it for one class, and realized I'm an old-fashioned gal.

I rely upon the elaborate handwritten system of crazy underlines and arrows and weird indents that make the significance of my notes perfectly clear to me, and which would take ages for me to reproduce on a laptop.

I guess undergrads today can develop their note-taking systems and habits from scratch on a laptop, so this probably isn't a problem for them.

29. The obvious answer is to have the law students who are found to have not been taking appropriate notes in class to submit to the "petticoat discipline". I shall never think of PDQ Bach in the same way.

Since B ain't here (yet), I'll speak as the other teacherly sort

WTF? WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I'LL KILL YUO!

30 - Presumably Cornell.

That said, I was taught a variation of the Cornell method my first day of college. Thought it was completely useless, this insistence that we have to hand in our notes in all their various stages for the first half of that semester ... until we realized that we didn't actually have to study for the midterm for more than an hour, and that we'd all aced it.

I guess undergrads today can develop their note-taking systems and habits from scratch on a laptop, so this probably isn't a problem for them.

Dear lord, it's not like a majority of undergrads have a laptop nowadays, even in the US. When I was an undergrad, in the current millennium, about 1% of us took lecture notes on a laptop. Nobody's done it in any of my graduate classes.

35 - I've notified the FBI. (Got 'em on speed dial now.)

32 - All that thinking could be otherwise (and betterly) applied, no?

Sue! I'm glad to see your comment.

37 - No? I assumed lots of the kids today were laptop powered, but I haven't been around any undergrad classrooms lately. And nobody does it in your grad classes? I'd say about 65% of students in mine take notes on laptops (for lectures, not seminars), and my impression is that it's pretty high in law schools too.

real-time google research on the subject being discussed, which leads to more educated questions on my part

As someone who does this constantly--uses google to quickly bone up on stuff--I call bullshit. Googling is a crutch; it isn't learning. I'll wager that the quick google knowledge disappears as fast as it comes in, which is exactly the opposite of what you want discussion in a classroom to accomplish.

The most common response to this, from students, is to say "I've had professors who held my attention; with them I didn't use the internets or play solitaire or anything. All you others are just whiny because you're boring." Which has a grain of truth to it.

Bullshit on this as well. Yes, some lecturers are so engaging that students are rapt, and this is a great thing. But hello, *active* learning requires a certain responsibility on the students' part. You can learn a lot from a dull professor if you actually think it's your job to do so.

All that said. I don't really mind laptops in the classroom, because I've gotten wanted to take typed notes myself. BUT. I strongly suspect that their efficacy is grossly exaggerated: ime, handwritten notes are effective learning tools *even if you never review them at all*. Something about having to listen closely enough to decide what to write down makes things sink in.

Of course, it's also possibly that I'm simply a super genius, and everyone else needs to review their notes. But I kinda doubt it.

Also the "distraction" thing is just a temporary situation. Students with Tourette's are a distraction too (I've had them), but it's the responsibility of the other students to learn to pay attention anyway. Once laptops get pretty common, I imagine folks'll ignore them.

But internet connectively should absolutely be banned, duh. And there's not a damn thing wrong with an instructor deciding that in *his* classroom, you will not take laptop notes. If you've got some kind of issue where you need to type, bring a note and get an exception made.

39: Not necessarily. I am generally a highly lateral thinker, and have found that the best way for me to retain information is to follow my tangential curiosities as they occur to me. In a small, interactive class this is easily accomplished by asking relevant questions, but in large lectures that's obviously not an available option in the same way.

Or I'm making an excuse because I'm altogether too attached to my laptop. Could go either way, but the fact that I've had to quit AIM outright might provide a clue.

Calling myself a "lateral thinker" makes me die a little inside, but I can't think of a more accurate way to put it.

43: Excuse. When taking notes you just follow your tangential curiosities by . . . . writing them down! Who'da thunk?

"As someone who does this constantly--uses google to quickly bone up on stuff--I call bullshit. Googling is a crutch; it isn't learning."

Call it what you want, but I'm going to stand firm and repeat that it helps me retain the original material much better than the "file this away and understand how it connects in later" technique does, because it involves me actually thinking about it.

Students with Tourette's are a distraction too (I've had them)

Wow, I'll bet they would be. My brother had a good friend with Tourette's, but it was very mild, and aside from a slight jaw tic only manifested in noticeable symptoms when you first woke him up. There's a documentary about Tourette's called Twitch and Shout that is a really fascinating watch. Keeps veering back and forth between side-splitting and heartbreaking.

I'll speak as semi-recent law school grad, who attended during a time when the shift had occurred and all but one or two people in any given class used laptops.

1. Most people "outline" in law school, which means integrating your class notes with other stuff. Having handwritten notes in this context, when you're trying to create a new, sometimes 80-page document (for each class!) is a tremendous waste of time.

2. The old saw is true: good profs mean fewer distracted students, and lower distraction levels per capita.

3. And! Even better is the tactic of my beloved school, which was cold-call Socratic in every class, all the way through -- you can get distracted, but you can't get too distracted. Most law schools have moved away from Socratic to pansy-ass hand-raising or halfway-measure "on call" systems. Computer distractions affect these softer approaches much, much more.

