
'Teach Naked' Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms - malte
http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/
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krschultz
Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the
powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading
straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.

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Herring
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write &
talk to himself for an hour.

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olefoo
Depends on the professor. Some of the most intellectually challenging lectures
I've heard were delivered with no more equipment than a chalkboard.

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Herring
I don't doubt it, I'm just saying a bad lecture is probably more about the
professor's (& student's) incompetence than about the tools. Eg I'd rather
have slides to write on if he's just going to copy from the text.

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yannis
This is also one of the best ways to teach computer programming. Let also
students write programs by hand on paper first. Too many students acquire bad
programming habits by brute forcing solutions rather than solving by thinking
and researching.

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Oompa
This maybe true, but I cringe at the thought of writing code on paper.

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mquander
Well, hopefully nobody is asking you to write legal Java down to the last
namespace and semicolon on paper. (I know some classes do this; I think it's
foolish.) But writing semi-legal Scheme or pseudocode on paper is easy and no
more strange or demanding than doing mathematics on paper. I don't think it
deserves a cringe.

Also, if it's some small degree harder to actually physically write the
program, I'm not sure that's a bad thing in terms of learning; it encourages
you to do more thinking and understanding and less fly-by-wire programming and
testing.

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yummyfajitas
Regarding math on paper, I actually find it's easier to do math on computer
than on paper. Quick and easy calculations (e.g., less than half a page) are
often faster on paper, but the long and involved ones require a computer to
manage.

I might have different feelings if I didn't use emacs.

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RK
Are you one of those people who TeX's their notes while sitting in class? I'm
always amazed by that. Wish I could pull it off :)

Long calculations are a pain, but I find doing it by hand is good, so that I
can go back and find mistakes. I tend to use one long scratch pads, so that I
have a sort of ongoing, live revision control. When I use LaTeX I tend to
erase stuff, because I want LaTex to look nice, and of course the erased parts
might have been useful later.

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yummyfajitas
I never actually developed note-taking skills. After a semester or two, I gave
up on even trying.

Basically, my calculations usually look like this:

interesting quantity < mess[0] < mess[1] < ... < mess[n] < final result

I've found it's very easy to copy mess[j] to a new line, edit, and repeat.
It's harder to rewrite mess[j] on paper. Storing complicated expressions in
emacs registers is also quite nice.

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tybris
People complain about education too much. Kids will find their way. You
shouldn't judge a generation until they're over 50 and vote a Republican
goofball into office that destroys the American economy. Now they obviously
had some bad education.

