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When I was in school we didn't have laptops and we paid attention all of the time. OK, maybe not. We used quill pens so we could only pick out a few keywords t
by skmurphy 18y ago
When I was in school we didn't have laptops and we paid attention all of the time. OK, maybe not.
We used quill pens so we could only pick out a few keywords to scratch down to jog our memory: parchment was so expensive that we would rotate the paper 90 degrees after we had written in one direction and write across. You could normally make out both directions if you were careful. I think the harder it was to write the more we appreciated what we had. Not like students these days.
This is nuts. He wants his lectures to be absorbed the same way he did when he was in law school. Student don't need a laptop to tune you out.
How would you design lectures if you knew every student had a laptop and wifi? I can't believe we will be using pen and paper in even 30 years to laboriously transcribe lectures.
- skmurphy 18y agoA lot of folks are writing in to explain how they didn't pay attention in class because they had a laptop. The argument seems to be that "I can't focus on class if I have access to a laptop--so no one in class should have one." What happens when they get back to their desk: most jobs these days involve access to a PC/browser. It would seem like they would also be tempted to surf the web instead of work. Do they want to prohibit their co-workers (and competitors) from having access to the web? Should we go back to programming using a keypunch? How/when do you develop the self-control to focus on the task at hand? Pencil and paper allow you to doodle and not pay attention. The challenge is not the affordances of the laptop but the inability to focus.