On the other hand, if the internet could be banned, I think it would make sense; there's nothing lost from the classroom or the educational process that way (except IM'ing to tell your classmate an answer when he's called on!). But as noted, probably not technically feasible.

when you're trying to create a new, sometimes 80-page document

Note to any law students out there: while 80-page outlines are conventional, they're way way way too long. You read a case for its holding; each case gets a one line summary, and the outline should come out at around ten pages if that. Flipping through an 80 page document during a timed exam is going to kill you.

44: It's a qualitatively different thing. Given that I rarely look at my notes, and further given that my attention, flittering butterfly that it is, rarely alights on the same subject twice, it's the difference between "oh, I wonder about X tangent, I should look that up," and "oh, I wonder about X tangent, I should look that up, ah! That's how it's relevant. I want to know more about this now."

Note that this doesn't make me a good student. But since I've spent my life fighting against the tide to be a marginally passable student, I figure applying the techniques that have best served my autodidacticism isn't the worst idea in the world.

48: I agree with you that it's too long to make (if you can't get a class down to 25 pages, you don't understand it properly), but I'm all for having someone else's stupidly-long outline on hand. Because, at many schools: Ctrl + F.

Oh, wow. Having the outline searchable on your computer? Man, why go to class?

When the laptops started popping up, I worried that students would fact check my ass in real time and find out I don't know what I'm talking about. Then I realized that was a good thing, because it provided a greater incentive to do something I generally do, which is to not present speculation and hazy memory as fact. Students with laptops in an incentive to stay on the straight and narrow in that regard.

One thing I like about laptops in the classroom is when a student asks a factual question I can't answer, I appoint a laptop user as my temporary research assistant, telling him/her to look up something (and usually where to do it). I often strategically do this to students who I suspect are not paying attention, to force them back into the narrative of the classroom.

I suspect that students who are going to pay attention probably will, and those who won't will either space out or surf the net. Furthermore, I don't want to prevent students from doing whatever kind of notetaking works for them, because that's a personal thing. There are some kinds of lectures--working through a complex multi-step philosophical argument, for example--where I strongly discourage students from taking notes at all, but that's the exception.

I don't really understand what the issue is here. The school gets paid, the professor gets paid, and the student gets what he wants, whether that's a good understanding of the material or a certificate of participation. If it's an actual distraction to others, fine--ban away.

Ogged is clearly right that the "but that's paternalism!" objection is silly. I just don't buy the classroom environment harm. It's easier to delude yourself about the bored student who is spacing out than the bored student who is playing World of Warcraft.

42: Googling is a crutch; it isn't learning.

Depends on what you're Googling. Google isn't a substitute for research and honest-to-Bob dead tree books, but OTOH there's all kinds of of useful stuff to be found that isn't porn or Wikipedia or Unfogged. I can see Sifu's case.

51: I know, right? The way to control for it is just by making longer, harder tests, such that you simply won't have time to search for all the right answers -- it'll have to be internalized. Then the outline just becomes a reference for the minutia.

Back when I went to law school (in the dark ages of the late 90s), I was one of maybe 5 people who typed my notes. As a left-hander, I could never write very quickly, and can type about 10 times as fast. But the big difference was that we didn't have internet access in the classrooms back then (heck, most of us were still on dial-up). I think it's less the computer than the internet/instant messaging that's distracting. without those things, the computer is nothing more than a fancy mechanical writing implement.

Sometimes you need to be a little paternalistic, and I think the laptops-in-classroom is one of them. I don't attend many classes anymore, and the ones I do I can't or don't want to much fuck off it, but I spent most of my first-year classes on my laptop chatting away or reading NYT or Unfogged or whatever. This semester I basically taught a class (with two other students) and we wanted to ban laptops in the class. It just makes for better discussion. The real reason I wanted laptops banned is that I know that there are many students who will participate if they don't have anything else to do, 'cause they'll be paying attention, and law students are mouthy. You just get better discussion if there's no laptops/internet access.

I'm not in class at this moment.

The way to control for it is just by making longer, harder tests

This is how allowing laptops in the classroom change the norms for the entire class, whether or not they use the technology. (One of the ways, at least.)

The way to control for it is just by making longer, harder tests

In my experience, it's the opposite. You in fact make shorter tests, so people don't have much time to rely on anything but their brains. Are you really going to spend ten minutes looking through your outline in a two-hour exam? Believe me, the searchable outline doesn't really give you much. I always have one on hand for exams and they don't help terribly. They're good for jogging your memory for a detail you might have forgotten, but if you don't already know something, an outline's not going to help you. I had a spectacular two-hundred page detailed outline for my Tax Exam, and I still performed shittily.

59: I agree, and w/r/t law, I think definitely for the better. A difficult problem in which you have full references available is a closer approximation of the practice of law than a test of memorized rules.

"Google isn't a substitute for research and honest-to-Bob dead tree books"

It can be.

When I'm engaged in a lecture I have questions I want answered more-or-less constantly. Given the choice between interrupting the class to ask and silently figuring it out for myself right then and there, I would argue the latter is less disruptive.

Having access to Wolfram Mathworld in a (non-math) class with unfamiliar math in it is a lifesaver.

60: I meant "longer" as in more or harder questions, not as in more time. I agree with you that time constraints are the key.

I fucking hate time constraints. I made a poor grade on an essay exam because, writing at full speed, I only had time to write a draft and a final version of a 200-word essay in the allotted hour, and not even enough time to stop and think about it. I just write that slowly. Of course, I didn't realize it would be such a problem going into the exam, or I'd have talked to the TA about it.

