I read recently that less than 3% of people at MLB games keep score (gnaws on flimsy interlocking NY Yankee pencil)
So before covering some high school softball and baseball this past week, I downloaded a free “scorepad” app and fooled around with it at home to see if it was worthwhile.
Long story short, as good as the idea sounded, ahem, on paper, in practice, it was a pure debacle.
All it did was remind me how scoring a baseball game, even in this increasing digital world, is a simple, timeless joy.
Maybe this is going a wee bit overboard, but there’s actually a level of zen found tracing the little diamonds and filling them it. It’s fun, too, getting into an official scoring debate with a colleague or a fan over whether a batted ball was a hit, error or fielder’s choice.
Yes, it’s purely baseball nerd stuff, but those little details and debates are a vital part of why the sport is ingrained in our American culture, even if it’s less and less every passing year. It’s partially why it always warms my heart when, at a high school game, I can run over to the home team dugout between innings and ask the kid keeping score if he or she ruled a play a hit or an error and I get something back other than a blank stare and a shrug.
Our apps and iPads might improve plenty of aspects of our lives, but every now and then, it’s OK to keep things like they were in the 1900s or even the 1800s.
Repoz
Posted: April 29, 2012 at 08:18 AM |
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And I agree with the article, score keeping in pen and paper is just a more enjoyable way to do it.
Getting a laptop in law school was the best thing I ever did. I used to take my pre-notes before lecture on the laptop, and then during class I could just follow along and insert new material from the lecture where it belonged. I could also take all of the notes directly into my overall course outline, so that at the end of the semester I had a single document to study from. It saved me countless hours of transcribing notes into the outline (not to mention if you didn't keep right up with it, then you'd get to the end of the semester and find yourself staring at page after page of hand-scrawled notes with arrows and little insertions and trying to figure out just what the hell it was you were trying to say).
Of course, I also used to look around and see people using their laptops in class to surf the web, play games, or otherwise not pay attention, so YMMV on how productive you might actually be using one during a lecture.
(And back on topic, I agree with the author - some of my best baseball memories are sitting at the park or at home scoring by hand. I'm sure I could do it on an iPhone or iPad, but I'm not sure that I'd want to. I guess the nice thing would be that you could have an electronic archive of every game you ever scored, and you could search and pull them up easily rather than going to that box in the closet where you keep stuff like old scorecards.)
It's also kind of fun to go over some of the many used scorecards that I've bought over the years and try to match them to the game. It's easy when all nine innings have been filled out, but unfortunately in many cases the person keeping score just gave up after a few innings if the home team got behind.
Which is exactly why I don't allow the use of laptops in my classes.
Gazoo? Boy am I glad I didn't go to Law School.
Yeah, that's the biggest advantage to tablet scoring. If you are running a youth team, HS team, or playing a season long Strat-O season, using a tablet is the best way.
Last summer a co-worker was scoring and keeping stats for his son's summer league team, all form his iphone. I'm not sure what program he was using, but he was able to send his scoring to a server live, which I could access from home via the web and "watch" the game, like a simple-dumbed down gameday. That seems like a pretty useful tool for relatives/friends.
The Yankee hitters in the 7-8-9 spots went a combined 13-for-18.
I am getting close to this. In fact I am getting close to revamping the entire way I behave in the classroom because I was so disgusted with my students' behavior this semester.
That's horseshit. They're paying to be there, if they're wasting their time it's their own fault.
Oh horseshit. Its my classroom-don't like it, go take someone else.
That's the most pompous pile of garbage I've heard this weekend. I feel sorry for the poor souls who paid to listen to you speak. No wonder they'd rather tune you out with laptops.
You have obviously never taught. With ######## like you, its no wonder that we have wrecked American education.
I don't care for reading books on it.
I thought I'd enjoy using it, and downloaded a free copy of Tristram Shandy on Christmas Day! But I find I desperately miss an actual book. I do think it will be handy for travel, so I hold out hope for that.
Many teachers don't allow laptops in lecture, either, and there's nothing horseshit about it. You have to puncture the air of privilege and intellectual slovenliness that is rampant among college students somehow.
It was the act of creating an outline -- synthesizing the material into a coherent outline, sometimes from multiple sources -- that was the major study tool for me. After that, reviewing the outline was useful, but I had already re-taught myself the material. It was also one of the most useful things I did in law school that applied to practice afterwards -- taking material from various sources and sythesizing it into a coherent whole.
I hope you're planning on teaching as a mean drunk.
It would make faculty meetings more bearable.
