4 ms·

My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for note

My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren't phased by the laptops and rarely ban them. But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it's almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That's what I've seen over and over in 7 years of post secondary classes. I don't know much about the professor in the article, but I would suspect improving his lectures will be more effective in helping students learn than banning laptops.

valine 9y ago
Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.
- foldr 9y ago
  Then why go to the lecture? You don't want to be there, and the lecturer probably doesn't want you there either.
  - nambit 9y ago
    My university classes had mandatory attendance. If not for that, I would also attend only 5% of lectures like a commenter above. I find most of my learning happens through books on my own time.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Disagree. I think it's confirmation bias. You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops).
- Dave_TRS 9y ago
  In my case I think a small N might more likely be the issue if there is one (only ~50-70 professors for me). I am very keenly aware of every professor that has banned laptops (after struggling through an entire semester), and none of them were the star professors. Interested to hear if others find the good professors allow laptops and the brutal ones are quickest to ban.
- albedoa 9y ago
  > You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops). I don't understand how that follows. Why wouldn't we notice when good professors deviate from the norm?
THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
My experience (Mechanical Engineering) was that laptop banning was only an indicator as to whether the professor was "old-school." IMO, some hardcore practice-until-you-bleed cornerstone topics benefited immensely from an "old-school" professor (Thermodynamics, Mechanical Design, Heat Transfer, etc) whereas softer, more conceptual classes (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics, Mechanics of Materials, etc) benefited from "new-school" professors that were savvy to the benefits of interactive software and additional visualizations and knowledge multipliers afforded by a computer.
dgacmu 9y ago
I have a counterexample - CMU's 15-112 bans laptops. The professor for it for the previous 8 years, David Kosbie, is one of the most highly regarded professors in the university. His primary rationale for it is the "externalized cost" effect described in the article, which I can attest is quite true in my experience teaching. When you look out at a sea of faces, you can see where the laptops are because of the reactions of people around them -- eyes keep flicking involuntarily to the interesting stuff happening on the screen, and then they peel themselves back to the lecture. It amounts to a long sequence of micro-distractions that have a pretty pronounced effect on learning. Humans are very attuned to things like motion, flickering, and changes in their field of view, and those are very present when browsing the web or reading facebook on your laptop in class. Second, laptop screens are backlit, which means that they may be the brightest object in someone's field of view in the class. Zoning out on a kindle or printed newspaper has much less of an effect on the people around you. I don't care if someone ignores my class -- that's their choice. I used to not ban laptops, but I've become convinced that it's worth it for the other students. Also, think about the numbers. It's very possible to have a lecture that's very engaging for about 95% of the class (which is a pretty impressive rate all-told). But the remaining 5% have about 10 students each in a field behind them that can see their laptop screen, so a very small number of students goofing off on laptops can have a disproportionate effect on the class.
- xenophonf 9y ago
  People like Professor Kosbie drive me up the wall. Let me show you why. Here are the notes I took on my tablet PC for a week-long Tandberg TCTE+TMS certification class: https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf Admittedly, it's a big PDF because I didn't bother converting my handwriting to text, but it's still a pretty useful reference when it comes to video conferencing stuff, even though I don't do that kind of work any more. Now here are my notes that I was forced to take on paper for a week-long ITIL V3 Foundation class, because the instructor thought he knew better than I did on how to learn: '' Oh that's right, they were on paper, so I can't easily back them up, digitize, and share them. In fact, over the course of several moves, I've managed to misplace both the notebook and the PDF scans. I live and breathe enterprise IT operations management and support. It'd be nice to have more than my memory as a reference, especially since I think ITIL had some useful models for conceptualizing this stuff. None of the official ITIL materials are public, so instead of my curated notes, I have to make do with what I can scrounge off the web. In my mind this wastes the time and money I spent taking the class. I realize that I am paying for my instructors' knowledge, experience, and insight---that sometimes I won't agree with them but need to trust them regardless. Conversely, as an engaged student I need them to stop actively interfering with the tools and methods that I've developed over my academic and professional career to teach myself and to retain what I've learned.
foldr 9y ago
Have you ever done any teaching? You might be surprised at how uncomfortable it feels to talk to a room where 50% of people are looking at their laptops or phones instead of at you. This tends to go in a vicious cycle. If people are bored for 5 minutes, they get our their laptops. Then there's no chance for me to unbore them in the next 5 minutes, because they're not listening to a word I'm saying. In most of the classes I teach, there's a pretty comprehensive textbook, and uploaded lecture notes to supplement that. But for some reason, a lot of students seem to begin by frantically trying to transcribe everything I'm saying (often inaccurately), before giving up and looking at Facebook. I don't ban laptops, but I'm certainly tempted to do so. Ultimately, it's not really the job of a lecturer at a university to be entertaining or "engaging". It's not middle school. You have to bring some of your own enthusiasm to the class. You can learn from someone who knows the material, even if they're not particularly charismatic.
- Groxx 9y ago
  I imagine the "frantically trying to transcribe everything" comes somewhat from how we've been trained by grading-on-attendance and grading-on-note-taking classes. We're used to going to classes that are far less useful than the book, and getting nothing from it except a waste of everyone's time. Some schools are of course different, but IME the most-useless lecturers were also the ones who graded on attendance and/or dropped "secret test hints" to people who were there. But I'll say a big THANK YOU for providing notes - it has always seemed stupid to me to have N people duplicating notes (often poorly), especially when they're expected to be learning things for the first time. It can be exceedingly hard to know what's useful and what isn't ahead of time, and you can't stop to write it down when you realize because the lecture goes on without you. Provided-notes (or a recording) are huge helps to people who actually need notes or don't absorb it the first time.
  - foldr 9y ago
    Ok, but there is no grade for attendance in my classes, and I keep reminding people that they don't need to take comprehensive notes. The expectation that a class should be more useful than the book seems odd to me. In a typical undergrad class, you're teaching a subset of what's in a decent textbook (with maybe a little additional meterial thrown in for color). So I mean, sure, you could just read the book if you're smart and motivated. The only way to really make the classes more useful than the book for smart and motivated students is to do exactly what you don't want - grade the students on note taking.
jorgec 9y ago
If you are a bad student then every single teacher is bad. btw, laptop for notes is a joke. A pen+paper is way more effective, cheaper and usable.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  Only if you know how to use a pen+paper. I didn't learn how to use pen+paper for notekeeping till I was a professional, way out of college. My digital note skills were superior when I was in college (just a simple collection of notes I typed up every now and then during lectures). Honestly, today's student should do the following: 1. Take pictures of the damn blackboard. Way easier than copying. Cellphones are cheap, everyone has a camera (even if the camera is of shoddy quality, it should work indoors in a lecture hall). 2. "Stream" notes in some format. It doesn't matter what your "streaming" note format is. It was computer keyboard for me, but today I can "stream" notes faster in pen / paper. 3. The most important step: Rewrite your notes into a better organization. "Streamed" notes have low density and poor value for studying. The importance of "streaming" notes is to have a comprehensive outline of the professor's major points. Many professors provide subtle hints about what the tests are going to look like, so comprehensive note taking is the key to picking up on these hints. "Organized" notes require conscious effort that takes too long during a lecture (or meeting, or anything really). 4. Ask questions -- Seriously. Professors make mistakes sometimes, but more commonly, the student's brain moves a bit slower as its learning from a lecture. If something smells "fishy", raise your hand and politely ask the professor to explain it better. Most professors are just happy someone is even listening to them, and often will comprehensively answer your question. Win/win for everybody. ------------------- With regards to "secret note taking skills", its really the split between "streaming" notes and "organized" notes. Heck, keep two notebooks for every subject. (Or really, just one "streaming" notebook which you copy into "organized" pages elsewhere). You really should keep the steps separate.