37: This seems to have changed in the past few years. When I was an undergrad, almost no one carried their laptops with them to take notes. Now? Everywhere.

The smart solution just seems to be to kill the wireless in the classroom. I usually take notes on my laptop (often in classrooms which have no wireless), because I type a hell of a lot faster than I write.

In an hourlong exam you wrote a first draft? What for?

I have had several students who are dysgraphic either on their own or due to heavy medication, and though they have to turn in writings to me done by hand each day, I let them type up their notes in class. Also, a lot of their readings are on a class website, so many of them read along on their laptops and Sidekicks.

I tried to hassle a Sidekick guy this semester, as he'd spend classtime giggling at his device. I got really rude about it, and was deeply ashamed when he showed me he was reading along and really getting into it.

Maybe my class just isn't big enough to make students feel like they can screw around online during class. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between an undergrad typing notes (furrowed brow, attentive glances to the front of the room) and one who is goofing off (relaxed face, attention focused on the screen). But that's probably because undergrads are not as sophisticated as law students at goofing off.

Oh man I could go on all day about this one. A few things:

1) I had to ban laptops from my freshman class because they're too stupid and/or lacking the frontal lobes to be discrete about their internet use. Everyone else is generally fine.

2) Wireless internet in classrooms is the dumbest idea ever. And our university just crowed about how wonderful it was that they offered it! I still fail to see a single useful application of this.

3) I agree with Ogged's stenography comment. A good typist can just about keep up with spoken speech. You can't do that by hand and thus have to paraphrase, which forces at least minimal use of higher brain areas.

Fortunately, any measure which would prevent cellphones from working in the classroom would also work on wifi.

All classes will henceforth be conducted in lead vaults.

A Faraday cage would be more practical.

Most of my law school finals--at least all of the ones I took--were 8 hours long, open book, w/ access to computer files. Hence the use of 80 page outlines and ctrl F. (It still helped to know the cases...ctrl F really only works in a law school exam if you think, "oh right, this was the case about X, what the hell was it called again", but you can't just start from scratch. And they wrote exams that filled the 8 hours.

I do hate really time-constrained essay tests. Not fair to slow writers.)

Handwritten notes are much less useful than typed for this. But not so useful that I regularly lugged my laptop in every morning--my books weighed enough. I tended to take my own notes & use them to modify old outlines from the class, and he could do this w/ the notetakers. (though doesn't that make it easier for students to miss class entirely? It's possible to take attendance but most professors don't).

I don't buy the stenography argument. Laptops do break eye contact though, and yeah, people surf the web. My law school, when it wired classrooms for internet, also made it possible for professors to turn it off--I think that makes the most sense.

Teaching is all about being paternalistic, so I don't have a problem on that end.

Well let's see here, none of my classrooms as an undergrad had wireless, and now I think all the rooms I had class in do. None of my classrooms as a grad student, an era which lasted through December 2006, had wireless, and now they all do.

In scientific classes the lecture notes contain quite a lot of tables and figures and diagrams, with the result that almost every professor provides his notes (usually Powerpoint printouts with insufficient explanations of what is going on in the images) ahead of time on the course website, and almost every student prints them out ahead of time, brings them to class, and writes notes on the slides because otherwise the slides wouldn't entirely make sense.

A laptop would probably be more useful because you could add stuff to the Powerpoint file as the professor goes along, but I've almost never seen that.

73: I've done that before. It works well.

Laptops do break eye contact though

Doesn't actually writing things down break eye contact even more? I can type without looking at the computer, but I can't write without looking at the page.

Sheesh, I feel like an old man and I haven't even fully completed my graduate education.

I'm largely down with the no-laptops policy. If someone can't write quick enough to take notes, they need to learn to write faster.*

* leaving aside people with legitimate physical disabilities.

Long exams are not cool: I had a mathematical physics exam that was open notes, 12 hours max (take home). I was basically convulsing by the end of it. I have no earthly idea how I managed to get to campus and turn it in. There's no guarantee that I was clothed...

I am by and large a terrible note-taker, but I did take copious notes for my discrete math and algorithms classes, which I still have to this day. That would've been a pain to do on a laptop, I think—hard to draw graphs quickly.

Dang, what kind of internet nerds are you people?

I would never have thought I'd be swimming against the tide on this.

It's not like I'm some facebook-reared nineteen year old; during my brief age-appropriate stint in college nobody had laptops and the internet was barely present. I couldn't be happier with how things have changed.

78: It's not really possible, but some people give it the old college try using OmniGraffle or equivalent.

And open book exams, with laptops and internet access? Why?

What is it examining? Seems utterly pointless to me.

It's a research paper with a short deadline -- how fast can you research and how well can you write up the answers to a set of questions. That's a reasonable skill to test, albeit not much like what's conventionally tested in an inclass examination.

As a left-hander, I could never write very quickly, and can type about 10 times as fast.

I'm surprised this isn't a more significant consideration for more people. I type 60-70 wpm, but write much, much slower. I missed a lot, because I simply couldn't keep up.

I've never heard of it, but I am also left-handed, so maybe it's an actual thing?

Students with Tourette's are a distraction too (I've had them)

Since no one else did it, I will: Is there a student I haven't had?

