Technology can do much more than enable a woman with six children to have another eight.

Here at University Diaries, we tend to follow the amazing things classroom technology can do.

A student at Yale expresses his gratitude.

I’m willing to say that it’s a fact: Every day at Yale, someone’s cell phone goes off during class. That’s fine, it happens to all of us at some point. What boggles my mind is that nine times out of 10, the person a) has their cell phone in their bag, rather than perhaps in a pocket, thus putting it further out of reach, b) takes the phone out of their bag while it’s still ringing, or c) blankly stares at it, as if just too curious to avoid checking who’s calling at that moment. And all the while it is emitting that annoying Nokia descending ringtone even louder now because it’s not being suppressed by the bag, distracting just about everyone in class for upwards of 30 seconds, and deeply, deeply frustrating your humble correspondent. I mean, for God’s sake.

I understand the recent argument in the [Yale Daily] News that laptops should be banned from class. I’ll admit it; I take notes on my laptop sometimes, but only in classes in which I permit myself to be distracted, i.e. ones that I don’t care that much about. Not exactly the ideal student ethic, but certainly practical for the easily bored college student of the 21st century.

Overall, I somehow find it hard to imagine that most technological aids in the classroom truly take learning to new levels, somehow bestow Yale students with a far more profound understanding of the arts and sciences. Professors often use Powerpoint presentations that are completely worthless or simply jarring, that often pose more problems than they’re worth. Video clips in slides never open. Ever. They just bring up a picture of the Quicktime icon and leave the professor struggling to find the program on his or her desktop that is, meanwhile, projected to the whole class, who are all the while scanning it for anything moderately incriminating or embarrassing.

Transition effects like text (typically WordArt) bouncing like a basketball or shattering like glass, often paired with sound effects such as “ca-CHING” or “ahhhOOOOOgaaah” fail to grip the average Yale student, I think it’s safe to say. Students often download the Powerpoint presentation of a given lecture before class, taking notes on it while following along on their computers. This is like three steps away from the actual content of the lecture, each step making the student that much more passive and the professor that much more distant.

Nobody needs a slide in an introductory lecture that says “Introduction.” Nobody.

We don’t really need the expensive Smartboards in LC to learn about “Paradise Lost” or African-American history. We need the knowledge, and the newest gadgets don’t automatically deliver it any better or any faster, despite tech specs that may claim otherwise. If one were to add up all the minutes used in lectures over the course of a semester spent fiddling with, fixing and adjusting technological classroom aids, one would undoubtedly find that we lose a heck of a lot of valuable learning time. Ultimately, these innovations distract us, best intentions aside. Why do we use them? Well, because we can.

Take Mr. O’Callaghan, a hometown friend’s seventh-grade pre-algebra teacher. Word on the street was that he would look at porn on the Internet while students took tests. My friend didn’t believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. But hey, if the technology’s there, he might as well use it, right?

Mr. O’Callaghan seems to have moved on from junior high to the National Science Foundation…

UD‘s struck by the circularity of history…. From early man cranking his shank in a cave to Mr. O’Callaghan in his cubicle at the NSF…