From Slide Rules to Cyberspace

[SlideRule]

An excerpt from Sooner Magazine, v18 i2 1998 {p18}

"Introducing the laptop into the classroom of today is akin to introducing the scientific calculator in the late 1960s," Fagan says. "Replacing the slide rule and log tables with this tool raised some controversy. Yet the HP-35 calculator enabled students to solve more difficult problems. Some instructors claimed that students could not understand the physics of the problem if they used the new mathematical tool. Changing to a laptop classroom today raises similar complaints, but soon the laptop will be as commonplace as the calculator."

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[KeithB]

I was using my SR-56 in the late 70's, and then my HP-41 in college in the early 80's.

[dm319]

When I did my first degree laptops were very unusual in the lecture halls, even though many students had them in their dorm. When I went back to doing a bioinformatics course 15 years later I thought I would use my laptop for note taking. It surprised me how distracting the laptop was, and definitely detracted from my ability to concentrate.

[Johnh]

I teach engineering at Sydney uni. These days, most students have a tablet as well as a laptop, and use it in lectures for annotating the lecture slides, and generally for sketching and anything that you might have used a paper notebook for before. I'm getting given handwritten assignments done all on a tablet, or mixed with some typing. The best ones are very good.

[dm319]

That's good to hear. I guess a lot of it comes down to the discipline of the student.

[KF6GPE]

(06-08-2024 08:55 PM)dm319 Wrote:  When I did my first degree laptops were very unusual in the lecture halls, even though many students had them in their dorm. When I went back to doing a bioinformatics course 15 years later I thought I would use my laptop for note taking. It surprised me how distracting the laptop was, and definitely detracted from my ability to concentrate.

In my last year in undergrad as a math major, I was one of the first people to get a Powerbook 100. It made for a great note taking device --- it didn't take me long to get the hang of Word's Equation Writer or whatever it was called, and battery life would carry me through a lecture.

In graduate school recently, I tried using a laptop for note taking (granted, not for math, but at seminary).

It was an absolute disaster.

The difference, I think, can be summarized in one word:

WiFi.

Perhaps add three more words:

multi-tasking operating systems.

I ended up getting a Remarkable tablet for seminary and have not looked back. Even now that I've graduated it gets almost as much use as my tablet or laptop. PDFs, etc., etc all go on it, and I read it in the evenings instead of on my iPad.

[dm319]

(06-09-2024 04:26 PM)KF6GPE Wrote:  WiFi.

Yes, this exactly. My experience was that I was easily distracted with silly things. Often little things the wifi connecting and disconnecting, were enough to change the context in my head that I could lose the thread of a talk. And this was with a very stripped-down linux machine. So much worse if you're using Windows, and it has logged you into Teams and is flashing up incoming mail into your Outlook. Or you've opened your web browser and your telegram messages start flashing up. And then you get notified for updates...

My wife is a lecturer. She recently repeated a group session with one difference - instead of the handouts printed out, they had to download them. She found the group far less engaged and could see that many were checking social media.