55: You can certainly learn things on Google, but Googling on the fly while trying to keep up with a class lecture/discussion isn't a very good way to do that.

Given the choice between interrupting the class to ask and silently figuring it out for myself right then and there, I would argue the latter is less disruptive.

Or, perhaps other students are wondering the same thing? Or should be? That's kind of what questions are for.

re: 82

I suppose. If it's just a 'general research skills' exam or something, it makes sense. And that's a useful skill. Is that how these exams are presented? [I really don't know since I've never come across one in real life]

However, as an exam in $foo-subject, it makes no sense at all. I'm pretty sure I could pass an undergraduate exam in more or less anything [leaving aside subjects that require advanced maths] given a laptop and internet access, so it's not a test of much apart from general research skills.

By the way, I'm grateful for the internet = crack metaphor, which I'll be sure to bring up the next time some internet libertarian blowhard asserts that pregnant addicts should "just quit" for the sake of the baby.

Also, if you can type 10 times as fast as you can write, there's something fucked about your writing skills. *Everyone* types faster than they write, but even allowing 80wpm typing, 10% of that is 8 words a minute. 6 year olds write that quickly.

84: Not in my experience. I tend to have pretty weird, digressive questions that draw on knowledge other students wouldn't necessarily have. Also, it annoys the hell out of me when somebody keeps asking questions every two minutes in a 150 person lecture, so I would imagine it's annoying when I do it, too.

And I'll say it again, googling on the fly while in class is a good way for me to retain things. I'm at a loss as to how to prove that to you.

re: 88

And you can pay attention to what is being said, while doing this googling?

googling on the fly while in class is a good way for me to retain things

Is not!

89: Enough, usually. The key point is that I'm terrible at paying attention in any case, so what the googling does, paradoxically, is keep my mind involved in what's being discussed.

It's funny, you teachers and your earnest pedagogies. All the schools are dilpoma mills these days. Dollars for degrees and nothing more. Your presence at the podium every day is just the thin illusion separating your students from those who buy their diplomas online; your salary, payment for your quiet participation in the ruse. They don't care what you're saying and would prefer you said nothing at all. Allowing them to zone out with their laptops, in order more quickly to pass the time, seems the least you could do. Why force them to pay attention when they don't give a shit? Is it purely to exert your control, to impose your will because you can?

Yeah, we all became teachers because we're so power mad.

81 - Of the two infamous exams here at Irvine, the somewhat-less-trying one is Andrzej Warminski's how-to-be-De-Man-in-24-hours test, in which you're forced to 1) read and 2) produce a properly De Manian reading of an obscure work of Romantic literature read by (at most) three people since the turn-of-the-last-century. I speak from experience, here: that fucker's the test of tests, I tell you what.

I have absolutely no idea what ben's talking about. (Posted here so I don't have to look like a dip at my own place.)

93- No, I'd assume you became teachers because you're lazy. Dictatorial exercise of what power you have would just be a bonus, I guess. Perhaps an attempted pushback against your ultimate futility.

96 - Just because we chose to keep going instead of making a choice doesn't mean we're lazy.

Actually kind of it does. Even though, at the same time, a PhD is essentially an endurance contest.

I don't see why someone irritated with laptops would just go Socratic. It's more fun than a lecture anyway.

I have no idea why they'd go to open book/outline exams either: sure the practice is 'open book' when you're sitting in your office, sometimes, but it sure as hell isn't open book when you're standing there at the podium, and some judge is asking you about some case she thinks you ought to know. or when the other guy asks his client a question on the stand, and you think maybe you don't want the jury to hear the answer.

The bar isn't open-book yet, is it?

98 - I work a lot harder than most of the lazy people I know. (Mind you, not that I contribute anything to society, like those other lazy fucks.)

I would never accuse somebody pursuing a PhD of laziness. Masochism? Yes. Poor financial instincts? Absolutely. Weird, pedantic specialization? Bring it on.

Not laziness, though. That's a hell of a lot of work to no good end.

99: Open bar?

Those who don't realize that 92 and 96 weren't serious are utterly humorless. Probably humorless feminists.

I am such a humorless feminist. It's something I have to work on.

100, 101: Depends on how you define lazy. Maybe I should just say "fearful"--of leaving the familiar realm of the academic.

99: Surely you meant *wouldn't* just go Socratic. Which is fun, yes, but also kind of hard work, and a lot of people who are good lecturers are uncomfortable with the question format.

The key point is that I'm terrible at paying attention in any case, so what the googling does, paradoxically, is keep my mind involved in what's being discussed.

I understand this. It's like ADD-distraction, but where you happen to be distracting yourself by learning about the topic in a different way. The alternative isn't paying full attention to the lecture, it's letting your mind wander.

101. Did someone say open bar? I know I heard open bar.

104 - Fearful? Doesn't that go without saying?

66: The first draft had about a third of the words. More of an outline, really. I can't organize a whole small paper in my head well enough to write it out in one go.

I write about 25 WPM.

"The most beautiful word in any language is: Revolution!"
-- Eugene V. Debs

"The two most beautiful words in any language are: Open bar!"
--minneapolitan

College sucks.

110 - Stories about heroes? What a whiner.

111: The "heroes" bit is weird, but "whiner"? This guy's an assistant professor. What would he be whining about?

