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I disagree. Based on my uni experience classes with handouts and pdf files was where I learned the best. The problem with blackboard is that professors go faste

I disagree. Based on my uni experience classes with handouts and pdf files was where I learned the best. The problem with blackboard is that professors go faster than you copy and it ends up being that spend all your time trying to copy everything that you don't have time to even listen to the words that they are saying. And when you try to review the scribbles in your notebook it's hard to understand anything. A good set of slides with examples and annotations goes a long way. And to this day I have slides I saved that I still refer to.

BenFranklin100 3y ago
I HATED classes taught on a blackboard. I learnt nothing. Blackboard and chalk pedagogy is a technological artifact from the days it was economically infeasible to provide students with printed handouts.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  The blackboard is a much more democratic, transparent, two-way tool: everything the teacher does the student can directly see and imitate. Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. Students should also be practicing solving problems directly at the blackboard, with the teacher and other students as an audience. (Writing on an overhead projector or some kind of projected ipad screen or something could be an alternative, but these are higher-tech for no real advantages in an in-person lecture context, and make it much harder for multiple people to participate together. Writing on paper is an okay substitute if there are no more than about 3–4 students per teacher.) A handout or slides or video is an opaque one-way tool, a prepared polished document that students can see but typically have no easy way to imitate. It affords the lecturer more chance to put effort in up front into making a clearer document, but robs students of the chance to witness their teacher doing some of the work in real time, and ultimately leads to a relative loss of basic problem solving skills involving writing/drawing, trading them away in favor of immediate gratification. Sometimes this trade-off is worth it (e.g. Grant Sanderson's work largely couldn't be replaced by blackboard lectures https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw ), but when the school's entire pedagogy moves that way, the loss is tremendous in my opinion, an erosion of some core tools of a centuries-old mathematical/scientific culture.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. I vehemently disagree. Classroom lectures almost always present results that are already in the bag. I can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out. The closest I've ever seen is 3blue1brown, and he obviously doesn't use a chalk board. Nowadays technical problems are often solved by writing code, which is almost never done on a chalk board outside of job interviews.
    - jacobolus 3y ago
      Even when chalkboard lectures present material that was prepared in advance, there's a significant difference vs. prepared material presented in slides or a typeset document or a video. Writing imposes a speed limit on the lecturer, and forces them to verbalize the whole reasoning process. In slides it is much easier to skip past the meat of the work, and much harder to be responsive in writing/pictures to questions and discussion. > can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. I promise you this does happen in some classrooms. It certainly happens all the time in informal discussion between professionals. In my opinion schools should strive much harder to induct students into a problem-solving culture than teach specific content trivia. A blackboard is an invaluable tool for the former. > often solved by writing code Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper, and thoughts made first in code are substantially blinkered in my experience compared to thoughts worked through on paper. Many of the best programmers I know do their most important work on paper (sketching, planning, doodling, drawing diagrams, ...) before ever touching the keyboard. And that is far more true still for mathematicians, physicists, etc. What is true is that many programmers are not very effectively taught to use paper to its full advantage as a tool for thought, and either never learn or largely figure it out on their own. Our typical computer science pedagogy is frankly terrible at this, and professionals' on-the-job training isn't much better.
      - 3y ago
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I don’t understand the rationale behind assuming everything old is worse than today’s methods, technology. I still get my pens and paper when I design a software or study something that I want to learn, and it works trillions times better than watching a video or going through some slides. I still produce my notes & documentation from books or existing material, and retain that knowledge almost indefinitely. There’s mounting evidence about both people have learning differences, and using pen and paper exercises the brain in a completely unique way. Ignoring this is pretty counterintuitive from my perspective.
- Tomte 3y ago
  Blackboard and chalk are an artifact of a time when students came to classes prepared and could follow.
leidenfrost 3y ago
Thing is, making you write what you hear improves meomory and info retention and retrieval. PDFs Are a nice tool for the big books where you need lots of texts, images and diagrams. The scribbles are more for helping to remember past lectures. But when everything is a PDF, knowledge becomes too fleeting to even remember past the exams.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  Please don't speak for everyone. I learn best from lectures by paying careful attention with my eyes and ears, and keeping the narrative flow structured in my brain; trying to write a substantial amount disrupts my focus and leads to dramatically worse understanding/retention. Other people learn best from lectures by writing everything down (but never looking at it again); just the act of writing helps them focus. Still others learn best from writing without worrying about understanding the first time, and then afterward repeatedly reading their written notes. (If I wanted to be e.g. an ethnographer or journalist, I would have to be the type to write notes after the conversation, rather than during.)
IshKebab 3y ago
I did engineering at Cambridge and they had the best solution to this problem: fill in the gaps notes. It might sound crazy but it has none of the downsides of no-notes or ready-made-notes. * you have to pay attention and turn up otherwise you end up with useless notes, so it still has the motivation factor of no-notes * you don't spend all your time copying so it doesn't suffer from the "I wrote it all down but I didn't listen to a word" factor of no-notes
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
  Any examples ?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Not the best example but here's one: https://www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/university-of-cambridge/1p2-structures/l9-l12-deflection/45014720 https://www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/university-of-cambrid... Bit difficult to find because they aren't publicly available.
darkerside 3y ago
I think what may be the case is that blackboards are the best way to learn something you already loosely know. You can follow along and need to rapidly identify new information and compress that information down for your notes. But if you don't know it, yes, you will get lost and fall behind.
maximus-decimus 3y ago
This, but I want to add that at least for my physics classes, blackboards add two sources of errors : the teachers mistranscribing their notes on the blackboard and me mistranscibing the notes from the blackboard. Especially bad when it's a bunch of formulas with greek letters and you can't tell the prof's alpha from a psy. On top of me not being able to listen, my notes were basically useless

