7 ms·
In high school we got really good at minimizing the windows of games and social media sites as the teachers actively circled the room looking for bad behavior.
by ben_jones 9y ago
In high school we got really good at minimizing the windows of games and social media sites as the teachers actively circled the room looking for bad behavior. In college if you sat near the top of a large lecture hall you could usually see the majority of students with laptops were on facebook, netflix, or youtube, and not actually taking notes on the device.
Companies like Apple try to convince high schools that every student needs an iPad or parents that if they don't send their to college with a mac book pro - they aren't good parents.
It would take one hell of a peer-reviewed article to make me believe constant computer presence in classrooms did anything but harm students. Are their situations that rely on constantly looking up information on the internet? Probably. But we have to weigh that value of constant internet access (which students already have today with their smart phones) against two decades of manipulative practices by software and hardware vendors finagling their way into already ineffective and poorly spent education budgets.
- kirsebaer 9y agoPerhaps the real problem is forcing students to sit through lectures they don't care about in order to get information that is easily available in books or videos.
- jimhefferon 9y agoThat information is available to them now. I don't find that they get it. I am learning a musical instrument. My practice is much more reliable when I have weekly lessons. People are funny. Not haha funny. Complicated funny.
- ben_jones 9y agoI wholeheartedly agree. But the (at least American) education system is build around obtaining checkmarks on a degree audit so you can get the credentials to get a job. I think its a deep issue and you have to start with simpler problems near the top rather then heading straight to 'break the wheel'.
- hackinthebochs 9y agoBut what's the alternative? I see this sentiment repeated all the time and no one offers any workable alternatives.
- Eridrus 9y agoThe alternative should be to make more classes elective and provide less rigorous versions. There's really no point teaching most kids anything beyond the basics of most subjects. Spend more of our resources on motivating subjects & topics, rather than just telling kids to learn things. If the kids aren't interested in learning what you're teaching, it doesn't matter what you're teaching anyway, you're just creating stress on everyone for no reason. Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experiences, but I lost nothing when I dropped physics because my teacher was an asshat, nor from sticking with chemistry because my teacher was a non-asshat.
- Buldak 9y agoMost people are not cut out to learn like Good Will Hunting.
- sannee 9y agoI don't think you need to be exactly a genius in order to watch videos on the internet. It requires even less effort than attending a lecture, and has many benefits (cheaper, you can literally replicate the best lecturer in the universe for everyone, you can rewatch inifinite amount of times...).
- jbergens 9y agoVideos are generally much more boring to watch than a live teacher. I definatley don't expect students to watch the same 1 hour video twice.
- jseliger 9y agoI've banned laptops in class for years: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... . In most cases, the scarce resource today is attention, depth, and concentration, not information or whatever else laptops may provide access to.
- majewsky 9y agoAre students allowed to appeal? When I moved from hand-written notes to LaTeX notes entirely, I anecdotally found that it improved my immediate understanding of the material. For example, when the professor is doing a sketch on the board and you make hand-written notes, you quickly copy the sketch and forget about it. When you do it in LaTeX, you have to think about how to translate the sketch into TikZ commands as fast as possible because the board could be wiped any minute. It requires me to distill the core ideas out of these sketches much more quickly than the average student, and that helped me quite a lot. (It should be noted that I don't say that any student will benefit from writing their notes in LaTeX. 90-99% will be absolutely lost when the first big formula appears, and that's before you get to figures describing tree algorithms.) EDIT: Just saw the link in the article to another article about a study where hand-written notes resulted in better recall. Must be just me then.
- TomMarius 9y agoThese studies compare to standard Word writing, you wrote your notes in LaTeX, which is vastly different IMO.
- valuearb 9y agoIf you pay attention, anything will help you recall. But if the medium you choose also contains it's own distractions (chat apps, email, hacker news) it will hurt the recall of those who fall under their sway.
- ranger207 9y agoIf I recall correctly, one theory as to why hand written notes are better is because they're slower, forcing you to get to the core of the professor's lecture. So in other words, exactly the same reason LaTeX notes worked for you.