valine 9y ago

Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.

foldr 9y ago
Then why go to the lecture? You don't want to be there, and the lecturer probably doesn't want you there either.
- nambit 9y ago
  My university classes had mandatory attendance. If not for that, I would also attend only 5% of lectures like a commenter above. I find most of my learning happens through books on my own time.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Disagree. I think it's confirmation bias. You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops).

Dave_TRS 9y ago
In my case I think a small N might more likely be the issue if there is one (only ~50-70 professors for me). I am very keenly aware of every professor that has banned laptops (after struggling through an entire semester), and none of them were the star professors. Interested to hear if others find the good professors allow laptops and the brutal ones are quickest to ban.
albedoa 9y ago
> You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops). I don't understand how that follows. Why wouldn't we notice when good professors deviate from the norm?

THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago

My experience (Mechanical Engineering) was that laptop banning was only an indicator as to whether the professor was "old-school." IMO, some hardcore practice-until-you-bleed cornerstone topics benefited immensely from an "old-school" professor (Thermodynamics, Mechanical Design, Heat Transfer, etc) whereas softer, more conceptual classes (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics, Mechanics of Materials, etc) benefited from "new-school" professors that were savvy to the benefits of interactive software and additional visualizations and knowledge multipliers afforded by a computer.

dgacmu 9y ago

I have a counterexample - CMU's 15-112 bans laptops. The professor for it for the previous 8 years, David Kosbie, is one of the most highly regarded professors in the university. His primary rationale for it is the "externalized cost" effect described in the article, which I can attest is quite true in my experience teaching. When you look out at a sea of faces, you can see where the laptops are because of the reactions of people around them -- eyes keep flicking involuntarily to the interesting stuff happening on the screen, and then they peel themselves back to the lecture. It amounts to a long sequence of micro-distractions that have a pretty pronounced effect on learning. Humans are very attuned to things like motion, flickering, and changes in their field of view, and those are very present when browsing the web or reading facebook on your laptop in class. Second, laptop screens are backlit, which means that they may be the brightest object in someone's field of view in the class. Zoning out on a kindle or printed newspaper has much less of an effect on the people around you. I don't care if someone ignores my class -- that's their choice. I used to not ban laptops, but I've become convinced that it's worth it for the other students. Also, think about the numbers. It's very possible to have a lecture that's very engaging for about 95% of the class (which is a pretty impressive rate all-told). But the remaining 5% have about 10 students each in a field behind them that can see their laptop screen, so a very small number of students goofing off on laptops can have a disproportionate effect on the class.

