Ban the Laptops, Yes | Hacker News Reader

Ban the Laptops, Yes

firstthings.com

12 pointscicero6 comments

We are no longer in the middle ages. The most effective method for teaching/learning is to hand out the lecture notes before the lecture, preferably at the beginning of term. That way students can study up on the content before hand and arrive ready to absorb and discuss.

In my experience most profs (not all) would abhor this approach because their strategy is to come in, fill the boards with notes fast enough that students have trouble taking the notes down never mind thinking about them. At lecture end the prof asks "are there any questions" knowing full well everyone is still confused and he gets through yet another lecture with minimum effort.

Class time should be a great time of interaction between students and teacher. The advantage of a good lecture over printed material is the lecturer can adjust to the needs of the class. This requires much more than asking for questions at the end. Indeed, I think the middle ages were even better than some lectures today because you could watch disputations and see how arguments were made and countered.

I think a key point is that computers can be extraordinarily valuable for education, but during a lecture or during a seminar they're usually more of a distraction because a goal of that is a teaching interaction and engagement between people in the same room, and modern computers have so many tools to connect people for totally other purposes.

So if someone says "but computers are so important for being able to do online research and collaboration!", that's absolutely right, but that doesn't mean they're a consistent net positive during face-to-face teaching sessions.

Bret Victor (who just came up in another thread) has been pretty adamant about his claim that some future kind of computational media could be a huge plus for collaboration and teaching environments—yet that present-day laptops and tablets are not that and tend more to isolate people.

This reminds me that I need to pick a date for ThrillCode 2018 [1], my "no laptops, no PowerPoint", mostly semi-serious code conference.

http://thrillcode.xyz

[1] I apologize to my fans that I failed to pick a 2017 date.

The school I work at sometimes takes some heat because we are relatively low-tech, so it's nice to see that there is some data to back up our intuition.

... and the mobile phones?

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