… about student laptop use in class are here.
Opinion piece, University of Maryland Diamondback:
… [E]very professor, both future and incumbent, [should] be required to take a technology proficiency assessment prior to the start of the semester to make sure he or she understands the use and functionality of the technology used both in and out of the classroom. This assessment will ensure professors are well informed of these technologies and can easily navigate through multimedia extensions — a Professor 2.0, if you will.
Before Dr. Stonewall Jackson has a heart attack, this assessment will in no way prevent a professor from lecturing; failing the assessment will simply result in a mandatory classroom technology workshop..
A reporter from the George Washington University student newspaper came by today and asked me questions about my no laptops thing. To prepare for the interview (UD prepares) I read Georgetown Law professor David Cole on the subject. He bans laptops for two reasons:
1. They turn students into stenographers rather than note-takers.
2. They distract the student with the laptop, who spends a good deal of time using it for non-class purposes; they also distract students who aren’t using laptops but can’t help looking at the screens around the room, which might be showing basketball games, porn films, etc.
The GW Hatchet article about this should come out on Monday; if I’m quoted, I’ll link to it.
Meanwhile, here’s some weird shit.
… Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman isn’t bothered by what his students do in class. If students want to play poker or watch porn during class, so be it, he says, though he knows his opinion is out of the mainstream.
“I have students who don’t come to class. I have students who are paying attention and say dumb things. But so be it,” Berman says.
Berman’s only concern is when one student’s behavior distracts another’s learning experience. It is a lesson he learned all too well when sitting in on a colleague’s evidence lecture during the March NCAA basketball tournament.
“I noticed a student’s laptop with the basketball scores on the screen,” he says. “I got distracted looking at the scores.”
He doesn’t think a student watching porn distracts other students? And… I dunno… the whole I don’t care what they do rhetoric makes me wonder… The way he says it – it sounds like a boast. So take the porn — what’s that going to turn into? Say you’ve got five guys in the back of the lecture hall clustering around a naughty movie, plus a bunch of others scattered about pleasuring themselves on private screens… What’s that gonna be like? Heavy breathing, orgasmic groans. But so be it.
For $1, … computer design and graphics students allowed Purdue students, faculty and staff 30 seconds to take whacks at computer hardware set up on the Engineering Mall.
… some of the links between technology and a dead classroom.
… “[C]lickers” [are] little anonymous devices that allow students to answer multiple choice questions in class without having to raise their hand and be singled out as correct or incorrect.
There are profits being made out of “classroom response systems.” With these systems of clickers, graphics and software, shy people don’t have to step out of their comfort zone…
From the Rutgers student newspaper:
“[Textbooks] come bundled with various technologies, including clicker technologies,” [a university technology specialist] said. “We still have not overcome the problem caused by different publishers using a variety of systems.”
Nick Arvaneni, a sophomore engineering student, said there is one type of clicker that is especially problematic.
“We had to buy a [personal response system] clicker. Right after that, the teacher said that we aren’t going to use them anymore. … You can’t resell the clicker and they’re more expensive than the others,” he said. “Once my teacher realized how complicated it was, she decided not to use the clicker — and now I’m stuck with it.”
Andrew Abdou, a University alumnus and information technology representative for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, thinks the clickers are more trouble than they are worth.
“The assortment of clickers you’ll collect is remarkable,” he said. “Clickers in general are just an advanced way of taking attendance. They don’t keep you any more engaged or provide a more interactive class experience.”
Clickers don’t stop students from skipping out on class.
“A lot of the time, students give their clickers to a friend to click for them,” Abdou said. “One time, a professor caught a girl doing that and he smashed the clickers against the wall.”…
From a student at the University of Arizona:
[I]n some ways clickers are great: they add a new level of interactivity to big, soul-sucking lecture classes, forcing students to stay more involved. What sucks about the clicker, on the other hand, is that it’s basically an indication of the permanence of the large lecture teaching method. It’s hard to find any faculty member on this campus who’ll say that teaching a 500-person class is a great way for students to learn. One big issue is that big classes force the subjects being taught to regress; that is, to be simplified and standardized in such a way that there’s always a “right” answer amidst several wrong answers. Obviously, very few disciplines are that cut-and-dried, and so the true depth of the material is lost as it becomes more and more processed for mass consumption.
What most professors will say, however, is that it’s the value of undergraduate education that’s changing. It has become more a necessity than a privilege, a ubiquitous prerequisite for marginal success in life (and a decently paying job). So the crux here is that classes are just going to get bigger and bigger — we should be thankful that nobody at this University, as of yet, has to endure being the class of 2020.
1.) THE MEDICAL ACADEMIC COMMUNITY: WHERE TRUTH IS AN OPTIONAL EXTRA.
How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras.
2.) A LOSS OF THAT CERTAIN QUALITY.
