1. The Japanese grandmother's house.
2. The table representative at the group dinner.
3. The baby has a high emotional IQ.
4. Medieval doodling in official court records.
5. Back when only 20% of us were on the internet, Jeff Goldblum did an Apple ad.
Say, I went to that Donuts and Coffee discussion. My prediction? We'll default to the current status quo, leaving things as they are. So many speakers offset each other in their opinions, positive and negative, about wireless in the classroom.
One young man seemed truly offended that the professors would even consider taking away his classroom Internet, as he got about an hour's worth of work done on his laptop, before, during and after class, in the down time. When pressed by a prof as to what "work" he was accomplishing, he came up with: responding to emails, reading the newspapers, checking on things, etc. I do this at school too, but on the library and public access computers. If you cut off the classroom access, will the library suddenly become more crowded, meaning you have to provide more desktop computers or open areas for laptops? If the library has wireless access, some spills over into the classrooms, and people can still pick it up there.
Or is the administration considering cutting off access to the whole building? One student said gossip was going around, people were concerned what y'all were up to -- banning laptops? -- on that mysterious faculty listserv of yours. No one really was sure how these things would work out, affect admissions, etc. One woman explained her generation needs to multi-task. She knitted her way through undergrad, and found it helped her concentrate. They feel like time is wasting if they're not doing 3 things at once, giving the example of walking down the street, talking on the phone, or listening to music.
A few people said seeing games and images on other people screens was annoying. One explained she has ADD and these things DO distract. If you don't get there early the day they do the seating chart, there's not a lot extra available seats to switch to. This person, incidentally, reported seeing a semi-porn CSI type video game on the screen, played daily by the guy who sat in front of her. Nobody else said anything when one prof asked, really is porn out there in class?
The discussion, in fact, seemed to get most passionate about this issue. One older student, with a Ph.D who has taught before, was trying to explain how naughty pics might appear on laptop screens in class: if you're checking your email, say from AOL, some people have nude/provocative pics that go with their name IDs. He would just quickly close that window, he said, if it came up. He also was offended the administration would consider shutting off the wireless, said he had undergrads coming to class stoned when he taught, and really, what can you do when the students are adults? His criticism was of teaching methods -- when he can be chatting with the book open, get asked a question, skim to find a line that explains what the prof wants, and then go back to chatting... that's the prof's fault for being boring, and asking simplistic questions.
The first guy I mentioned, spoke up to say he really wasn't sure what was in his laptop either. Things happen. Pop-up ads, innocently typing in whitehouse.something, etc. can take you places you don't want to go. That's when one prof jumped in to give say listen up people, it can be a felony to have some things on your computer, period, and innocent explanations won't help you later down the line. He's seen cases of it in practice.
Another female prof also spoke strongly, I think this was after the student spoke of the CSI-type game, that NEVER should people have to tolerate porn in the classroom, period. This prof asked what students thought of a policy, laptop users sit in back, non-users sit in front. Sounded like a good compromise, but how would it work with the outlets distributed throughout the room? Some people still need to plug in. And does that create artificial distinctions among students?
Overall though, I think that prof may have had it right. She's no dummy, and reported to students that there's an obvious online, hunched- over look that shows you're not just taking notes. Very little typing, more slight scrolling with the mouse. Even if you're listening and doing other things, it's rude to the prof and to fellow students when you don't look up during a discussion, and listen to what others have to say. (It's different from doodling, one prof said, more like opening a newspaper and starting to read it.) Stay open, and give your attention to the speaker. One gives a little speech early on, during the intro/housekeeping portion of class, saying stay engaged, eyes off the screens occasionally, basically please pay attention people, and you might learn something not in the readings.
More than one student suggested, though, it's survival of the fittest, if people want to tune out, maybe they suffer the consequences come test time, and then again, maybe they don't. In the end, the conversation took a turn that teaching styles need to incorporate all the benefits of online resources. But this seemed like a cop-out to me, after we'd spent all that time discussing the low-level reasons people really are online during class. They're not all checking WestLaw or Lexis-Nexis, or sharing extra details about cases, though I'm sure that happens too.
1) I think that no matter what you do, a student is basically going to get out of it what he or she puts into it.Point 3 is especially interesting. I hadn't seen anyone make that point, but I believe it would have a decisive impact on some decisionmakers. And it should!
2) My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science and I really haven't handwritten anything much longer than a grocery list in 20 years. I simply could not take meaningful notes by hand. While my case may be kind of rare, I'm guessing that there are more and more students who would be severely handicapped if they had to take notes by hand. (Thank God VA had a laptop option on the bar!) [Althouse note: At UW, we have not yet decided to let students use laptops for their exams.]
3) It was very helpful for me to have access in the classroom because of my family. My wife had to work full time and caring for the children, ages 8, 11, and 13 now) was a constant problem. A cell phone wasn't really in our budget and would have been really rude in class. But Net access allowed me to be contacted by the kids' schools or my wife, or even the kids directly. ... I could even have set up a camera at the house if I had felt the need. My oldest son has standing instructions to check his email if he gets home and no one is here so I was also able to handle class running over or deciding to meet another student in the library easily.