112 - Most technical programs already have apprenticeship programs; what they don't have is people who 1) have the basic knowledge required to pick up the skills (unless you're talking about purely manual labor) or 2) have the research ability required to learn new skills after they're hired.

What he's whining about is the fact that universities aren't vocational programs. (I have a lot of friends who majored in geology and now work for chemical companies who regularly complain about the inability of new hires to acquire the specific knowledge they need to survive in the industry. There's the bar of entry; but since each company's going to ask trainees to do something a little different, it makes no sense to do vocational work. They need to learn how to learn on their own, i.e. research.)

Universities shouldn't be vocational programs. Those already exist. If you want one of those, don't go to a university, whose mission isn't to ensure you get your first job.

The inability of new hires to acquire the knowledge they need to survive in the industry is not the same as not posessing the knowledge they need to survive in the industry, and seems like the type of thing that is supposed to distinguish universities from vocational programs.

Of course, engineering degrees lie in that weird middle ground, so my frame of reference is probably whack.

So ya'll are saying that college (to be clear, I'm only talking about undergraduate) is primarily about learning how to do research, and secondarily about learning about some subject matter? That just seems fucked up to me. And you're both graduate students, too.

primarily about learning how to do research, and secondarily about learning about some subject matter?

Yes, because most people don't really use the specific content they learned in college once they get into the workforce. Jobs that you need a college degree to get usually don't require them because the employers want someone who can take an integral or explicate The Waste Land, but because a degree is a useful proxy for more general skills.

Also, entirely too many people go to college.

116 - I'm saying both: there's the bar of entry, as I said, but beyond that, the ability to do research -- to integrate unfamiliar ideas quickly and independently -- is essential to success in many a profession (and distinguishes those who will excel from those who will merely be competent).

I'm not saying that what I teach is necessarily essential, although we all like to imagine ourselves to be well-rounded, and my courses do help sustain the illusion.

Well, I'm not going to go on about this, since I have a deep grudge against college. I'm too bitter to be objective.

College is designed for the training of the aristocracy. It's not well suited for much else.

It's not well suited for much else.

Everything I know about drugs and drinking, I learned in college (in truth, I arrived with extensive AP credit in both, but that would ruin the pithy saying).

Woo! A subject in which I plausibly have expertise.

For me, a college degree was not a precondition for getting a job: I was, by most people's standards, very successful in the workforce for, oh, a decade before going back to school. However, not having a college degree does limit the range of jobs that you will get hired to do. There's a fairly large universe of skills (e.g. differential calculus, matrix algebra) that, while extremely useful, are extremely unlikely to be picked up on the job or in your spare time, unless you're a super genius. So, if you're a computer programmer, it's perfectly possible to get a good job without having ever gone to college, but the chance that you will get a really cool job that requires knowledge of Monte Carlo simulations, or partial differential equations, or high temperature physics, is close to nil.

I realize that all of this applies specifically to science degrees. I have no idea what a humanities degree gets you, aside from the ability to present as remarkably well-read and entré to professional schools. The latter is probably the most important at this point. Unless you go to an Ivy or some other networking-heavy east coast school, in which case it's all about the connections.

The idea that college teaches critical thinking is horseshit.

The idea that college teaches critical thinking is horseshit.

Hmmmm, my degree involved 2 one hour tutorials each week (a whole 24 weeks of each year!) which was just me and the tutor for the most part. I think that for a couple of terms I had Maths tutorials with someone else, but all my Philosophy tutorials were just me and the Philosophy fellow - i.e. me reading my essay (and I'd done all maths and science A levels; my essay skills weren't up to much), and him picking it apart as we went along. I *like* to think that my critical thinking improved somewhat in three years.

The sex and drugs bit probably didn't help an awful lot in that department, but did teach me other useful stuff.

Late to the party as always. I don't wanna talk about whether college is any use because the answer is too confusing/depressing; I don't wanna talk about whether I was completely insane to think that getting a PhD was a good idea because I already know the answer.

I just wanna bitch about how much I hate all that clackety goddam keyboard noise that those keeners who bring laptops to class make. I can't wait to have my own classroom from which to ban laptops. And if that doesn't work, I'ma ban fingers.

123: Oxford tutorials are not a fair comparison. I wish I'd had that kind of teaching.

When I was in law school, a lot of people took notes on laptops, and some people caught a bit of wifi in the lecture halls, but you could only get it at the edge of the room.

We weren't allowed to use our laptops during open book exams. There's now a program for typing exams which prevents you from accessing the other stuff on your computer, but it's PC-ist. Mac users are screwed.

I heard a BarBri review professor say that there was a good side and a bad side to typing your bar exam answers. The good side--if you have bad handwriting--is that your answers will be legible. The bad side is also taht they'll be legible; you're less likely to get credit for jotting down the right keywords.

O laptop, my laptop.

I hate all that clackety goddam keyboard noise

Good thing we have computers now instead of typewriters.

Yeah, technology makes these "clackety" concerns obsolete.

The idea that college teaches critical thinking is horseshit.

Again, I came out of college with the ability to turn almost anything into a bong. We may, however, have different definitions of "critical".

The idea that college teaches critical thinking is horseshit.

College teaches critical thinking, just not to everyone.

