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U. of Chicago Law School Blocks Internet Access
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 18, 2008 08:46 AM
from the solitaire-without-a-laptop dept.
from the solitaire-without-a-laptop dept.
Scott Jaschik writes "While some individual professors have banned laptops from classes at various colleges, the University of Chicago law school is going further, cutting off wireless and wired access in its classrooms to confront what officials see as out-of-control Web surfing. The story was first reported in the Above The Law 'legal tabloid' late last month. Students and the university's CIO question the strategy." Things will get interesting when Sprint WiMax service lights up in Chicago later this year.
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Submission: U. of Chicago blocks Internet access by Anonymous Coward
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About Time! (Score:4, Funny)
The "internet" (or "anarchist-net" as we've dubbed it here) is nothing more than a distraction for students and could never ever possibly be used for learning. I suppose next citizens will want every single state and federal law posted on there so they can try to interpret it themselves! Not on my watch, we here at U of Chicago produce no fewer than 50,000 lawyers a year and we will see you in court if you try to circumvent the United State's legal system's need for them (Sprint, we're watching you!).
Re:About Time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Because programmers can be fired if they disobey. (Score:3, Interesting)
Politicians almost seem to have a union mentality. They look out for their class first, then do their job second. You fire one politician, your only choice for replacement are generally more people with the same attitudes.
Maybe we need MORE politicians, so some can be out of work, and hungry for employment, and will actually obey
Cue the knee jerk reactions... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, overall I don't have a problem with students wasting their tuition money (or their parents' tuition money) by browsing the internet in class all day. But this isn't some power grab to squelch independent thinking. These students are free to browse the internet in their dorms, or the library, or the dining halls, etc. It might be poorly thought out, but I think people (or at least you) are freaking out over nothing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue the knee jerk reactions... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, silence is defeat people. If someone is doing something around you that's pissing you off, speak up dammit. Some people just don't know it bothers you.
Now if you continue to do obnoxious behaviour even though people vocalized their dislike, then you're just being an asshole.
Re:Cue the knee jerk reactions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up!
Those that sit and surf the net while in class are complete assholes. Don't bother coming to class if you're not going to productively participate in lecture or if you're just going to distract others that can see your screen.
Not to mention that it's also just blatantly, obliviously, and childishly rude to the lecturer.
The same things go for talking on your cell phone in confined spaces.
Parent
Re:Cue the knee jerk reactions... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had to take classes on subjects I was already fluent in, such as various programming courses, and in some cases the professors require attendance or they deduct points.
If I'm forced to be there even though I don't need to be, I'm going to sit in the back and either surf the web or do homework on my laptop. Why should my time go to waste?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Law schools generally do not use a "lecture" format in the classes -- students are expected to participate in a "socratic dialog." My experience has been that such dialogs are much less interactive in classes with web access.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No kidding. About 75% of professors seem to think that it's acceptable to waste the students' time by conveying exactly the same information (and NOTHING more) that they could have digested with 10 minutes of reading via a 50 minute lecture.That's not education--that's a complete waste of 40 minutes.
Where did you go to school that this is true? At the college level I don't think I had *1* professor that did what you say they all do. Maybe Intro to Econ which had 300 people, but even that class had smaller breakout groups of 10-15 that had discussions, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not everyone learns by reading... Some people require the professor to discuss the textbook material in class to help them understand it. Other people need both to read and to listen to the professor. So
Re:About Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent makes one really good point. I was recently talking with a friend of mine just fresh out of law school. Aside from learning the language and protocol of courtrooms and some law theory a huge portion of a law degree today is learning to use some very expensive law databases. These for profit databases are the _only_ practical means of knowing the law. It seems to me, that of all the things our government could spend money on, making the law and cases knowable to the general public at an accessible price to everyone would be somewhat high on the list.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I a not saying that there aren't are good and ethical judges, I am sure the majority of them are just that; but there are many judges who are political instruments, who refuse to inform juries of thei
Re:About Time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Am I supposed to go back to WRITING my notes? This is 2008 for fuck's sake.
Re:Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:5, Funny)
By the way, GUIs nowadays really are so easy that a cave man could use them, if you ever got the inclination.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:5, Informative)
If I attempt to take notes, I just enter a weird pass-through mode where information comes in via the ears and out via my hands, but not a drop of it will stick anywhere in between.