Two points. One, I think your doing more harm than good. I don't know your students, your subject, or your style, but I can say that in my experience (more as a law student than in undergrad) you'd be hurting as many people who want to do well and take notes as you'd be helping people who get distracted. I've gotten into a very involved debate with a former professor over this very issue. He actually allows laptops, but we were discussing others who don't. One thing he conceded was that at least half of students who have spent four or five years in college can no longer hand wright well enough to read their own writing. That trend is never going to reverse, hand-writing large amounts of information is just plain dead and that means that half of your class has a very difficult time keeping useful notes. (again, I don't want to assume, I don't know your class).
Two is more personal for me. There were periods of time were the professor would go off into a massive Socratic tangent with another student over a subject that I understood. I found that just having something else to do while I followed that discussion helped tremendously. It wasn't that I wasn't paying attention, just that if I tried to focus on just the conversation I would fail spectacularly and without dividing my attention I'd quickly fall off into daydreams and wake up thirty minutes later with no idea what happened.
QI Obsession alert!
I just watched the "Indecision" episode. Apparently Herodotus observed that the Persian Empire's decision making strategy involved getting really drunk, coming to a decision, then reviewing that decision while sober the next day to cross-reference. (Or alternatively coming to decision sober, then reviewing it while drunk).
I wonder if the same philosophy could be applied to teaching?
EDIT: Herodotus also mentioned that the Persians had an odd habit of going out of their way to vomit and defecate in private...what a strange people!
These are good points. If I could disable wifi access, I would have no trouble allowing laptops. But when you combine them with with at my school is our students obsession with their smartphones, it becomes distracting to me.I realize you might not be interested in Ngo Dinh Diem and his relationship to Washington, but your fellow students might, and I know I am.
I think this may be the big one. I don't really know much about Law School, but it sounds like there is a tremendous volume of specific information you have to keep track of. For which the organized reference of a computer seems handy. For my experience (in history and literature mostly), note-taking is of secondary importance. Generally in those disciplines the more notes you take the less you're getting out of the lecture. In those disciplines lectures are less about information collection and more about engaging with the lecturer. Notes are more useful as a reminder of what the topics were. So, for a 15 minute chunk of lecture you might write "Cromwell saw the events of 1649-53 as reinforcing his providentialism". I do think laptops can be useful in lectures (just not for me), and banning them seems extreme (though once again, I've not lectured in places where people use laptops so I wouldn't pretend that's a hard and fast claim), but I do think in certain situations where students just type everything they hear out of the lecturer's mouth they are counter-productive.
And that was the crushing point for the professor, that you don't just distract yourself but everyone around you. I never will understand why schools have wi-fi access in the classroom. It seems to me like the best solution would be to hook up the computer the professor uses to the internet with a hard line and let the students use their lap-tops "off-line" only. You'd still get the occasional guy playing solitaire, but I'd imagine that's relatively rare. I'll actually agree that cell-phones have no place in the class room except for emergencies.
Unless I were training to be a stenographer, I'm too set in my ways to take notes on a keyboard. If the stylus things aren't any better than the credit card pads at stores, they're not for me. /curmudgeon
That's actually a big pedagogical question in law school right now. In theory, law schools claim to be socratic, so note taking should be of secondary importance. But since the advent of the bar exam its become necessary to force feed as much information to the students as possible so they stand a chance of actually being lawyers, because just being able to do the analysis isn't enough anymore. Its odd, because its a field where research skills + analysis should really trump knowledge alone. I know several students who had terrible first semesters because they took notes on laptops, but I know more who can't write by hand for a length of time at all anymore. I think the reason computers have become the absolute norm in law school is simply that certain methods of studying greatly increase a student's chance for success. First you read the material and take pre-lecture notes, then you take lecture notes, then you synthesize the two into a concise outline that you'll use to study for the final. I think that would be very hard to do with handwritten notes. So perhaps your correct and my experience is too limited to comment outside of law school.
If you're sitting behind me, and trying very hard to listen to the lecture, and I open up BBTF or ESPN or Fangraphs, you aren't going to be tempted to sneak a peak?
Actual question (not rhetorical): how much of legal skill consists of research and how much consists of knowing certain things down cold?
I ask, because in principle you should be able to do a lot of Physics from first principles. But in actual practice, the people who work in a particular subject have an amazing amount of domain specific knowledge. They can often quote you chapter and verse about which researchers tried what approach when. (My thesis advisor was amazing at this -- he could give you journals and page numbers.)
