Althouse: "The Day They Took The Laptops."

February 25, 2011

"The Day They Took The Laptops."

(GWU Law Revue 2011.)

31 comments:

John Borell said...: Hilarious. Where's that dividing line? I graduated from law school in 1997. I got my first laptop in 1995, but no one, and I mean, no one, brought them to class back then.

I guess I'm on that side of the line of old. If I could get through law school without a lap top in class, so can you.; 2/25/11, 2:45 PM
traditionalguy said...: The day they fry all of the laptops with an electromagnetic pulse bomb will be the day that humans must find traditional life again. I can dream, can't I?; 2/25/11, 2:46 PM
Anonymous said...: How are students supposed to learn to interact with the world?

I mean, they face a crushing sense of isolation and alienation if they can't see their Facebook page on demand, or at least a few times an hour.; 2/25/11, 2:48 PM
holdfast said...: I perfer this one - more musical:

http://youtu.be/hQsPC2n4T6Q; 2/25/11, 2:53 PM
holdfast said...: Started law school in '98. That year classes were about 25% laptop. By 2001 more like 80%.; 2/25/11, 2:53 PM
Chase said...: The left (read "Democrats") is frightened, so scared right now - irrationally so, if they would but take a deep breath and actually think logically - that it is approaching the tipping point of obscurity. The overreaching by the left is shocking in it's daily growth - you would think someone would step back and realize the American people in growing numbers are turning away in disgust.

And all without any help from Conservatives and Independents.

I have never been more hopeful for my country!; 2/25/11, 2:57 PM
John Borell said...: I think Chase has weird association patterns.; 2/25/11, 3:11 PM
The Drill SGT said...: I got my first laptop in 1995, but no one, and I mean, no one, brought them to class back then.

In '74, you were forbidden to use HP-35's in class, because they were so much better than using a yellow Pickett engineering slide rule :) The rich had an edge

times change, but stay the same...; 2/25/11, 3:12 PM
Joe said...: (The Crypto Jew)

My typing is so awful and slow that I could ONLY use paper and pen to take notes….I like the outline form
I.
A.
1

And the like and there’s no way I could format and type and listen and put it down on “paper” took me about 2-3 minutes of wrastl’n the PC just to get this typed out.

OTOH, who cares if you’re surfing the Web or taking great notes, AS LONG AS you’re not disturbing anyone else….I mean it’s your money, your class, your grades, and if you wish to P!ss it away on Facebook, it’s none else’s business is it?; 2/25/11, 3:16 PM
Triangle Man said...: I got my first laptop in 1995, but no one, and I mean, no one, brought them to class back then.

Yep, but the leading edge campuses started to add WiFi (and distribute WiFi cards to students) in 1997. Started to see a lot more laptops on campus and in class at the same time.; 2/25/11, 3:41 PM
I'm a Shaaaaark said...: City Fires Every School Teacher

The Providence school board voted to dismiss every one of the city's 1,926 public school teachers, the Providence Journal reports.

They won't all ultimately lose their jobs, but the move gives the board "maximum flexibility" to make budget cuts.

"Teachers begged the School Board to issue layoffs rather than fire them outright because, under the layoff provisions, teachers are recalled based on seniority. There is no guarantee that seniority would be used to bring back any of the fired teachers. School leaders have been vague about exactly how seniority will play out in the case of terminations."

wv: pawno - what my dog watches on TV when I'm not home; 2/25/11, 3:41 PM
corey said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 2/25/11, 3:53 PM
Toad Trend said...: This pretty much plays out in every high school across the land, only with cell phones as the primary distraction.; 2/25/11, 4:08 PM
PaulV said...: At some schools texting is useful way to cheat on tests; 2/25/11, 4:12 PM
PaulV said...: how bad is the job market for recent JDs? Lucky to get paralegal jobs?; 2/25/11, 4:19 PM
Deb said...: First, they came for the laptops...

wv: nonary. What we are left with after the laptops are confiscated,,; 2/25/11, 4:23 PM
bagoh20 said...: My senior year of high school I took the last slide rule class ever, and it was mandatory for my path. We were instructed to check our work with hand held calculators that had just come out, were the size of bricks, and cost about $100.

Nobody cried when they took the slide rules away. But they had a very small carbon footprint and were powered by flop sweat.

