Well, we know all of this, and the only contribution the Canadian professor I’m quoting makes is a literary one: He puts a nice Edgar Allan Poe twist on the sheer creepiness of teaching to a laptop.
Creepier still is the way, sufficiently massed and sufficiently angry (think five hundred laptoppers herded together for PowerPoints and clicker tests), these students begin to stage a Revenge of the Zombies. The professor, for instance, is commenting on an article about an engineering class at Ryerson University:
Paper airplanes thrown at professors, music and movies played aloud on laptops and chattering cell phone users are causing engineering instructors to pack up and leave.
In an announcement posted on BlackBoard Oct. 19, first-year engineering instructors Robert Gossage and Andrew McWilliams announced two measures to deal with the “constant disruptions” in General Chemistry lectures.
The first was a three-strike policy. After three warnings the professor would walk out and it would be up to students to learn the rest of the lecture material on their own. The second was to make test and exam questions harder, since “the class appeared to know the material well enough so as not to listen during lecture.”
“Chemistry has been the worst,” said Adam Rupani, a first-year engineering student. “I was sitting in the first row and couldn’t hear the professor.”
Oh, but there’s some good news!
Rupani said lectures have been better since the removal of clicker tests that were at the end of each lecture. Students got bonus marks just for taking the test, but without it, some of the rowdier students decided to skip class.
“People won’t come if there’s nothing going on,” said Rupani.
Truly the introduction of enormous classes, PowerPoint, laptops, and clickers has been a boon.
To journalism. And to YouTube.
November 26th, 2010 at 8:49AM
Shortly after the introduction of the telegraph, a journalist remarked: “This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.”
(The Internet is, of course, a direct descendant of the telegraph.)
Perhaps if there’s no *elsewhere*, there’s also no *here*???
November 26th, 2010 at 7:31PM
From the Maclean’s page:
University Diaries: In my personal experience, the digital distractions weren’t this bad even a semester or two ago. While this has been a creeping phenomenon, this semester’s antics are sudden, unprecedented, and surreal. I’ve taught in Canada and the U.S., and can report that until rather recently Canadian students were generally, well, truth be told, a little better behaved. (Sore-ry, my American cousins.) Well, no more. Poof goes the myth of Canadian politeness. We’re all in the same leaking boat now.