Developing Usable Experiences

Four More Weeks, Lost in Laptops

March 29th, 2010 5:55 am —  37 views

My statistics professor1 loves statistics, there is no doubt, but student participation during lecture isn’t great.2 There are about 35 students (when everyone shows up) and only 5 or 10 of us say anything all semester. You know who you are.

Every student has a laptop and seems to pay more attention to it than the professor.3 The professor has cleverly taken to using an online tool called LectureTools.4

With LectureTools she can post slides of the lectures. We can basically annotate the slides to leave notes. It also allows her to post questions which we can answer during lecture.5 She’ll ask us to answer a question then will call up the results.

When she asks about the answers nobody wants to admit having answered. Nobody responds. The look on her face is like, “Seriously? I know you guys are here, you just voted. Hello?”

I think she’s on to something though. If you’re all going to be in a room together where you can see and hear but are also networked, make use of it for learning. LectureTools holds a lot of promise, keep at it Lada.

It’s easy to get distracted though. At one point the prof (running her lecture off her laptop) switches to an email to find a link to something funny and relevant…I forget exactly what it was because I got lost for a second.

Understand that if the professor mentions a famous person, theory or event, many of us launch a browser tab and Google it. The next 5 or 10 seconds spent skimming data. Augmenting the lecture with facts, figures, pictures.

I started skimming this blog of “indescribable awesomeness” and almost bust out laughing. With practiced discipline I brought my facilities back to lecture. Just barely. A few days later W. and I are looking at some of the older posts and were laughing so hard we were in tears.

But anyway, back to school stuff, this blog, and it’s final days.

There are basically four more weeks of classes. The fourth week is committed to a take-home final in statistics. In one of my classes, I have only 3 more weeks. So even though it’s four weeks total, it’s less than that even. The next 2 weekends are going to be all about writing final reports, wrapping up a 25 page white paper, and a couple more problem sets for stats.

After that I graduate and move on.

Image: Taken on the way to study group and a group meeting in the Ross Business School. This is looking through the class toward a huge granite staircase.

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  1. Before I had my first class with her, I remember an email being sent to SI students to vote for her on Wired.com. [↩]
  2. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that many are there because statistics is a requirement. [↩]
  3. Except for one person who shares with a friend for LectureTools stuff. [↩]
  4. It was a rough start, but a couple weeks into class she went to a session on how to use it and things improved considerably. [↩]
  5. We can also post questions which she checks every now and then to answer. [↩]

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Comments

2 Responses to “Four More Weeks, Lost in Laptops”

  1. Dawn on March 31st, 2010 12:36 pm

    Ahhh…Lada. I remember feeling confused. She sure knows her stuff though.

  2. Laiane on April 4th, 2010 10:36 am

    That blog is indeed awesome. I love her pain scale (and posted a link to it on Facebook).

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