A history professor at Yale talks laptops.
In seminars, laptops are still more harmful [than in lectures], serving as physical barriers that prevent a group of students from becoming a class.
UD has taken to calling the relationship between professors who allow and students who use laptops Mutually Assured Cynicism.
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=26741
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
October 8th, 2010 at 10:12AM
I went to a scientific conference this summer and had my first experience of being an audience-member listening to a talk in a place where many people were surfing the web on laptops.
It WAS annoying. It was distracting, even though the talk was something I cared about and wanted to pay attention to.
It was also a lot harder to socialize in the between-times, because so many people were more interested in their screens or texting on their phones than they were in talking to other people.
October 8th, 2010 at 11:36AM
this is why I banned laptops from my sections this semester. If they have a screen in front of them, they’re not paying attention to anything that’s going on around them.
October 8th, 2010 at 4:06PM
What is the issue here, lap tops or the use of them?
I have to stand up for lap top users here because no one else seems to want to: did you really never play noughts and crosses with your pen and paper? Doodle? Draw cartoons of someone naked? Play hangman? Break the point of the pencil and endlessly sharpen it? I’ve seen all these behaviours in class.
In a seminar I use my computer to take notes. The wi fi is off, and it would never occur to me to play music. That is because I am interested in my work.
The tool isn’t the problem, it’s the user.
October 8th, 2010 at 5:49PM
Yes, it’s the user. But there are so many users who are abusing their laptops that they create a distracting environment for the non-users.