There are times in my student days (pre-wifi) where I said to myself, "What is the professor talking about?" Or "I'd like to know more about this topic and contribute to the discussion better". Why not allow me to use technology like I'd have in the real world to do my research and answer my questions?
In the real world, would you really expect to use the internet when the boss is talking, or when it would significantly affect the business atmosphere of the office?
I think lectures should be for the benefit of the students who came to learn. If you can't pay attention, you should daydream quietly or leave. Having a large lecture hall full of lots of people who aren't paying attention is disruptive for the people who are paying attention.
Yes, if I can prove my point or add to the discussion by doing so.
Tase those bros.
I don't have as much experience as some around here do, but from what I've seen it depends. A lot of things become rote, objections and the basis behind them, heresy exceptions. But in any kind of novel litigation then your going to need to be able to research precedent. If you want a jury instruction, you need a precedent. If you want to prove an element, a precedent will tell you what information is necessary to do so. In practice a lot of these things stop happening because everybody's been doing them for so long, but at the core if you can research then you can survive.
I think they paid to be there, and are there, only according to rules and under certain terms.
Some have, in the past, made the argument that some or all disciplines have some degree of required foundational knowledge that simply isn't interesting. That's a reason to use alternate means of education for that portion of the material, not a reason to justify removing distractions because the teacher is boring. Even in discussion-based classrooms, it shouldn't be a problem if the teacher is good at facilitating discussion.
Part of the problem is that there are a lot of teachers who are good at publishing, or are subject-matter experts, or have strong academic credentials, but are lousy at the actual teaching part of the job. Good teachers provide a rewarding classroom experience that doesn't encourage people to distract themselves. Another part of the problem is that lectures, which are rarely the best way to deliver material to students, are cheap. You can throw 200 students in a large room and pay one professor to read a set of handwritten notes while clicking through a PowerPoint presentation.
Perhaps, but by that standard one would also need to ban women, windows and textbooks.
The teacher/student relationship is very different than the employer/employee relationship. My students aren't my employees; in fact, they're closer to my employers (although it's really a different enough relationship that that's not really appropriate either).
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
47: It's a contract. There are terms that encumber both parties. If a student doesn't want to hold up his end of things, let him cut class and be thrown out of school.
let him cut class and be thrown out of school.
One good thing about universities in Sweden (and Europe in general) is that there is very little mandatory attendance (you have to go to the exam, and there may be lab work or similar).
This just in: people texting in Steve M's class have wrecked American education. A source close to Steve M also admitted that the texters have ruined true love, shot JFK, resulted in all music recorded after 1990 to "really suck hard", and caused a spate of cases of the heartbreak of psoriasis. We will have more on this story as it develops.
Sure, but why should this particular encumbrance exist? We could demand that all students wear uniforms or ban food and drink from the classroom too. If the teacher is saying "a bunch of my students ignore me and surf the web," then the focus should not be on addressing the symptom but the disease.
I don't think attendance should be mandatory either. People should be in class because they value the experience. I've taken few classes with an attendance requirement that were very worthwhile, and I've received great value from classes without attendance requirements.
I would guess that it's egomaniacal twatbag professors, who care more about hearing the sounds of their own voices than they do about educating, that have wrecked American education, but I can't really say, as I don't have an American education (thankfully.)
We've debated this point here before, but I agree with this. Students learn in different ways - there are classes where I got a lot out of coming to lecture, and there were classes where I got everything I needed from the books and handouts. Forcing me to go to those lectures would have accomplished nothing, because there was nothing new being taught in those lectures. I can read the book just as well as the professor can, and I don't need to listen to him stand there reading it to me.
To professors who complain about students surfing the web in class - I hope you don't also require attendance. If people aren't getting anything out of your lectures, then they shouldn't have to show up. If they're being forced to show up and you're not giving them any reason to be there, then they should be able to do what they want (within reason, and without distracting the people who really do want to be there) while they're there.
agreed--I teach Pharmacology and Molecular Biology to med students and dental students. And I've noticed that different students take notes differently. All my lecture outlines are posted online several weeks beforehand. Some students print them out and take notes by hand the old fashioned way. Some bring the laptop to class but still take notes on paper. And some take notes by typing on the screen. (and yes, some surf the web).
I don't think it would be fair of me to dictate how the students choose to learn.
As a lawyer, just as an exercise in arguing both sides of an issue, I bet you could come up with a lot of reasons for those encumbrances. In fact, being the intelligent man you are, I'm certain that you could.
