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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @03:43PM (#601409)

    My high school geometry teacher(*) started class by putting the assignment for the next day on the lower left of her chalk board. Along with a few other friends, I sat in the back and did that assignment concurrently with her lecture -- and never had to take home any homework. After we finished, we quietly passed notes around -- I'm sure she saw, but never said anything because she knew we were on top of the material. Since we were in the back we didn't bother the rest of the class.

    (*) I only found out recently, when reading her obit, that this teacher was a star math major at the local big university. Back then (mid-1960s) she was faced with the glass-ceiling and was unable to get tenured as a math prof. We didn't realize how lucky we were that she ended up as our math teacher.

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