Laptops Required for Freshmen 594
An anonymous reader writes "Indiana State University will become the first public university in the state to require all students to have notebook computers, beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2007. Guess which laptop is the preferred one..." I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.
Thinkpad... pffft (Score:2, Interesting)
Laptops in Class? Bad Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
In my opinion, there would only be one way a laptop would be useful, and that's if every one of your text books could be loaded on it electronically, thereby avoiding the need to lug books around all day to class. Of course, in the real world, this would create a problem, because publishers would put DRM on their ebooks, and make sure you couldn't buy and sell second hand texts. You have that problem to some extent now, of course. I remember a teacher who made sure to check each student's text book on the first day of class, to make sure it was the latest one. It turned out he was getting a cut from the publisher of everything sold by the campus book store in an under-the-table deal. A second teacher did the same thing, but he co-authored the book. I think he taught the Business Ethics class
Anyway, I question the need for forcing students to spend even more of their hard-earned money on a specific hardware/OS combination on something that really serves no purpose. Of course, I'd say the same thing about a college education in general, but I digress. If they want to use a computer for their term papers, fine. If they want to live in the previous century and use a typewriter (they still make them, right?), then more power to them.
I can see only very limited benefits to doing this, none of them for the student.
And for crying' out loud, don't enable wifi or cell phone reception in the classroom, either! Students don't need it, and the teachers don't (or shouldn't) want it. Teachers have enough to worry about as is.
Useful for some (Score:5, Interesting)
I used my 17" PowerBook G4 during the two and a half years of getting my MBA*, and I found it invaluable. I used it in three ways:
First, I converted the professor's inevitable PowerPoint presentations into PDFs and used Acrobat to take notes. (Admittedly I prefer when professors don't use PowerPoint. Do it on a marker board if you must write something. PPT is too lazy.)
Second, I used an application called InkBook [magesw.com] along with a cheapo Wacom tablet which allowed me to do sketches and take notes which were parsed into English, a la the Newton of yore.
Third, I would often receive case studies as a PDF, so I could quickly take notes and refer back to them during class.
The benefit was I didn't have to carry around a folder with a bunch of paper notes, and I can refer to my notes even to this day. I'm very comfortable with using a computer as my primary tool during class, as I suspect many on Slashdot may agree.
However, I noticed that while everyone in class had a computer, few used it the way I did.
There was a lot of reading emails, playing games, or browsing the web during class (admittedly, when I got bored, I did that, too). Although some people took notes in PowerPoint, many people just printed stuff out and hand wrote their notes, so their laptop was just for messing around. If that's the case, then I don't see a benefit with requiring students to have a computer. If the person isn't comfortable with it, and the class isn't significantly enhanced by using it, then there's no point.
Plus, I'd be pissed if my school forced me to use a laptop of their choosing, rather than what I believe works best for me.
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*hey! before you harass me, consider my relatively low Slashdot user ID. I will accept the taunting and mockings from only 87991 other users.
Laptops don't help with grades. (Score:3, Interesting)
For my first two years of law school I took a laptop to class. I'm utterly unconvinced that they helped me with grades. Laptops do allow students to take more verbose notes, as one can type faster than he can write. However I did not find this to be a benefit. If anything, greater verbosity to review for exams turned out to be a hinderance.
My last year of law school I got tired of carrying around my Dell clunkster. Some people had Palms and folding keyboards that they used to take notes. I considered going this route, but decided to reject it to try an alternative on a trial basis: pens and spiral notebooks. Light, easy to carry, no technical failures. It worked great.
On distractions: yes, sure, some people will use laptops to play games in class. These are the same people who would otherwise be daydreaming or drawing doodles. With pen and paper, I would daydream and draw doodles.
Finally though, laptops have the potential to improve class interactions and learning experiences. In law school a few students would use IM during class. Sure, sometimes they were gossiping, but often they were helping each other with the material that was being discussed. Another neat idea would be to have a chat room for the class, going on at the same time as the lecture.
But for the most part, class is just a waste of time anyway. Just a rehashing of reading material. In those cases laptops won't help anything.
Re:New thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a freshman at Clemson, and wasn't really surprised to learn they required laptops when I applied. They encourage you to buy one of their Thinkpads. It does make the IT department's job much easier - they set them up with a dual partition, and when the students inevitably get the latest AIM virus it's a simple task to image over the C partition since all the device drivers can be standardized because all the hardware is the same. It's just like the way apple works, in my opinion.
However, they don't force you to buy a Clemson laptop - I'm typing this on a Asus Z71V, a great linux laptop, and I see about 1 out of every 5 or so people have a non-IBM laptop. Also, DCIT actively encourages dual booting into *nix and maintains dual-boot Ubuntu images preconfigured for their thinkpads, along with supporting an active Linux user group. [clemsonlinux.org] Also, many of the workstations here run Solaris and if you take a comp sci class it's pretty much required you learn basic *nix commands. So it is a pretty good policy here, IMO. Forcing everyone to have a laptop - one kind or another - gives people a great tool to work with.