First, and foremost, it isn't just about the teacher and the student. There's a classroom, and the classroom experience is not a redundancy (or is not taken to be one); it exists to further the education process, and you, the student, are there to be part of that process (that’s the deal), to do your part to make that process work for yourself and your classmates. You’re supposed to learn from the teacher and from each other. You may teach me something in a class discussion—and vice versa.
I mean, why not everybody stay home and not have an university at all?
It says something about the narcissism of people and of enabling belief systems that this has to be spelled out like this. And I include myself--no one cut more classes (I always took my allotment) than I did or did less and skated by in other classes. And when I didn’t have to attend a class, there’s a period in my school life when I wouldn’t have. I don’t think I was a better student for it. I think it’s the rare case when anyone is. Still, this is simply to say that there are rational considerations for requiring students to attend classes, and it is entirely understandable and defensible that a university may not validate a non-attendance approach.
But, it isn't only that. Sute, the presumption is that classes are important to learning, and universities want their students to learn. But, schools are in business, or are like businesses, and they have to meet certain standards, official and unofficial for their own good. They want students to attend. That’s how they make money. They hope to acquire and retain a reputation as a good learning institution (not to mention, there's accrediting, endowments, etc. to consider). The university exists as a community of learning. This shouldn't have to be said, since it's only existed as an idea since there have been universities.
But, if a student doesn’t like it, let him go do business with a matchbook university.
It's actually interesting how universities came about. You had the Italian universities where the students effectively ran the show (student councils deciding who taught the classes, how much they'd be paid etc.) Or places like Paris, Oxford or Cambridge where the crown or the church covered expenses and had more say in how things were run.
Not to take away from your point. As always I'm not entirely sure what it was, though I'm confident a cleverer man than I could reason it out. I just find it interesting that from the outset there were a few different models of what a "univeristy" is. To a certain extent universities have to think of themselves as a bunsiness as they are competing for funding dollars and students. But from my experience in the UK in the past couple years it's quite troubling the extent to which universities in this country seem to be embracing a "business" approach to running things.
(1) I don't lecture.
(2) The idea that people only surf the web because they have no reason to listen to the teacher is asinine.
(3) It's not my job to be entertaining.
I was thinking about this - on some level, isn't it? You're paid to impart knowledge to the audience, not to put your knowledge out there to a non-understanding group. If that were the case, they could bring worldwide experts who don't speak the language into college classrooms; they are brilliant, but don't connect with the students.
I mean, I don't think that if you're not entertaining, you're bad at this. But wouldn't it be fair to say that part of your task is to be "engaging?"
You're saying universities aren't communities of learning?
By and large my colleagues have all been dedicated students who were sincere about completing their degrees, but then I haven't set foot in a 300-seat general-degree-requirement lecture hall full of 18 and 19 year old college freshmen since around 1990.
I could make quite a few arguments simply for the sake of playing devil's advocate, to be sure.
You’re supposed to learn from the teacher and from each other. You may teach me something in a class discussion—and vice versa.
Perhaps, but then why not make that the requirement? I have no problem with evaluating students on the basis of their contributions, but I have a serious problem with giving points or demerits based on simply showing up. That has nothing to do with learning from the teacher or each other; it has everything to do with forcing students to be present whether they contribute to learning or not.
I mean, why not everybody stay home and not have an university at all?
Good question. A degree has become, in many ways, a necessary piece of paper in order to qualify for employment in a number of fields for which it is entirely unnecessary. I'm not convinced that is a good thing. I spent three years in law school, but I could have been as effective an attorney simply through self-study and vocational training if not for the artificial barrier to entry in the profession.
College was a great experience for me, in the sense that I discovered my adulthood without real-world consequences. The things I learned in the classroom are practically useless in the real world. That isn't to say that I don't value them. I appreciate knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It just strikes me as an extraordinarily inefficient model.
Still, this is simply to say that there are rational considerations for requiring students to attend classes, and it is entirely understandable and defensible that a university may not validate a non-attendance approach.
I didn't say requiring attendance was irrational. It most certainly serves a purpose. I simply don't think that it is an educational purpose (except to teach compliance with rules). If you want to make an argument that requiring attendance is good for business, or that there's value in teaching compliance, that's a different thing entirely.
Just to be clear, I am talking about a pure attendance requirement. If you miss X classes, your grade is reduced by Y, but students who show up and contribute nothing are considered as present as those who are entirely engaged.
(2) The idea that people only surf the web because they have no reason to listen to the teacher is asinine.
(3) It's not my job to be entertaining.
