Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I recently attended a relatively technical biochemistry seminar (on protein folding) at the Ivy league school where I am a postdoc. A fellow postdoc sat next to me doing the NYT *Thursday* crossword. Did the whole damn thing during the talk. In ink. Afterward, we had a detailed conversation about the experiments that had been presented; it was clear that my colleage had understood the experiments, and their limitations, at least as well as had I; and I was taking notes.

Anyway: don't assume that students who don't appear to be paying attention actually aren't. Or the inverse....

Just for the record, moving 2 of your three urchins out of the way in that snowball game is not cheating. You can only control one of your urchins at a time, while the computer can control all of its ragamuffins.

Tucking the two non-active urchins away is just compensating for that failing. The true programming flaw is that one doesn't have the traditional "players left" icons in the corner, so you can bring new urchins out of the bullpen if your urchin-in-play is killed. (Runs home?)

Sorry, but I went to law school at Stanford where we had wireless access and all the students used laptops. I guarantee you that adding wireless to the classroom is a bad idea. Great for web-surfing (cause you get great speed), but bad for paying attention and retention.

People say that bad professors will improve their teaching to capture the attention of students -- competition for eyeballs will increase the quality of teaching. Well, that assumes what markets always assume, that people have information. Most professors have very little idea what's going on behind the laptop screens in front of them. A professor thinks he has just said something profound - cause it seems like everyone is taking notes. In fact, they are sending e-mail.

I have asked a lot of people and no one has ever come up with a reasonable argument for wireless access in the classroom where the benefits of its use will outweigh the educational costs.

Sorry, but I went to law school at Stanford where we had wireless access and all the students used laptops. I guarantee you that adding wireless to the classroom is a bad idea. Great for web-surfing (cause you get great speed), but bad for paying attention and retention.

People say that bad professors will improve their teaching to capture the attention of students -- competition for eyeballs will increase the quality of teaching. Well, that assumes what markets always assume, that people have information. Most professors have very little idea what's going on behind the laptop screens in front of them. A professor thinks he has just said something profound - cause it seems like everyone is taking notes. In fact, they are sending e-mail.

I have asked a lot of people and no one has ever come up with a reasonable argument for wireless access in the classroom where the benefits of its use will outweigh the educational costs.

Intel uses the term "unwire" to describe the installation and use of a wireless infrastructure. It certainly is a little less cumbersome and more descriptive than "wirelessing" or "anti-wiring." Of course you may have to pay a royalty to Intel every time you use the term, but maybe they can include it in the intellectual property the provide with their Pentiums.

What's to stop the instructor from saying, Laptops Off?

Incidentally, Slashdot has this very subject up for discussion at this link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/15/2249258&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=146&tid=193&tid=99

I think wireless internet in lecture halls is great. The professor can stay at home in front of a blue screen and deliver the lecture. The students can choose some virtual representation to be the professor using some crude form of CGI to mimic the professors actual movements.

Think about it: would you rather learn economics from Professor Delong in person or from a CGI Jenna Jameson (controlled by Professor Delong) on your laptop?

Having been both an undergrad and a teacher of undergrads in the recent past, I have to come out in full support of wireless technology. Kids who don't pay attention won't pay attention; there's nothing to be done, and frankly by the time they're in college, responsibility to take or not to take notes is theirs entirely. Personally, I found that allowing kids to bring their laptops into wireless classrooms meant the problem students would sit in the nosebleed section of the lecture hall writing emails or playing card games--in short, NOT TALKING and interrupting my class.

I'm all for banning computers in classrooms. The sound of typing is incredibly distracting. At the very least, computer users should have restricted seating choices.

Jeez, as a graduate student instructor, I can only imagine that wireless would make my class discussions look even more like blog commentary.

How about banning sleeping? Isn't a student sleeping in class more distracting than one typing away? At least in the case of student avec laptop, one (i.e. the lecturer and the student) can maintain the pretense of the student's "working" while she writes a letter, or a paper for another class, or plays a game or hacks on a program.