I'm sorry, but law school pedagogy *is* part of the issue. A lot of it is droning info-dump. You want students to be with you all the way, whether or not they have laptops, make being in class a value-added learning experience. If someone can be playing solitaire, answering email and writing an essay and see no performance difference in your course, then your pedagogy is part of the problem--it means you're just eating up the hours doing stuff that has no learning outcomes. If on the other hand, having a laptop and dicking around means a student performs poorly in the course, then problem solved, you know?

I have students who are silent and disengaged. I don't see any difference in their case with whether they're using a laptop or not. A student who's engaged in a discussion class who has a laptop open might actually google something relevant to the discussion and bring it to bear on what we're talking about. Just happened today, in fact, and it was a real plus to the conversation.

Just happened today, in fact, and it was a real plus to the conversation.

Ah, Swarthmore. Don't make me jealous of your undergrads.

I have a deep grudge against college. I'm too bitter to be objective.

I'm blown away by this, and I want to go hug you, or something.l

College for me was a ridiculously amazing opportunity. I've been out eight years and I still miss the rush. I suppose if I owed more than a few tens of kilobucks I'd be kind of bitter, as I'm not in a terribly lucrative scene, but even so.

I know people who are bitter about college because their high school education left them woefully unprepared, but that's a different story altogether.

The idea that college teaches critical thinking is horseshit.

Uh-oh, the familiar call of the autodidact...

130 gets it exactly right.

stanford EE is known for
a) taping most of their classes and letting students watch them online. Hence I occasionally hear people say "I can't go out, I still need to watch 6 lectures and even at 2x speed..."

b) killer takehome exams: 48 or 72 hours.

c) one prof (Gene Golub, actually CS not EE) gives lectures on his tablet pc: he hooks it up to a projector and then writes/draws on it as if it were a whiteboard.

Yeah, aside from the occasional completely insane girlfriend, I loved every minute of college. Extended my undergrad career to six years just to get more of it.

"aside from"?

Colleges and critical thinking are like Chris Rock's description of drug dealers and drugs. They don't force it on you; you have to be seeking it out. But if you're interested, they'll hook you up.

134: I am, like, in college right now.

129 gets it exactly right.

139: How is it that you're so in on the injokes, oh recent-comer to Unfogged? Heaven forbid you've actually read the archives.

I'd like laptops banned in class, or at least wi-fi turned off; I lack the self control to avoid the internet under my present circumstances.

127, 128: Yes, computers have completely solved the problem of mechanical noise. Also, I have a completely paperless office. It's future-tastic!!

How many students are in a typical law class? Or does it vary a lot by class and school?

137: When you roll like the Apostropher, "crazy girlfriend" is merely a distraction from the real debauchery.

First year I had four classes over 100, since then I've had a lot in the 80-100 range (with some smaller seminars mixed in).

BA, you're at stanford?

146: yeah (though not EE).

Ok, well, I don't know where I was going with that, I guess.

I graduated college a year and a half ago and almost no one used laptops in class. Maybe a half-dozen people over all four years. Now I'm in grad school taking undergrad courses as well, and at least half of the undergrads are using laptops. I think a big change has taken place over the past year -- either that or it's a cultural difference between schools (I went to college at U Chicago, I'm now at Berkeley).

Then again I feel that youth culture has changed a lot in the last couple years, so much that I feel a bit like I'm part of a different generation from people 2 or 3 years younger than me.

140: what in-jokes?

Becks-style to 122 and beyond.

re: 149

I'm not sure what the policy is here at Oxford, but I've never seen anyone using a laptop in class. But then, I never attend undergraduate lectures, so it's possible that's changed.

I haven't done any teaching for about a year, but a year ago, a significant % of students still turned in hand-written essays.

And the noise thing is a big issue, too, as has already been mentioned.

Someone typing at audio-typist speed is noisy -- keys rattling.

"Yeah, aside from the occasional completely insane girlfriend, I loved every minute of college. Extended my undergrad career to six years just to get more of it."

Amen! I've always regretted not extending my stay as an undergraduate.

Very few people had computers when I was in college, much less laptops.

I was thrilled when I got a typewriter with word erase my last year of college.

Yeah, the internet barely existed when I was in school (Telnet! Gopher! Archie! So shiny!), and I don't remember laptops from the time. Nearly all of my papers were turned in hand-written.

Professors still felt obligated, however, to make explicit that smoking was no longer allowed in class (no, I'm not kidding, and there were ashtrays in the halls). Except when I took bowling as a PE. The smokers got the last two lanes, and we smoked the entire class.

Yeah, I'm going to stop beginning my comments with "Yeah" now.

I'm more shocked that you took bowling in college than I am by the smoking in the classrooms.

I don't remember being permitted to turn in hand-written essays in college, and that was the early seventies. There were rpgs on time-share, but most classes in computer science—I never took one—required hefting trays of punch cards. I remember helping a girl with hers after midnight one night: your time allotment could be weird. A girl with whom I had a friendship and casual intimacy, so that I have misremembered and forgotten my own past.

I took lacrosse and boxing, so that I must have been trying to "man the f/ up and do the manly thing" at twenty.

Handwritten papers? Really? You're only a year or two older than I am. If I'd ever turned in a handwritten paper in college, my professors would have looked at me as if I'd handed them a dead cat. (Given my handwriting, the distinction between the two is a fine one, but that wasn't the issue.)

Well, LB, I think that I'm just a year or so younger than you, and I turned in handwritten papers right the way through college, and had to hire someone to type up the two senior theses I wrote. Then again, I didn't go to college in the U.S.