BenFranklin100 3y ago

I HATED classes taught on a blackboard. I learnt nothing. Blackboard and chalk pedagogy is a technological artifact from the days it was economically infeasible to provide students with printed handouts.

jacobolus 3y ago
The blackboard is a much more democratic, transparent, two-way tool: everything the teacher does the student can directly see and imitate. Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. Students should also be practicing solving problems directly at the blackboard, with the teacher and other students as an audience. (Writing on an overhead projector or some kind of projected ipad screen or something could be an alternative, but these are higher-tech for no real advantages in an in-person lecture context, and make it much harder for multiple people to participate together. Writing on paper is an okay substitute if there are no more than about 3–4 students per teacher.) A handout or slides or video is an opaque one-way tool, a prepared polished document that students can see but typically have no easy way to imitate. It affords the lecturer more chance to put effort in up front into making a clearer document, but robs students of the chance to witness their teacher doing some of the work in real time, and ultimately leads to a relative loss of basic problem solving skills involving writing/drawing, trading them away in favor of immediate gratification. Sometimes this trade-off is worth it (e.g. Grant Sanderson's work largely couldn't be replaced by blackboard lectures https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw ), but when the school's entire pedagogy moves that way, the loss is tremendous in my opinion, an erosion of some core tools of a centuries-old mathematical/scientific culture.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Watching someone reason with a writing implement in hand is an incredibly valuable learning exercise, since effective technical problem solving is largely done that way in practice. I vehemently disagree. Classroom lectures almost always present results that are already in the bag. I can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out. The closest I've ever seen is 3blue1brown, and he obviously doesn't use a chalk board. Nowadays technical problems are often solved by writing code, which is almost never done on a chalk board outside of job interviews.
  - jacobolus 3y ago
    Even when chalkboard lectures present material that was prepared in advance, there's a significant difference vs. prepared material presented in slides or a typeset document or a video. Writing imposes a speed limit on the lecturer, and forces them to verbalize the whole reasoning process. In slides it is much easier to skip past the meat of the work, and much harder to be responsive in writing/pictures to questions and discussion. > can't remember a single class where a professor actually walked us through the process of figuring something out This can't really be blamed on the tool of the chalkboard. I promise you this does happen in some classrooms. It certainly happens all the time in informal discussion between professionals. In my opinion schools should strive much harder to induct students into a problem-solving culture than teach specific content trivia. A blackboard is an invaluable tool for the former. > often solved by writing code Writing code is a narrow and constrained tool with much less freedom than writing on paper, and thoughts made first in code are substantially blinkered in my experience compared to thoughts worked through on paper. Many of the best programmers I know do their most important work on paper (sketching, planning, doodling, drawing diagrams, ...) before ever touching the keyboard. And that is far more true still for mathematicians, physicists, etc. What is true is that many programmers are not very effectively taught to use paper to its full advantage as a tool for thought, and either never learn or largely figure it out on their own. Our typical computer science pedagogy is frankly terrible at this, and professionals' on-the-job training isn't much better.
    - 3y ago
bayindirh 3y ago
I don’t understand the rationale behind assuming everything old is worse than today’s methods, technology. I still get my pens and paper when I design a software or study something that I want to learn, and it works trillions times better than watching a video or going through some slides. I still produce my notes & documentation from books or existing material, and retain that knowledge almost indefinitely. There’s mounting evidence about both people have learning differences, and using pen and paper exercises the brain in a completely unique way. Ignoring this is pretty counterintuitive from my perspective.
Tomte 3y ago
Blackboard and chalk are an artifact of a time when students came to classes prepared and could follow.

leidenfrost 3y ago

Thing is, making you write what you hear improves meomory and info retention and retrieval. PDFs Are a nice tool for the big books where you need lots of texts, images and diagrams. The scribbles are more for helping to remember past lectures. But when everything is a PDF, knowledge becomes too fleeting to even remember past the exams.

jacobolus 3y ago
Please don't speak for everyone. I learn best from lectures by paying careful attention with my eyes and ears, and keeping the narrative flow structured in my brain; trying to write a substantial amount disrupts my focus and leads to dramatically worse understanding/retention. Other people learn best from lectures by writing everything down (but never looking at it again); just the act of writing helps them focus. Still others learn best from writing without worrying about understanding the first time, and then afterward repeatedly reading their written notes. (If I wanted to be e.g. an ethnographer or journalist, I would have to be the type to write notes after the conversation, rather than during.)

IshKebab 3y ago

I did engineering at Cambridge and they had the best solution to this problem: fill in the gaps notes. It might sound crazy but it has none of the downsides of no-notes or ready-made-notes. * you have to pay attention and turn up otherwise you end up with useless notes, so it still has the motivation factor of no-notes * you don't spend all your time copying so it doesn't suffer from the "I wrote it all down but I didn't listen to a word" factor of no-notes

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
Any examples ?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Not the best example but here's one: https://www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/university-of-cambridge/1p2-structures/l9-l12-deflection/45014720 https://www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/university-of-cambrid... Bit difficult to find because they aren't publicly available.

darkerside 3y ago

I think what may be the case is that blackboards are the best way to learn something you already loosely know. You can follow along and need to rapidly identify new information and compress that information down for your notes. But if you don't know it, yes, you will get lost and fall behind.

maximus-decimus 3y ago

This, but I want to add that at least for my physics classes, blackboards add two sources of errors : the teachers mistranscribing their notes on the blackboard and me mistranscibing the notes from the blackboard. Especially bad when it's a bunch of formulas with greek letters and you can't tell the prof's alpha from a psy. On top of me not being able to listen, my notes were basically useless