The same applies to conference lectures. Though I can insert endless (probably apocryphal) anecdotes about well-known mathematicians apparently sleeping through lectures and waking up all of a sudden with some profound question. I indeed can testify to the fact that mathematicians sleep through each other's lectures, but I have yet to see a instance of somebody soundly sleeping only to suddenly wake up and point out that the third condition of Lemma 2 really requires non-degeneracy of gamma.

> He spent the bulk of most of the lectures -- nearly two hours a pop, no less -- playing a freeware "snowball fight" game of some sort. And he'd always cheat: He'd take two members of his team and drag them to the bottom corner of the screen, where enemy balls could not reach, due to programming shortcomings in the game. If that young man had wireless access, at least he'd be reading, or downloading better games, or something.

Most likely he'd be cheating at Networked Freeware Snowball Fight against his frend Beavis in the other lecture hall.

(Or worse he could be making pointless postings to blog comment boards.)

>Isn't a student sleeping in class more
>distracting than one typing away?

Having taught several sections of Principles of Macroeconomics and Intermediate Microeconomics (the former required for all students, regardless of major), I can testify that, no, sleeping students aren't very distracting, unless they do entertaining things like fall out of their seat, or they snore. In the former case, the shame is generally punishment enough, in the latter, a well placed nudge from a neighbor generally solves the problem. Someone playing (dating my teaching experience) Doom, however, can be a bit distracting to the folks behind him.

I'm relieved that the guy playing the snowball game wasn't cheating. That part really bothered me.

rvman is right--sleeping people are easy to tune out, because they don't move much. (I once had an afternoon class which I could time by the progress of one student's head down her arm--when it hit the desk, time was up.)

And the reason we can't say "laptops off!" is that some students take notes on their laptops. There's a lot to be said for that (they'll be where you find them), and it would be a cost to forbid it.

"sleeping people are easy to tune out, because they don't move much."

Huh? Is this like "The deader, the better"?

What's really amusing is now there are auto-robots kids are e-mailing back and forth to, generating exactly the sort of gerbil acronyms they can sit and spend HOURS at, even in summer.

What's that going to do to a kid's brain, to spend the summer indoors, AIM'ing to robot chat? My guess, Thorazine will be the drug of choice, and lectures will disappear as a form of media.

As a buddy used to say, it's all right to talk to yourself, as long as you don't answer back.

Our economics professor had the delightful habit of becoming apoplectically stutterous at some point in his lecture, simply going off the deep end trying to pronounce that unreachable glottal.

It made his lectures highly interesting, if only to see whether you won the bet for that day on exactly how many minutes he'd last, before going sub-Neanderthal, beet-faced and vein throbbing.

I haven't the slightest recollection of anything the man said in his lectures, only the endings, but that's more than I can say for professors' classes I don't even remember attending.

If you're not doing the reading, you're screwed. It should all be wifi from archival DVD's, and let the professors concentrate on research.

(quote:) I remember a class I took at Berkeley last summer (PS 140D: War Violence & Terrorism), in which there was a student who usually sat one or two rows in front of me in the lecture hall, with his laptop. He spent the bulk of most of the lectures -- nearly two hours a pop, no less -- playing a freeware "snowball fight" game of some sort...(end quote)

[ - Tourette's Syndrome spaz attack clipped in editing - ]

There are millions of Americans who'd trade a decade off their life expectancy to be privileged to sit in that video-gamer's chair and get hold of some of that "higher education," i.e., a.) learn a few fun fancy complex things and b.) get certification thereto so they could have decent careers instead of the dead-end no-future jobs they're stuck in.

Well, maybe not millions, maybe just me. Maybe I'm the last one.

You're a professor, Brad, why don't you just flunk these punks and boot them out of your classroom? Is that what you're there for, to serve as background music for a video game? Is the actual purpose of a university to perpetuate the class differences which ensure our video-game player's sons and daughters will have a comfortable dorm in which to party party party for four carefree years with their fellow elite, and nice college classrooms in which to enjoy the video games of the year 2030?

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