People surf the web because they do not value what the classroom provides enough to pay attention to it. I'd say that certainly is your job (in the sense that it is the job of all teachers) to communicate that value. Part of being a capable teacher is inspiring a passion for learning in students.
It's not my job to make the classroom a circus, but it most certainly is my job to make it a stimulating environment to learn. I have yet to see a teacher provide a valuable experience that requires a classroom without being entertaining. I don't believe that's a mere byproduct.
I thought I'd enjoy using it, and downloaded a free copy of Tristram Shandy on Christmas Day! But I find I desperately miss an actual book. I do think it will be handy for travel, so I hold out hope for that.
Dumb question: What happens to all the books stored on kindles and other e-books when the Next Cool Product comes along? That may sound flippant, but when you look what's happened to microfilm, 8-tracks and VHS tapes, and is there any reason down the road that e-books will be spared from the same commercial imperatives?
Me, I'm glad that I've got all my books in the one format that's guaranteed to outlast me, and that will have resale value for my wife or our goddaughter once I'm gone. Forget aesthetics or sentiment----Once you've read hundreds or thousands of $9.99 kindle books, how much money will you ever be able to get back for it? Will you be able to retrieve even a penny of your expenditures?
People surf the web because it's easily done and doesn't require thinking. Most 18-year-olds aren't doing the kind of analysis implied by what you're arguing.
Believe it or not, I put a lot of effort into making my classes interesting. But some #### you just have to grit your teeth and sit through. A classroom simply isn't a theatre.
One advantage of ebooks is that they're platform-independent. I bought books for a first-generation Kindle that I can now read on my iPad 2. It's as though you'd bought the song itself, rather than the 8-track, if you see what I mean. As technology changes, I should theoretically continue to be able to read a Kindle book on whatever computer or tablet devices come along. There are movies I bought on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray, but this actually does get around that problem.
Nope! Resale doesn't exist for this at all, which is a valid argument against it. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to store a thousand ebooks than a thousand real books.
Although I know with 100% certainty that I'll never buy an e-book, I'm still quite relieved to know this, if only for the future safety and well-being of the people who sold all those countless millions of people on the concept.
Forget aesthetics or sentiment----Once you've read hundreds or thousands of $9.99 kindle books, how much money will you ever be able to get back for it? Will you be able to retrieve even a penny of your expenditures?
Nope! Resale doesn't exist for this at all, which is a valid argument against it. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to store a thousand ebooks than a thousand real books.
True enough, but if you're a serious book buyer, those "cheap" $9.99 e-books you buy with no hope of ever getting anything back for them can add up a lot faster than one may realize, and if you know what you're doing, the money you might get back for many of those "dead tree" books would pay for a fair amount of storage space. After a certain number of years, it's safe to say that a person with good taste in books, who doesn't need to buy them as soon as they come out, and who sticks to cloth editions, will probably wind up in the long run spending a LOT less on his books when all is said and done than a person who bought all of his books in Kindle editions.
And then there's also this: Very few art or photography books are even available in e-book formats to begin with, for rather obvious reasons.
Well, sure. I certainly don't buy all my books as ebooks. And in fact, the bulk of my ebooks are free, since they're out of copyright. Like, here's Christy Mathewson on pitching. It's only four dollars (plus shipping) on ABEBooks, but it's free as an ebook. That sort of thing appeals to me, you know?
(Ooh! Or the 1913 Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, also free!)
See? Minutes after I searched for it, I'm reading it on my iPad. For free. I'm not saying ebooks are better than real books in all cases, but they definitely have their uses.
There is 'value' in buying an ebook (speaking for myself), even if the out of pocket costs somehow do cost more to me than taking ownership of cloth editions over the same amount of time. That's an acceptable tradeoff (premium).
Thanks, Monty. Just 'bought' this one too for my Kindle.
Yost, do you mind if I ask what you teach?
Personally I liked those subjects, but then my first novel comes out in a few months so I may be atypical. Is the class required curriculum? I agree with the idea that there should be some ability to compel the students to pay attention, I've sat through enough Property Law lectures to know that if they didn't make me I'd never learn the material. I'd also consider myself to be in the class of generally lazy but relatively intelligent people who would have failed out of school long ago if they didn't make me come. That said, there are circumstances, a required class outside of a degree path for instance, where it feels a little unfair. I have a hard time believing that anybody who wants to be a writer wouldn't pay attention in class though, because I'd pay cash money to go back and take more classes even now.