xenophonf 9y ago
People like Professor Kosbie drive me up the wall. Let me show you why. Here are the notes I took on my tablet PC for a week-long Tandberg TCTE+TMS certification class: https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf Admittedly, it's a big PDF because I didn't bother converting my handwriting to text, but it's still a pretty useful reference when it comes to video conferencing stuff, even though I don't do that kind of work any more. Now here are my notes that I was forced to take on paper for a week-long ITIL V3 Foundation class, because the instructor thought he knew better than I did on how to learn: '' Oh that's right, they were on paper, so I can't easily back them up, digitize, and share them. In fact, over the course of several moves, I've managed to misplace both the notebook and the PDF scans. I live and breathe enterprise IT operations management and support. It'd be nice to have more than my memory as a reference, especially since I think ITIL had some useful models for conceptualizing this stuff. None of the official ITIL materials are public, so instead of my curated notes, I have to make do with what I can scrounge off the web. In my mind this wastes the time and money I spent taking the class. I realize that I am paying for my instructors' knowledge, experience, and insight---that sometimes I won't agree with them but need to trust them regardless. Conversely, as an engaged student I need them to stop actively interfering with the tools and methods that I've developed over my academic and professional career to teach myself and to retain what I've learned.

foldr 9y ago

Have you ever done any teaching? You might be surprised at how uncomfortable it feels to talk to a room where 50% of people are looking at their laptops or phones instead of at you. This tends to go in a vicious cycle. If people are bored for 5 minutes, they get our their laptops. Then there's no chance for me to unbore them in the next 5 minutes, because they're not listening to a word I'm saying. In most of the classes I teach, there's a pretty comprehensive textbook, and uploaded lecture notes to supplement that. But for some reason, a lot of students seem to begin by frantically trying to transcribe everything I'm saying (often inaccurately), before giving up and looking at Facebook. I don't ban laptops, but I'm certainly tempted to do so. Ultimately, it's not really the job of a lecturer at a university to be entertaining or "engaging". It's not middle school. You have to bring some of your own enthusiasm to the class. You can learn from someone who knows the material, even if they're not particularly charismatic.

Groxx 9y ago
I imagine the "frantically trying to transcribe everything" comes somewhat from how we've been trained by grading-on-attendance and grading-on-note-taking classes. We're used to going to classes that are far less useful than the book, and getting nothing from it except a waste of everyone's time. Some schools are of course different, but IME the most-useless lecturers were also the ones who graded on attendance and/or dropped "secret test hints" to people who were there. But I'll say a big THANK YOU for providing notes - it has always seemed stupid to me to have N people duplicating notes (often poorly), especially when they're expected to be learning things for the first time. It can be exceedingly hard to know what's useful and what isn't ahead of time, and you can't stop to write it down when you realize because the lecture goes on without you. Provided-notes (or a recording) are huge helps to people who actually need notes or don't absorb it the first time.
- foldr 9y ago
  Ok, but there is no grade for attendance in my classes, and I keep reminding people that they don't need to take comprehensive notes. The expectation that a class should be more useful than the book seems odd to me. In a typical undergrad class, you're teaching a subset of what's in a decent textbook (with maybe a little additional meterial thrown in for color). So I mean, sure, you could just read the book if you're smart and motivated. The only way to really make the classes more useful than the book for smart and motivated students is to do exactly what you don't want - grade the students on note taking.

jorgec 9y ago

If you are a bad student then every single teacher is bad. btw, laptop for notes is a joke. A pen+paper is way more effective, cheaper and usable.

dragontamer 9y ago
Only if you know how to use a pen+paper. I didn't learn how to use pen+paper for notekeeping till I was a professional, way out of college. My digital note skills were superior when I was in college (just a simple collection of notes I typed up every now and then during lectures). Honestly, today's student should do the following: 1. Take pictures of the damn blackboard. Way easier than copying. Cellphones are cheap, everyone has a camera (even if the camera is of shoddy quality, it should work indoors in a lecture hall). 2. "Stream" notes in some format. It doesn't matter what your "streaming" note format is. It was computer keyboard for me, but today I can "stream" notes faster in pen / paper. 3. The most important step: Rewrite your notes into a better organization. "Streamed" notes have low density and poor value for studying. The importance of "streaming" notes is to have a comprehensive outline of the professor's major points. Many professors provide subtle hints about what the tests are going to look like, so comprehensive note taking is the key to picking up on these hints. "Organized" notes require conscious effort that takes too long during a lecture (or meeting, or anything really). 4. Ask questions -- Seriously. Professors make mistakes sometimes, but more commonly, the student's brain moves a bit slower as its learning from a lecture. If something smells "fishy", raise your hand and politely ask the professor to explain it better. Most professors are just happy someone is even listening to them, and often will comprehensively answer your question. Win/win for everybody. ------------------- With regards to "secret note taking skills", its really the split between "streaming" notes and "organized" notes. Heck, keep two notebooks for every subject. (Or really, just one "streaming" notebook which you copy into "organized" pages elsewhere). You really should keep the steps separate.