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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.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:12PM (1 child)
First off, there isn't a single ad hominem in that entire post. Perhaps if you weren't so ignorant, you'd know that.
Secondly, none of this is pre-Gutenburg, the style of education used in schools didn't exist until several centuries after his death.
Thirdly, people find things interesting or not, that's largely out of the control of the person giving the lecture. Sure, you can come in with more energy, but the classes still have to follow the prescribed curriculum otherwise there's no guarantee that the students will be prepared for the next class or get what they need to get out of it. It's nice to have passion, but passion is not the same thing as being a good instructor and if the students are so spoiled that they won't focus unless the subject matter is sold to them, then all bets are off in terms of whether or not the students are learning what they need to learn.
Lastly, yes, you are indeed an asshole. Yes, they're more likely to be in that position than other people are, but whose fault is that anyways? If they come back to you because a button was moved or reworded, you address it that next time properly. It's not rocket science. You show them how to find the answer on their own. Or, you do a screen capture video if you expect that you'll be doing this more than once.
Also, it's hardly the fault of the end user that software developers are so inept at designing intuitive software.
When all is said and done, this kind of arrogant self-centeredness is hardly helpful. For those of us actively involved in the educational process, it gets to be a bit old being expected to cater to the students even when doing so causes problems further down the road that we then get to address.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday November 26 2017, @01:21PM
Not sure what your personal definition of "ad hominem" is, but I think most reasonable people would agree that "you're an asshole of a rather large magnitude" and "because you're a sanctimonious and judgmental prick" pretty much meet the requirement of "attacking the person rather than their argument".
However, if you don't see the problem with that sort of language, then it might explain why you can't comprehend that - while I might feel frustrated when trying to help compulsive note-takers - some of us have this thing called "self control" that stops us actually acting like an asshole towards them.