As far as this contract talk is concerned, its kind of a silly argument. In all honesty the K is between the parents/grandparents/legal guardians of the student and the facility in the majority of cases. If somebody is motivated enough to pay for their own classes then they're motivated enough to pay attention. When you remember that we're talking mostly about the kids who don't pay for their own school (or take out loans that they won't think about for a few years) the dynamic changes.
If I did lecture -- a model I don't think works very well, by the way -- I don't think I would allow electronic devices in the lecture hall, but I also wouldn't make attendance compulsory. If you want to take your grade into your own hands (ie, by not being prepared for your exams and papers), then good luck to you. But part of what I would be doing in that environment is trying to project a certain, for lack of a better word, stage presence, and I find that exceptionally difficult to do if people's eyes are glossed over and they're staring at a computer screen.
Had I not been able to bring a laptop into class I never would have completed my MBA.
Evening classes in Fall semester coincide with the playoffs-there would have been a month long period where I would have missed literally 1/2 my classes.
Instead I just followed along on gameday and all parties were happy.
That said, I take notes by hand (And usually in the margins of the text or on the powerpoint slides that every Prof gives out). Taking em by computer wouldn't/doesn't work at all for me. Something in the process of writing out the info forces me to synthesize it. That might have something to do with being dyslexic, but I definitely get much more out of longhand than taking notes on a computer
Spoken like a literature professor. But I don't know if the idea transfers very well. For instance history is required, so everybody has to be there at some point. What's more, if you don't have a passion for it you never will and it doesn't lend itself to alternative methods of teaching. Math would seem to be another. As for your point on discipline and using that to set an atmosphere, my best two subjects in school (provided I didn't have any love for the material) where contracts and property. My contracts professor did half of what your talking about, he tried to incite us to learn and did a very good job of it. My property professor did the other half, we used to joke that she could see into your soul. One guy's phone went off and she questioned him mercilessly for an hour and a half about the Rule Against Perpetuities (a concept that nobody in the free world understands) just to make a point. So I can't really disagree with either point. I guess I"m just a little biased because I'm so sure that law schools are doing it wrong and that's my most recent academic experience.
Law school is built on the idea of asking question of the students and getting them to work out the answers for themselves, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say that in a class of 100+ that is worse than lecturing. That model works better in smaller environments where everyone can get called on at any time or gets called on semi-regularly. In big classes we might have been called on one time a month, maybe only twice a semester. Assuming half the students are at average or above average intelligence (which would seem to flow from the definition of average) then half or more of the class is listening to a professor pull teeth from a student who just doesn't get it for half an hour, which I don't think is conducive to anyone's learning. In fact, the drop out rates in law school are so high specifically because people get stressed out by that very model, which is a shame because the idea that doing well under pressure in a single moment makes a good lawyer is pretty faulty. But I think anyone who started at my law school at my year would agree that law school is unnecessarily stressful (unfortunately our class had a higher than average incidence of suicide), so I may be a bit prejudiced.
Reminds me of the old idea that there are three kinds of learners: visual, auditory, and kinetic. The idea being that each type processes information better by seeing, hearing, and writing the information respectively. I don't think anybody has the same connection to typing that they do to writing, and I've been advised multiple times to hand-write notes, but that's just something that I can't do. I think I was called an auditory learner, but I don't really remember what the teacher said. I believe that the idea that there are certain types of learners has been as thoroughly de-bunked as the creative people are left handed non-sense that still gets talked about so much.
1. Lectures are truly optional.
2. The material covered in lectures may, or may not, show up in exams.
3. The material on the optional reading list may show up in exams.
So you could get an exam question that asked you to deal with a topic in detail that wasn't mentioned in class or in the core reading, but merely in an "optional" or "recommended" article/book. That type of system will certainly reward the thorough and ambitious student, but it seems like it's designed to ruin everyone else. And it almost did ruin me. By contrast, all of my professors loved my essays because I wrote in the American way of trying to be insightful and creative. My native classmates were programmed to just synthesize expert opinions, even in literature courses.
edit> I suppose #2 is true for all classes in America, but it seemed nuts when I considered #3.
I can do online, and I can learn straight from a book, but I work best when there is a give and take, where a Prof can be stopped and pertinent questions asked until I get the material cold.
So for me there's a verbal and written component augmented by questioning/analytic process.
But there is definitely something that happens in the course of listening to a lecture, putting it into my shorthand and paraphrasing appropriately and then writing said comments, that is the key to me really getting something that I'm learning.
And on that note, let me also mention how much I like Profs who know the material cold and spend class with their ass perched on the corner of their desk, lecturing right out of their head.
These are far and away my favorite types of classes provided that they don't lecture like the science teacher from The Wonder Years.
