laptops in the classroom: an article post.

Here is an article from Slate Magazine about laptops in the classroom, but it's not a techie piece. It instead considers the nature of lectures and professors.

I haven't formed any opinions yet, but certain paragraphs trouble me. This is one paragraph which I've split into parts, and I hope it is not too out-of-context.

In any event, even when multitaskers can't keep track of the professor, it probably doesn't matter much. In lectures at large universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, class time is usually taken up by the broad outlines of the subject.

The real learning occurs when we bear down and pore over the hundreds of pages assigned every week—the lecture I'm currently tuning out assigns about 3,000 pages of reading over the span of the semester—and when we attend small discussion sections with graduate students who go over what we've read. Any good grade-grubber knows that the trick to doing well on exams is knowing the reading, not what the professor said last week.

If what the author says is true, then what is the point of attending lectures, other than if there is a class attendence policy? Why have lectures at all, if they are obsolete in the learning process?

Is it also possible that, in some cases, the grades don't reflect what the prof discusses in lecture because the prof doesn't grade the exams? Or is that superfluous?

Perhaps the real problem with laptops in lectures isn't the laptops, but professors' over-reliance on the lecture as a learning tool. Earlier this week in Slate, M. Stanley Katz contended that "the most effective learning is active learning … teaching must involve presenting students with problems to solve rather than merely lecturing about those problems."

Amen, professor. You try listening to rambling, jargon-filled disquisitions for 15 hours a week without reading blogs. At least Gawker solicits our contributions.

Wow. "Rambling, jargon-filled disquisitions." Are lectures really that bad, these days?