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posted by janrinok on Saturday November 25 2017, @06:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the gall-ink-and-parchment dept.

Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won't see that when I'm teaching.

Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.

That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.

But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It's not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:28AM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:28AM (#601318) Journal

    Maybe the universities should only be paid for failed students. That way they have an interest to actually sieve out the best: If they deny too many degrees, or if they don't properly give the degrees based on achievements, people will go elsewhere, and they won't get paid. But if they give too many degrees, they won't get paid either.

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    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:56AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:56AM (#601322) Journal

    > Maybe the universities should only be paid for failed students
    Fascinating idea, open for abuse in some markets though. Students that have few short term prospects might earn some buck by failing exams and splitting the proceedings.
    And, people is then likely to receive letters from Harvard like "...We are sorry, you are too smart to enroll in our courses...".

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    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:32AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:32AM (#601649) Journal

      But then, imagine you can show your prospective employer a writing from Harvard that you are too smart for them …

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      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday November 26 2017, @09:42AM

        by Bot (3902) on Sunday November 26 2017, @09:42AM (#601676) Journal

        "The candidate is pretty qualified but can't play dumb well enough"
        "Don't worry, we don't need him in sales"

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        Account abandoned.