I suspect it's because I'm a visual learner, and when my visual attention is focused on a blank sheet of paper instead of on the person doing the lecturing, my learning ability is severely impaired.
Anybody else out there like this?
Parent
Re:Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe a tablet that let you freehand sketch accurately in addition to typing. I still think that would be rather clumsy compared to a pencil and notebook.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I always found that taking notes was a distraction, and they were never useful to me anyway. Just paying attention and thinking about the lecture was far more useful.
Re:Banning LAPTOPS?! (Score:4, Interesting)
You have the right idea by listening though-don't try and copy everything your prof writes down, just the highlights along with the references to what s/he's talking about. For most people though, taking some kind of note is essential or you will drift off after 30 minutes or so no matter how interested you are.
*Speaking as someone who's been doing instructional tech work for more than a decade, Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. The first thing you need to say to yourself if you ever think about using it for more than projecting a few pictures is "No", then ago talk to your local IT guy and ask them for a better way.
Parent
Where I come from... (Score:4, Insightful)
If your students are able to pass without paying any attention to you, you must not teach very much in your lectures. And if you don't teach anything, well, why should they pay attention?
Re:Where I come from... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
A Word About Law School Exams (Score:5, Interesting)
I concur. I am finishing my 2nd year of law school, however, and I can tell you that there is serious disincentive to participate in class. Why? Because the professors are not (usually) trying to teach you something, but to trip you up, because they think that their perverted "Socratic method" (really sophistic, but that's besides the point) teaches best by embarrassing students.
If you're one of those students who prepares and participates in class, you go into the final and realize that you've got 3 hours to dump as much black letter law onto the page as possible. You've spent the entire semester in the penumbra on interesting legal questions while your classmates were surfing the web. Those same classmates crammed Law in a Flash for two days before the final.
Guess who gets all the peach jobs? Federal clerkships? Good internships? Yeah.
I've gotten 4.0 grades in most of my paper-writing courses. I'm much closer to the median (3.3 at my school) on final exams, especially multiple choice exams where I'm more likely to see arguable points. When I'm done, I'm going to go get a PhD in philosophy because, thanks to my "merely cum laude" grades at a top-40 law school, I'm not competetive in the legal market as anything more than a writer of wills or an ambulance chaser.
On top of all of this, if you're in a top-ten law school, you're not going to flunk out unless you flat-out refuse to take final exams and you can have peach jobs anyway.
The best legal minds out there, in my opinion, are beaten back by the system. I was especially disappointed, when given an opportunity to ask Chief Justice Roberts a question about legal philosophy at a cozy Q&A, that he has no idea what I was talking about. The highest-ranked lawyer in our country is a skilled legal technician rather than a deep thinker.
Some people will be glad to hear this. But to tie this all back down--actual learning isn't about passing a stupid test. And in this country, we have decided--even at the level of law schools--that actual learning is something we want to force on our students (my law school is discussing similar measures to cut down on internet time during class), but not something we want to reward them for by gearing our tests toward critical thinking. So far as I am concerned, the problem is not wireless internet, the problem is legal education as foisted upon us by Langdell back in the 1900s. That's an awfully long time to go without genuine pedagogical reform.
Parent
Re:A Word About Law School Exams (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Time to transfer . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently Law Students Can't Be Trusted (Score:5, Funny)
If they spend too much lecture time on the intarblags, it will be reflected in their grades.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What the hell??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the hell??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The folks surfing during class aren't just cheating themselves. They are cheating the other people in the class who are trying to learn.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't we supposed to be adults at that level of education?
I know I've had a few classes in college that didn't teach me anything I didn't already know but had to take them anyway due to prereq
Next up... (Score:5, Funny)
Just let them fail.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I always assumed that once you hit college the hand-holding by instructors was supposed to stop.
Maybe they could use group projects to fix the problem. I know in my college classes I was a righteous dick to any group members who just goofed off on the Internet rather than contributing towards the project.
I loved my system analysis and design class where we could 'fire' group members for poor performance (and trust me, people did.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet access in the classroom always seemed to me like a boon from the "ignorant IT gods" of hasty wireless implementation by blithering idiots who didn't know how to make it secret and only let profes
Instead, just force people to make a decision (Score:5, Insightful)
So I fully understand lecturers who urge (or force) people to make a conscious decision *either* to stay in the lecture room and (at the very least pretend to) pay attention, or if you don't feel like paying attention, want to browse the internet, or absolutely *have* to chat with your neighbour about the previous weekend, can you please just go to the lunchroom next door, thank you so much and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Because it's not like anybody is *forcing* you to be there. If you think you'll do fine by reading the lecture sheets and/or the book, you're free to do so (and in many cases that's perfectly possible, too).