Way to make Healy feel self conscious, LB.

It's probably a school-by-school difference; both MIT and UofC had plenty of computers available for students to use, so there wasn't any real excuse for turning in handwritten papers. I can see at a university that was a later adopter of technology, that you'd have to accept handwritten papers from students who didn't own computers or have the typing skills to manage a typewriter.

(And of course, I understand that professors at UK universities are fond of dead cats.)

I graduated about 30 megaseconds ago. When I first used a laptop to take notes as a freshman (being infatuated with the rhetorical chops of one professor), there were no more than 2 others doing the same. In my senior year, it would have been surprising to see more than 10-20% of the class with laptops.

On the other hands, WiFi was provided by the libraries only, and was usually not accessible in the lecture halls. Maybe the law school was different, being all in one building.

I handed in typed essays pretty much all the time as an undergrad, however, many or most of my students here at Oxford* handed in handwritten essays.

I asked a couple of them about it once and, basically, most of them didn't have time to type up essays they'd already drafted by hand** so what I got was usually the first and only full handwritten draft. The ones who typed them were the ones who drafted on computer anyway.

* when I was doing adjunct/TA type teaching
** some oxford undergrads do ridiculous numbers of papers in a term

UK universities

Oh great, first you make me feel embarrassed for handwriting papers as an undergrad and then you re-annex my country to its former colonial masters. What's next, I wonder?

157/158: You had to take two PEs. I took karate my first semester in school, and decided I sure as hell wasn't doing anything else that physically taxing for the second. So I held out until I was able to get bowling for the second one. The class was held in the lanes in the Student Union.

When I pulled all-nighters, about 20% of the time was spent writing, in longhand, and the other 80% was laboriously, ineptly typing. It was just a plain, flat requirement and that's all there was to it.

What's next, I wonder?

Forced conversion? Taxes to support the Irish Church?

165: Thank heavens my mother doesn't read this blog. She'd disown me while muttering grievances against the British dating back to the 12th century. Sorry about that.

169: Isn't nattarGcM ttaM Scottish? We can make fun of his lot for never actually managing to win their independence. Freedom-ish!

160 could've been me, except that I'm not younger than LB, nor did I go to Uni outside the United States. Had I gone where IDP went, I'd have moved. All night typing? Ugh.

re: 170

Yes. Visions of an Australian in woad shouting 'Devolution!' ...

Wait a second, I'm around Kie/ran's age, and I'm pretty sure I didn't hand in a hand-written paper after about sixth grade. Dot matrix was king.

Again, country by country, the expected level of modernity is different. Kie/ran's probably lucky not to have been required to illuminate his papers.

I assumed you old people used typewriters.

173: Well, we were still recovering from the famine, OK? When the Iranian relief ship SS SAVAK unloaded pallett after pallet of Epson 100FX-es onto the dock, the citizens of Cork rioted and cursed the Ayatollah.

I have to take minutes of all kinds of meetings, and I've always done them from handwritten notes. The notes I take are very abbreviated, with arrows and doodles and parts that make no sense whatsoever. But I'm always praised as being thorough with the final product. However recently I tried it a few times with a laptop, and the notes I get on the laptop capture so much more because I can type much more than I can write by hand as people talk. I've found that working from the laptop notes as opposed to working from the handwritten notes, I hardly remember anything that went on at all in the meeting and struggle more to produce a record.

By the way when I was in college we only had Chinese bead computers and if you needed to take notes you had to chisel them into stone.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in comments here before, but it merits repeating. I had a good friend who was doing his PhD when I was doing my M.A. in 1999. He typed the first draft of his dissertation on a typewriter. A manual typewriter.

His committee rejected his draft, so he typed up another draft during spring break. That too was rejected. For the third draft (which was rejected and precipitated his withdrawal from the program) his dad bought him a computer.

Well, I'm 36 (in between LB and apo?) and it would have never crossed my mind to go and attempt to type up an essay. There was a computer room and printers in college, and I did use one occasionally - or watch other people using it - but not for work. (Apart from when I did a term of LISP I think it was.)

Bowling though, that's fucking genius.

unloaded pallett after pallet of Epson 100FX-es

Some Iranian bureaucrat probably translated "consumables" as "edibles." Our bad, dude.

I used a manual until about 1982, electric after that. Portable manuals have begun appearing as decoration, I see.

Dot matrix was king.

Just enough older than Ogged to have had this crazy experience. You'll also notice, three comments down from that, alif's first draft of comment 178.

Of course, Google was slower in those days, too.

Aha, I did mention it here before.

I think I hand-wrote one paper during undergrad, and that was because of special circumstances (typewriter broke or something).

I hand-write all my Unfogged comments before I type them in the box.

My mother in law at one time made a living typing dissertations for students who couldn't master the mysteries of the typewriter. The last one I was aware of her doing was in about 1984. My wife presented her undergrad dissertation on dot matrix in 1986 and the faculty was vocally grateful to be spared the whiteout experience.

From time to time my mom prints out an e-mail and snail-mails it to me. Other times she forwards it on like an ordinary human.

My wife is a very good typist and had good equipment, but it was considered appropriate for her dissertation, submitted in 1984, that one of two women the U of C recommended, who made a living doing nothing else, should type the final version, using all the right settings, margins, etc. Cost hundreds, I remember.

