
Ban the Laptops, Yes - cicero
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/09/ban-the-laptops-yes
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sunstone
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.

~~~
cicero
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.

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schoen
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.

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WorldMaker
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](http://thrillcode.xyz)

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

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cicero
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.

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Koshkin
... and the mobile phones?