A slide rule did not support social networking, and tended to inhibit developing one.; 2/25/11, 4:24 PM
bagoh20 said...: The sciences usually permitted the use of calculators for tests, and I found them very helpful by writing formulas and other cheat sheet stuff all over mine in very small print. Wonderful devices, but nowhere the cheating tool of a laptop. With a laptop I'd be a genius. Lots more space to write stuff on the outside.; 2/25/11, 4:29 PM
Hagar said...: An HP-35 cost $400 in 1974, and that was a lot of money then.; 2/25/11, 4:57 PM
Bob Ellison said...: @Joe, I'm the opposite of you. When I went to college in the 80s, my handwriting was terribly slow and messy, and I tended to suffer on essay exams. I could type, though, at 100 wpm or so, because that's how I made money. No doubt that's partly why my handwriting atrophied, and it's worse today than back then.

The Luddite hatred for laptops is stupid. We should really be making all grade-school students take a typing class.; 2/25/11, 4:59 PM
Patrick said...: The pacing was a little slow, but that was hilarious.; 2/25/11, 5:10 PM
Henry said...: Is the scene from 1:58 a reference to the Breakfast club?; 2/25/11, 5:26 PM
rhhardin said...: I got my first (cheap) laptop in 2005 to deal with photos, which my windows 95 desktop couldn't handle.

Today that laptop is my desktop, the w95 machine having finally died.

Just add monitor and keyboard.

I assume it's exempt from confiscation.; 2/25/11, 5:40 PM
David said...: Stick to law, GW students. Comedy is not your strength.; 2/25/11, 6:37 PM
Eva said...: I'm a strict pen-and-paper girl but I have no qualms whatsoever with my fellow students using their laptops to chat or facebook instead of taking notes. Better grading curves for me.; 2/25/11, 6:58 PM
bagoh20 said...: My first laptop was about the size of of two shoeboxes. A home made 80286 with a monochrome screen on one side and a removeable keyborad on the other. It only had text based DOS (no gui or windows). It had a big handle on the top and weighed about 15 pounds. It was really a portable desktop computer, and it worked great. I developed and implemented my company's entire inventory and accounting system on it via many late nights staring at that screen and drinking Rum and coke till the wee hours.

We ran procedures that ran all night long till the next day to completely update a database. The same thing would take about 5 minutes today.

I don't remember anyone ever predicting the way we use computers today very accurately. The anticipated stuff was like having them run your home, or talk to you, but stuff like, youtube, facebook or blogging was never anticipated then.; 2/25/11, 7:26 PM
David said...: In the late 60's, when I was in law school, we got them to allow a typewriter room for exams. Whew. I could type faster than I could write, and my handwriting was God Awful. Made my career.; 2/25/11, 7:46 PM
Anonymous said...: "BREAKING: GW Drops to 94".

LOLZ!

GWU Law grads from waaaay back will get a laugh from this, especially when they consider how such great profs as Monroe Freedman, Jerome Barron and Max Pock would have squashed these little skulls full of mush had they dared for an instant not to give them their full attention.; 2/25/11, 8:37 PM
Martin L. Shoemaker said...: Joe said...
(The Crypto Jew)

My typing is so awful and slow that I could ONLY use paper and pen to take notes….I like the outline form
I.
A.
1

And the like and there’s no way I could format and type and listen and put it down on “paper” took me about 2-3 minutes of wrastl’n the PC just to get this typed out.

Joe,

You might want to try a Tablet PC (a real Tablet PC running Windows 7, not an iPad) running Microsoft OneNote.

OneNote is to me a kinda odd program if you've got a plain old laptop. It's an interesting way to organize your notes, but you can do a lot of the same with just a word processor.

But with a Tablet PC, OneNote is like a super-intelligent legal pad. You write on it with a pen, just like with a legal pad; but behind the scenes, One Note does text recognition and image analysis on your hand-written notes. So you can do text searches in your notes, and you can convert your notes into typed text. Plus it inherently understands your outline format. It's really, really cool.

Another feature of OneNote: if you're in a meeting or a class and you're authorized for audio recording (big if), it will record audio of the meeting and it will synch the recording to your hand-written notes. So later, you can highlight a point in your notes and review the audio for that point. And they thought of something brilliant, something I would've never thought of: the audio plays back from a few seconds before your note. More than likely that's the right place for the audio that led you to make that note.

If I were a university student today and the professor tried to take ban my Tablet and OneNote, that would be grounds for me to choose another class. Maybe another school. It's the ultimate note-taking tool.; 2/25/11, 11:17 PM
TWM said...: Are laptops the problem or is it Internet access? Seems to me that blocking the Internet in classrooms would solve many of the problems (chatting, emailing, surfing the web).

I only say this because, like Bob, I had really bad handwriting and it was a chore to keep up with note-taking in a fast pace class.; 2/26/11, 7:20 AM
Anonymous said...: Ha, when I went to law school in 1970 they didn't even have PC's, much less laptops!
All I hadda do was sharpen up a set of chisels and make sure to take enough stone tablets and I was ready to go!!; 2/26/11, 10:19 AM