Apparently the teaching types are all in a flutter over an initiative at the University of Chicago Law School to ban the internet in the classroom (link).
Perhaps because I am an internet junkie myself, I have never been much bothered by internet connections in the classroom. Last year I was riffing an off-the-cuff account of the career of Michael Milken when I remarked on how Ted Turner had paid him a “tip” of (as I said) “something like two million.” A voice in the back said “that’s not what Wiki says!” And of course, the correct number is fifty million. Well, fair enough. Wiki was right and I was wrong, and the instant correction added just a tiny frisson of electricity to the moment.
What perplexes me is not the internet but the laptop itself. We are training a generation of lightning typists. I teach my finance course out of a file of spreadsheets. I send the file to students. For a while I would also flash the spreadsheet on the screen. But I realized that the students were all typing the whole damn spreadsheet, even though they already had it in their file. I still give them the spreadsheets. But these days, I try to limit what I put on the board, so they won’t have as much to copy.
This is a technical problem and I don’t think I (or anybody else) have solved it just yet. But hey, big deal. The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise to the occasion. We’ll just have to figure out different and better ways to teach.
Fn.: Evidently my student was cleverer than I realized. In five minutes of trying, I haven’t been able to come up with the Wiki page to which he would have been referring. But look here.
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