And goddamme, but I hate, as in absolutely despise, profs who show movies during class. I paid a lot of loot to be there(Well metaphorically. I rode scholarships all the way through school, but someone paid for it. Besides, daminitall, I can always find better things to do than sit in a classroom...like dick around on BBTF)-don't waste my in class learning time with a flick I could catch at my convenience.
Morty: I didn't mean my post to be a disagreement of yours. Just using it as a jumping off point for what I'd been reading recently on the medieval university, and my musings on the UK system.
Seminars, on the other hand, were compulsory to attend, and I think generally pretty important.
Aren't you the guy who doesn't like to teach but would rather research?
Well, sure. I certainly don't buy all my books as ebooks. And in fact, the bulk of my ebooks are free, since they're out of copyright. Like, here's Christy Mathewson on pitching. It's only four dollars (plus shipping) on ABEBooks, but it's free as an ebook. That sort of thing appeals to me, you know?
Nothing wrong with that, though you don't need a Kindle to browse the web and come up with enough free books to keep you occupied for the rest of your life. Obviously the tradeoff between e-books and printed books comes down to a matter of personal preference and / or circumstances, and if I were living in a studio apartment instead of a four bedroom house and needed wall space for other things, I might see things differently.
(Ooh! Or the 1913 Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, also free!)
I've got a complete dead trees run of 20th century baseball guides, and if you want a much better guide from that year, you might want to see if Amazon has the Reach version. Spalding and Reach published competing guides from 1883 through 1939, and from about 1907 through 1914 the Reach guide is far more interesting, because of the countless hundreds of team photos that the smaller Spalding guide omits, such as this particularly choice example on page 604. When you consider the well over 1000 rare team photos in each year's edition, that small time frame may have seen the best single year baseball reference books ever published.
The Kindle does function well as a tablet for email, web browsing, Netflix, and is a handy size for travel.
For those who are unaware (and who are willing to put in the time):
There is a website called EReader IQ that will track the prices of Kindle books listed on your Amazon wish list and let you know when they drop below a certain level (or by a certain amount). You'd be surprised at how much fluctuation there is in the price of a lot of Kindle books - maybe not the bestsellers, but other books. I made a list of the ~300 books on my "to read" list that are available on Kindle, and uploaded it here. Every 7-10 days, I'll get an e-mail telling me that the price of X has dropped from $12.99 to $3.99, or from $10.99 to $0.99, something like that. I've saved probably a couple of hundred bucks doing it this way, and the nice thing is I can buy and "shelve" them without taking up any space.
It's as useful as you're willing to make it by loading up your Amazon wish list, but I recommend it to everyone who has a Kindle.
My boss kind of expects it in team meetings and increases our team productivity.
In the classroom, I welcome all kinds of wireless devices, and I usually bring my laptop to meetings and to thesis/dissertation defenses. I love it when we're discussing a word in my Structure of Modern English class, and somebody looks up an etymology on their phone. I love the ability to fact-check the universe from anywhere, and to be challenged on my tendency to guess or assume.
The limit is when it comes to evaluations. I don't take attendance, but I use lots and lots of class time for unplugged, handwritten, IRL in-class papers, based on material from the past few class meetings. Use the technology to learn all you can, and then when it comes time to show you've learned it, do it off-network.
History is the subject that BEST lends itself to alternative means of teaching. Lectures tend to be the worst way to teach history and have done unimaginable harm to the discipline, both in terms of bad knowledge becoming prevalent and lack of interest from people.
Video games, for example, can do an amazing job at teaching history in a way that a lecture only dreams of.
I learned from video games that dysentery was a big problem on the Oregon Trail.
With one fairly large caveat. You've bought a perpetual license from Amazon to read the book. They have the record of the license. So when the iWatch comes out, the only way that you can read on that platform is if Amazon develops a reading app for it. Which will probably happen, but you never know. More importantly, IMO, is this: What happens when Amazon goes out of business in 25 years? Or gets bought and turned into an on line retailer that doesn't stock books? Or whatever? You're out of luck then. Or you're counting on someone cracking the DRM so that you can transfer your book files over to the current platform.
This is the big difference when iTunes went with no DRM. With DRM in place, if Apple ever disappeared you'd be stuck with whatever devices you had at the time. Without DRM you can convert your files to whatever comes after MP3 (or whatever format Apple uses).
One thing I wonder, what happens to your Amazon account and all of the licenses when you die? Can that be transferred to your wife/son/daughter/cat? So, let's say Amazon lasts another hundred years. When I die in 30 years, can I leave my books to my son? And can he leave it to his kid? Obviously they could continue on with my account, but that's not the same if he has an account with thousands of books.