My wife [...] had good equipment

Sexist.

OT, but still related to teaching:

There is no way in hell I will do this example on "pendulum stiffness" from the textbook in my differential equations class.

"If the motion is so energetic that x reaches pi, the stiffness of the pendulum changes sign and the pendulum passes the apex."

I can't stop giggling.

I write first drafts of all my comments on a less important blog before typing them here.

I remember being shocked (shocked!) on my year abroad (in Brighton) to find out that handwritten papers were the norm. Since I was the only person in my friends group who could actually type, I supposedly made some money by typing final something-or-others for a Brit friend who never paid me, the bastard.

I did embarrass myself upon my return by turning in a single-spaced typed paper, having forgotten the norms of typed papers. I didn't have an actual computer until I started my MA in 1992.

I turned in quite a few handwritten papers in high school (also quite a few that I typed or conned my mom into typing). Composing on a screen rather than a piece of paper and being able to work on multiple sections of the paper at once was a revelation.

Typewriters were the bane of my existance: when I discovered word processing in 1985 I practically wept with joy. No more all-night typing sessions. And spell-check was a revelation.

But I still remember the clarity engendered by putting the damn thing together by hand -- and I still outline and think with a pen & paper.

Yeah, I still outline and think with a pen and paper. Sometimes if I'm 'blocked' I go back to writing longhand which often kickstarts the thinking process and I can continue on the computer.

Sometimes if I'm 'blocked' I go back to writing longhand which often kickstarts the thinking process and I can continue on the computer.

Me too. I've done the same thing once or twice with dictating -- stuff I dictate is not anywhere near as coherent as writing it, but it makes an editable first draft. But I have a hard time doing that because it's just so weird having a secretary type your stuff up. (And, of course, not an option for most people.)

because it's just so weird having a secretary type your stuff up.

One of my partners and I just had voice recognition software installed on our computers. It is pretty good--talk into the microphone and the words appear on the screen. You can edit by voice, too.

And if those of us at tiny-law can afford it, big law can afford it, too.

I can remember caste issues surrounding typing in the late '80s. The anomalous situation was that personal computers were recognised as cutting edge, so a lawyer could do anything and everything on them, to general approbation, but heaven help the lawyer caught in the open at a typewriter. I would faithfully dictate letters and non-standard documents, and the drafts I got were appalling. But they did represent a start of sorts.

Idealist.:

What did you get? Dragon Speaking? Which version? Please give me your review.

re: 198

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0. I just started using it last week. I am very impressed with the software so far. I do not have a lot of experience dictating, so I have some learning to do, but the software (while not perfect) does a pretty good job. And it learns as it goes, which is important in the law becasue it has to learn case names, etc. I recommend it.

Wow. That'll change [secretary G.'s] job a lot if J. starts using it.

I've been considering it for a while, but havent made the plunge.

1.) I want voice recognition software too?

2.) Does anyone know shorthand? Where does one learn it.

3.) On laptops in classrooms. I think that laptops are likely to be a lot more common in law school than in undergraduate institutions. This is in part due to the aforementioned outlines, but I also think that it relates to the layout of the classrooms. In law school we had long tables in a sort of ampitheater-style class with electric plugs.

I was at a lecture in an Arts and Sciences lecture hall, and the seats had those little tables that fold down onto the side of the chair. I think taht there are students who use their laptops under those circumstacnes, but I think that it would be a lot harder to do it.

re: shorthand -- I bought a book on it once, but never really got round to learning it. I found I could take sketchy notes using my own personal 'shorthand ' [i.e. english plus various idiotically obvious abbrevations and symbols ] quick enough that I could never be bothered to pick it up.

203- but anyone can do that. Isn't the benefit of shorthand the ability to take sketchy notes that anyone [else who knows shorthand] can read?

Re: Left-handed writing - the evil dexter-handed keep telling us sinister-handed that we should tilt our paper in a certain way, hold our pens thusly, et cet. It is all lies. As are the admonitions that, if one uses one's left hand, one will burn in hell. [My 2nd grade penmanship teacher. She also thought I "talked funny". That's what comes of living amongst the British. I got my revenge by practising my hand-writing until it was perfect copperplate.]

The problem in classrooms, IME, is that the !#%$#%#$ desks are all designed for righties. That's why it's harder to write: One's arm is floating in space with no support.

Having gone through undergrad before PCs existed, and having been a grad student before laptops, I can say that being able to take notes on a laptop in law school was heaven. Absolute heaven. I would have killed for a computer when I was in grad school - hell, my papers really were cut-and-pasted [then Xeroxed so that they were readable]. I even mastered the art of shortest-paper-possible, just to avoid typing.

OTOH, I went to law school before the advent of wifi access to the Intertubes, so having a laptop wasn't a distraction. The only active distraction was my con-law professor, who resembled Dom Deluise and wore loud Hawaiian shirts and shorts and sandals with socks - it was always hard to listen to what he was saying as I sat there, stunned by his wardrobe choices...

who resembled Dom Deluise

I've met Dom DeLuise. His real-life persona is exactly like his on-screen persona.

Sandals and socks are really, really comfortable.

Sandals and warm socks are perfectly reasonable with long pants. Not so much with shorts.

Sandals and socks are a crime against humanity.

209 has it right. Why not just wrap your feet in AD&D manuals and frisbee golf magazines.