[Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class
Ted M Coopman
coopman at u.washington.edu
Fri May 18 11:27:03 PDT 2007
All,
I recently was part of a team of TAs for a large (450+) lecture course. If you have the numbers you can scatter to police obsessive myspace cruising but we found that that other technology (iPods and cells) and old issues like talking were at least (if not more) as big a problem. The problem, I think, is large lecture courses and long lectures.
I don't think that shutting down wifi is a good option. It really is a losing battle. In fact, playing the cop takes the fun out of teaching. IMO these types of technologies show up the problems with our largely 19th century industrial mass production educational techniques. Research indicates that orally downloading information on students is the most ineffective method of teaching.
I used to obsess with the importance of course designs that made participation a major factor in grading. Now I tell my students not to come to class if they don't want to be there. They are adults, let them make the choice. Sure it will hurt them, but why burden everyone else with distractions and poor attitudes? I limit myself to 10 slides to frame discussion and activities. This makes web surfing and general noodling less of an option.
I have heard of large courses that use clickers (on the fly polls and quizzes), podcasting, back channel chat and other techniques to engage students. This is much better use of time and effort that trying to "make" students to pay attention, sit quietly, and take notes. Esp. since sometimes (as with our program) these large intro classes are currently the only viable option.
-TED
Ted M. Coopman
Department of Communication
University of Washington
On Fri, 18 May 2007, Sam Ladner wrote:
> This is an interesting discussion.
>
> A colleague and I redesigned our first-year courses to include laptops and
> internet access, as a pilot project. It was incredibly difficult to get the
> technology we wanted (tho wi fi was already available for everyone who
> brought their OWN laptop). We redesigned the class to have round tables, not
> lecture style, and a single laptop per 3 students.
>
> We then interspersed "mini lectures" with some PPT slides with "mini
> exercises" which were typically Web-based. An example was visiting several
> statistical agencies' sites and investigating how they asked the question of
> race or ethnicity. Students collectively (in groups of 3) visited the sites,
> and as a table or group, collated their responses to critical questions.
>
> These were then shared with the larger group of the entire class. From
> there, the next "mini lecture" would start.
>
> We found students did indeed still IM and check email during class. However,
> they were also much more engaged with the subject matter and had a better
> grasp than they would have in a traditional lecture style.
>
> Our learnings would amount to:
>
> * have students share laptops, and keep an eye on who controls it (dominant
> personalities? men? women? senior students?)
> * design interactive exercises intended to develop "critical surfing skills"
> and autonomous learning (i.e., without their professors holding their hands)
> * reconfigure the physical classroom to support collaborative learning over
> lecturing
>
> Now if you do none of those things, well then, go ahead and shut off the wi
> fi.
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