I learned that whichever nation builds Leonardo Da Vinci's Workshop ends up dominant in the modern era, which is why we must all bow down to our Italian overlords.
I don't think it's very complicated analysis. Students that place high value on the experience of being in the classroom are students that don't want to surf the web rather than pay attention or participate. Teachers have a good deal of influence over the degree to which their students value that experience.
Believe it or not, I put a lot of effort into making my classes interesting. But some #### you just have to grit your teeth and sit through. A classroom simply isn't a theatre.
I'm sure that you do. I can't imagine anyone who takes the teaching responsibility not putting effort into making the experience interesting. Although especially in literature, what is there that you should ever just have to grit your teeth and sit through in the classroom? There may be some foundational works that everyone should read even if they are a chore, or some rules about style, but that stuff sounds like something that can be done outside of class.
I majored in English literature and while there were books that I didn't like, the classes didn't have a lot of drudgery, generally speaking. I can think of one professor who was clearly going through the motions in a class where we read the Old Testament; he would do little more than simply read passages and give in-class quizzes about ridiculous details (like the relationship between Cainan and Enoch or how long Noah lived). That wasn't a particularly valuable class (oh, and of course, attendance was required).
If you are bothered by the DRM as a practical matter there are easy-to-use methods readily available to crack Kindle books, even plugins for Calibre (a pretty nifty ebook management program). I've never done it, there are reader programs for all my devices, and as I have all books stored locally I can crack them at my leisure if I ever found a need.
That's where the Italians went wrong, they commissioned paintings from him instead of building him a workshop to build all those things.
Well, sure, but if Andy buys a Kindle, chances are that he downloads his books wirelessly and never plugs his Kindle into a computer at all. He's incapable of cracking the DRM and getting his books onto another platform*. So when Amazon goes under, he uses his Kindle for a while longer, then when the battery is shot and won't charge anymore, he throws the Kindle on the shelf and cannot read his books.
Again, not likely to happen any time soon, but it's possible. As I said, it is a caveat to the "you can always have your books" that Amazon and others are pushing.
*No offense Andy, I'm making assumptions here.
Strongly disagree here. Maybe I just got lucky and went to schools with terrific history departments, but a good history teacher who knows their stuff can make the past come alive in ways few other classes (Say accounting) can. Slog through some businesses classes like operations management and suddenly history is a whole lot more interesting.
(Now, in all fairness, a bad history lecturer can make suicide seem like a reasonable alternative to spending another beautiful spring afternoon listening to them drone on)
Man, I had one prof who was more into the social than military/political/economic aspects of history. Her lectures were mesmerizing, full of two timing kings,rapacious queens, emperors who collected giants, animal sex,ruthless betrayals, secret trysts, orgies, deviance and all sorts of sordid sleazy acts perpetrated by the purported titans of the ages.
It was an awesome class, well worth getting up early and attending.
This is why I would never buy an e-book from Amazon. I have no problem with digital content, but I want to really own it in the way that I own a physical book. I want the freedom to lend or sell it to someone else. I want the freedom to use it anywhere that I'm physically capable of bringing it.
Since digital content is so easy to duplicate, it's very hard to control piracy without some sort of limitation on use. We can already scan and reprint a physical book with high-quality color printers, and even bind it if we're so inclined, but that's a fairly inconvenient and time-consuming process. It's enough of a nuisance that very few people will do it and the net cost of piracy is very small.
This is a particularly interesting time to live in, as we're trying to use an old model of intellectual property in a world with technology that makes that model problematic. How do we solve this problem?
1) We can create technological barriers to limit the ability to duplicate and distribute digital property.
2) We can pass aggressive, heavy-handed legislation in order to facilitate effective enforcement.
3) We can adapt to a world where nearly unfettered digital reproduction and distribution is a reality.
I strongly believe that #1 is a losing battle. It's too easy to capture and reproduce media with our current technology. Even if you figured out a way to prevent a particular file from running anywhere but on an authorized machine, nothing stops a dedicated copier from simply using some other device to record the content and convert it into a non-protected file.
I also think #2 is a losing battle. It will be very hard to show enough legitimate damage to merit the expense of trial, and even then, many losing defendants will not have deep enough pockets. We'll find out: illegal filesharing has been going on for quite some time and there have been very few end users getting serious judgments (and even those are not certain to hold up, and even if they do, bankruptcy may allow the defendants to evade judgment).
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