Professor Larry Van Sickle, who teaches sociology [at Rollins College] … has no specific rules except that the computer just be used for note taking, but also says, “There is something to be said for person-to-person communication. The way I run my classes, discussion is important, and when a student is hiding behind a laptop, there is a loss of that certain quality of human conversation.”
Starts like this.
When it comes to using technology to foster education, the prevailing wisdom has been that more is better. Over the past decade, universities around the globe have invested heavily in the wired classroom, adding everything from external laptop connections to Blu-ray DVD players. But there is little evidence that these gadgets enhance learning–and, critics argue, they might actually hinder it, making both students and teachers passive. What if classrooms were restored to the pre-Internet days of wooden tables and chalk?
Then there’s this bit about José Bowen, Mr Teach Naked.
Then it concludes.
Technology has a place in education, but it should be used independently by students outside the classroom. That gives them more time to absorb lectures via podcast or video, and frees teachers to spend class time coaching students in how to apply the material rather than simply absorb it.
Duh.
Yale Daily News:
… SMART Boards, which connect to regular computers and allow users to edit documents on the larger screen with stylus-type markers, came to Yale about four years ago as a high-tech alternative to chalkboards. There are currently about a dozen of the machines, which cost about $12,000 each, scattered in classrooms across Central Campus.
… Pedro Monroy, who oversees classroom media services at Yale, [said] that he does not get many requests from professors asking that SMART Boards be added to their classrooms across campus.
That’s an unfortunate commentary for a technology in which Yale has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars.
… [T]echnology is often a tough sell at Yale; [the university] stopped holding general lessons for faculty across the University before SMART Boards even came to campus because of lack of interest…
… Anne Fadiman, Yale’s Francis writer-in-residence and adjunct English professor, [is] content to teach with just chalk and a blackboard and a dozen students gathered around a table.
Asked why she doesn’t use a SMART Board, Fadiman replied in an e-mail message, “They’re too smart for me.”
****************
Who sent this Onion report on classroom technology use to UD? She can’t remember. Anyway.
In Silicon Valley itself …some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.
Mark Bauerlein, Wall Street Journal
Does the Internet have to be such a pervasive part of almost every class? What ever happened to good old-fashioned verbal communication?
A Penn State student, in the campus newspaper.
… of so much online education.
Excerpts, from the student newspaper:
… With continuing budget problems, some may consider avoiding online education a bad move for Brandeis. Adding a few extra hundred students and going online could possibly fill some of the budget gap without having to build extra housing or hire extra faculty. Proponents of the online system claim that it could offer education to the poor and underserved. But despite all of these benefits, there are serious problems with online education.
The problem with online education is a matter of parity. Those on campus get a much fuller education than those sitting in a remote location taking online courses. Most of the learning in college takes place outside of the classroom. Speakers come from all over the world to impart their knowledge to eager students and faculty on the Brandeis campus. Unless Brandeis were to film all of those moments and offer them to students, those taking Brandeis courses online couldn’t really claim to have the Brandeis experience.
Interactivity is the next problem. In an online course, you can ask the professor questions and take part in group exercises. But talking with a group of fellow students over lunch is difficult if the participants are dispersed around the state or country.
First-class lecturers and interactivity create an atmosphere of ideas that is essential to the liberal arts education.
… According to U.S. News and World Report, Brandeis has a graduation rate of 85 percent. The graduation rate for the University of Phoenix Online is abysmal: According to statistics from the California Postsecondary Education Commission, only 281 students graduated out of 6,578 enrolled, putting the graduation rate at 4 percent. Those are the sort of numbers that could tarnish Brandeis’ reputation as a first-rate educational institution.
… The real-world college experience cannot easily be brought online-from speakers to late-night bull sessions to being involved in extracurricular activities. Brandeis should not belittle the quality of its education by going online and putting its students in danger of the lower-quality education and higher dropout rates that define the online college experience.
From US News and World Report:
… New research shows that students who did the most multi-tasking were less able to focus and concentrate — even when they were trying to do only one task at a time.
“The human mind is not really built for processing multiple streams of information,” said study author Eyal Ophir, a researcher at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. “The ability to process a second stream of information is really limited.”
… Frequent multi-taskers took longer to answer [test questions] than lighter multi-taskers, indicating they had a more difficult time switching between numbers-based and letters-based tasks.
“This was shocking,” Ophir said. “You’d think multi-taskers would be better at task-switching, but they were slower.”
The reasons for the decreased cognitive control are unclear, Ophir said. Researchers cannot say if the multi-tasking itself damages cognitive control — and if so, how much multi-tasking it takes for damage to occur — or if those who tend to multi-task with media have less cognitive control to begin with.
“Either way, the prescription is to multi-task less,” Ophir said. “The big take-away from me is to try to build periods of focus, to create times you are really focused on one thing.”
Media multi-tasking includes doing one or more activities at once, including e-mailing, surfing the Web, writing on a computer, watching TV, texting, playing video games, listening to music or talking on the phone…