Today's ubicomp education anecdote

Today's snapshot of ubicomp and education comes from the Volokh law blog:

One Benefit of Laptops in Law School Classes:

As told in a guest post at Balkinization by Michael Stokes Paulsen:

I was, quite literally, teaching *Stenberg* v. Carhart (following on the heels of Monday's class on Roe v. Wade and Tuesday's on Planned Parenthood v. Casey), when a student broke in with the comment that the Court had decided today's partial-birth abortion case, upholding the federal statute. (Ah, the joys of internet access in the classroom.) Seamlessly weaving the student's interjection into the class decision, I asked him about the holding: "Who wrote?" (No one needed to ask the vote or the lineup.) "Kennedy?! Makes sense. Was Stenberg overruled? Could he do that, consistent with his opinion in Casey?"

As you might expect, there's lots of interesting blogging about Carhart at Balkinization; just keep scrolling.

 

So we see the world-class barrier being breached.  Note the web 2.0 connection - we read this on a blog, and can find more on other blogs.  Note, too, that this is about research and the live web.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Comments

[Gardner]

The other day I was teaching prosody and wondered aloud about the proportion of English disyllabic words stressed on the first syllable to those stressed on the second syllable. Within 60 seconds a student had raised her hand to answer. She had a laptop, of course, and was able to find the information almost instantly.

Interesting that her research skills in this instance were peerless. Perhaps the objects of research are changing, as well as the mechanisms. Perhaps our students will become better able to find some things than we ever were. Then, of course, we can teach each other.

[Ladi]

When I was in law school, having internet access in class was very useful when professors referred to current news events or recent cases...sometimes even less recent cases. It's far easier to Google up the details of a news story and drop a link into your notes than try to type everything relevant. And Ctrl+F, , Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V is a lot more efficient for finding particular passages being discussed and also putting them into your class notes. Even though I did my reading from the casebooks, I definitely pulled up some of the cases online before or during class, just to be prepared for that.

And while many professors hate it, I too surfed the web and chatted in class. Some of the chat was directed at trying to figure out where we were in the discussion ("hey, what page is that case on??") and some of it certainly meant more tapping but less verbal snarking at classmates. And some of the surfing let me pay half-attention when the professor or a student was off on a clearly irrelevant tangent. As a child of the computer age, the microseconds it takes to Alt+Tab were all I needed when the prof jumped back on track. Even now, I often switch between work and the Internet..sometimes even in the middle of a word. I just make sure that my non-work pursuits are not particularly important and don't require a lot of undivided attention.

[Bryan Alexander]

Gardner, do you mean that she was without research peers in that group of students, or that she was excellent? Re: the former, I'm thinking about the distribution of info flu skills, contextualization as related to scribe skills a millenium ago.