Yet another article in a student newspaper – this one at Tufts – about professors banning laptops from their classrooms.
What’s a laptop-mad university to do if its professors won’t play along?
How about this? UD is surprised the campus tech brigade hasn’t come up with it yet. It’ll make looking at sixty laptops fun.
Universities will design and distribute paste-ons for the backs of student laptops. Each paste-on will be a large, lifelike image of an engaged and attentive student. Wide-eyed, perky. At the beginning of each class, when students flip open their laptops, the professor will experience a rush of excitement as she’s greeted by a roomful of eager faces.
If the professor can stay focused on the images while teaching, she may be able to as it were tease herself into giving an enthusiastic lecture.
The model here would be men and inflatable sex dolls.
September 28th, 2010 at 1:54PM
Some of the comments on the Tufts story (and one it links to from the Brown Daily Herald) are truly funny. They object that laptops add to the learning experience by allowing students to get relevant information from the internet during lectures. This is, in theory, true, although the obvious rejoinder is, “save that for later; for now, pay attention to the lecture.”
September 29th, 2010 at 5:30PM
I banned them in my class. Then last week, I had a student–who had neglected to do his homework and was given an in-class writing assignment instead of peer review–tell me that he actually didn’t know how to write anything by hand.
“How do you sign things?” I asked, imagining a cockeyed X, of the sort that illiterate people once made when asked to put their signatures to legal documents.
He scratched his head. “Never had to sign anything.”
It might be true.