4) Finally, and I know this is really weird, but I took all my notes using Netscape Composer. It handles outlines much better than Word and produces nice, clean HTML. My basic class method was to make a web page out of the syllabus with each topic linking to a subtopic. Each subtopic web page consisted of my outline of the assigned text material for that subtopic, supplemented by links to my class notes and to cases, statutes, and other sources that were often on the Net or in Lexis. By doing this I was able to maintain some perspective on the material and decrease the time necessary to find something during an open note exam.
I can’t imagine a good reason that law school administrators would go out of their way to offer free Internet access in law school classrooms. ... A law school might as well pay for a poker game and a clown act to take place in the back of a classroom, as well as handing out free newspapers for students to read during class.
Mr. Buck's attitude seems to be that since the benefits of internet use are very small the school should not subsidize distraction. I think the proper analysis is the reverse-- the marginal increase in distraction is uncertain, and in any case the costs of not-paying attention are personal rather than external. Meanwhile, the internet provides great rewards to some who use it well, which I think swamp the horrors of students' reading ... blogs during class.I need to point out that my law school is considering going out of its way to turn off the wireless access in classrooms. We want wireless in the building generally, especially in the library.
I don't think the school should have rules dealing with distracting images (unless, of course, they're offensive images). I sometimes let my screen saver (a slideshow of photos) turn on in class. It's possible that another student could start looking at my photos and stop listening to the prof. But I just don't feel that that would be MY responsibility!
Note that distracting images are nowhere near as bad as distracting noises. You can't just close your ears to certain noise, whereas you can choose not to look right at someone's computer screen. And you NEED to HEAR the prof; you don't need to SEE the prof.
If it's a problem for students to display distracting images on their computer screens, then shouldn't students also be prohibited from wearing flashy clothing?
My property prof is always putting up extraneous images on her PowerPoint slides, e.g. while she's discussing a case about marriage she'll put up a photo of a random married couple that she got off the web. Should SHE be forbidden from showing distracting Internet images?!
Law profs shouldn't deal with the problem of "not paying attention" by coming up with regulations; they should deal with the problem by making their classes more interesting!
But wireless access should be blocked in the classrooms (as it is at Cornell), because it destroys the Socratic method to let students IM and email answers to each other in class.
I personally don't bring my laptop to class -- I like writing down my notes, because I type quickly enough that if I typed notes I would just transcribe the lecture and glean nothing from it, and I think it is a valuable skill to discern on the spot what information is important or not -- but a ton of my friends do. And of course there is rampant IMing, emailing, surfing (not porn sites though...what total creep looks at porn in class?!) but I wanted to mention to you something that professors might not think about, which is students using the internet in to look up additional information on the topic at hand.A law student writes:
I've seen this happen plenty of times. The professor brings up a new topic, or mentions a particularly interesting anecdote, and students start Googling away to find out more. If that isn't a sign of the intellectual curiousity that we as college students are always encouraged to have, I don't know what is.
On a sidenote, I don't find laptops particularly distracting, unless the lecture is poorly delivered enough to warrant my desire to FIND distractions. And if that's the case, I will find distractions anywhere -- typically in the crossword puzzle, which is something that just cries out for collaborative whispering and note passing among students. Oh, the horror!! Ban the crossword!!
I LOVE it. I am like you, in that I can't really pay 100% attention, and in my undergrad, I'd just doodle. This way, I am doing productive things like reading your blog, catching up on the news, doing assignments for other classes and work, talking to my wife at home on the home computer, etc. Not only that, but when I am really interested in something the teacher says, I'll go to Lexis and pull up the case, or do a quick search on Google and find that his facts are all wrong and therefore, so is his argument. More than a few times, a friend has been called on, and been way off, but with a little helpful IM, he's back on track. Wireless is a beautiful thing, and would only help the students. Like you say, those who won't pay attention, wouldn't pay attention anyway. Moreover, I've found that my attention span is about the same as it was before. If class is interesting, I'll pay attention.
As for being a distraction, the way our classrooms are set up, you can see what website someone is on, but you can't read it (too small font), so it isn't a temptation. I've never seen porn during class, and I sit closer to the back in each class. I have seen at one time, approximately 95% of the laptop users in class (which at any time is between 60 and 90%) playing solitaire during one particular dry lecture.
[D]uring my law school time …, Internet misuse during class was rampant -- online gambling, day trading, checking the news, etc.
Honestly, I never found it that distracting, and it's basically unregulable without doing a complete ban on Internet use, which I think is a bad idea--having Internet access allows access to a wide range of information and commentary which (when used well) can open up class discussion dramatically.
But a story on how broadband can be good--I was actually in class on September 11 in New York. At the time, I didn't have a broadband hookup capable laptop and sat near the back of the class. While the professor (who was apparently wholly oblivious -- not out of malice, but out of general obliviousness) prattled on, a student in the front row was constantly refreshing various Internet news sources on his browser and putting up the headlines on his screen so everyone behind him could read. (And yes, we heard the thud as the buildings collapsed in class, as the professor droned on.) So sometimes, "distraction" is a good thing.
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