If you want to take notes during the lecture (the excuse everyone uses), paper still works just fine, as it has for ages.
Re:Instead, just force people to make a decision (Score:4, Insightful)
So does chiselling hieroglyphs on little stone pyramids, but that's not a good reason to eschew new technology.
The argument against banning laptops/intartubes access is bullshit, because it presupposes that:
It fails every rational test. It's about ego, pure and simple. Lecturers are having hissy fits because their customers aren't a captive audience any more, and they want the old days back, when they could pretend that sleeping students were just listening really attentively. They may as well order the tide not to come in.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is probably the key to your answer; treating students as "customers". No. The goal of universities is not (or rather, in practice it often is, but it shouldn't be) to graduate as many students/year as possible. It's not supposed to be a "graduation business" where you can exchange tuition fees for a degree (that will hopefully get you a better paying job in the future).
Rather, students are supposed to be taught how to think systematically, how to approach the so
Re:Instead, just force people to make a decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
You'd be surprised what these students do (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, after the grades came out, it seemed that chatting and porn viewership had a low correlation with scores. (i.e. I actually took notes but was middle of the road for grades)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why they can't treat electronically disruptive individuals the same way they would treat conventionally disruptive individuals.
Our law school (NUSL) never used to allow it (Score:3, Funny)
The result? Well, I'm sitting in class right now, so you take your pick.
Won't anyone think of the Children! (Score:4, Funny)
A place for everything (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's not just people doing other things. I did a couple of seminars on Java in its early days, at a progressive local university, that had internet (wired) at every seat. Only a couple of people were using it, but it's awfully hard to get across concepts when people are constantly googling what you say and trying to point out problems or sound smart before you finish getting a point across.
A lot of the time in teaching, you have to start with generalizations to get the general concept across, some of which aren't 100% correct, technically; then you delve into the details clarifying those points. (As a broad example in another field, teaching newtonian physics as a basis for relativistic stuff.) One smartass with Google/Wiki can ruin that process for the whole class.
(On the other hand, those who are genuinely curious about something that is said and want to take a quick detour, I could support; but like most liberties, where there's a tendency towards abuse, you sometimes have reduced those liberties in certain agreed upon circumstances. It's similar to the cell phones on planes arguments. There are those that would use it respectfully, moderately, and quietly; but there would typically be a more noticable inconsiderate contingent that would just drive everyone nuts.)
Who Cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Emulators during lecture (Score:3, Funny)
From a professor (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach courses in literature, most frequently poetry, at a major Southern university.
This semester I've been trying to decide how to deal with students texting in class and with students who use laptops recreationally in class. I haven't come up with an ideal solution, but I'm leaning toward banning cellphones. The laptop thing is harder; many students use them to take notes and for reference, which is laudable. I think I might tell students using laptops to be prepared to e-mail me notes on demand at the end of class so that I'll know who's using a laptop to take notes and who's goofing off.
So that's background. I'm posting in response to some ideas from the student perspective that I see repeated here.
Several posters say that students are capable of multi-tasking. This is true, but research [sciencedaily.com] indicates that you're not capable of doing anything well nor of retaining it when you multi-task.
Several posters suggest that they should be allowed to be the judge of what's worthwhile. I'm all for agency, but if you decide to tune out, you might miss something that would interest you. Furthermore, some material isn't so exciting, and though a teacher should attempt to generate interest, some students expectations are unreasonably high when it comes to the entertainment value of literature. Maybe, too, it would be well to look on a lecture as a form of work.
A few people say they can pass without paying attention in lectures. That is probably true. I often find myself dumbing down my lectures, assignments, and exams so that students who have tuned out during class can pass. If I fail too many students, my enrollments go down, my evaluations suffer, and I may even lose my job, as I am on one-year contracts and get rehired based on student evaluations. If I do that, for fear of my job, the content of the course suffers.
Finally, a few people here say lectures are outdated and that content should be online. What about procrastination; would students just shrug off all this content until finals? What about dialog; will all exchange in your life take place via chat? What about seeing others modelling an interest in material only understood or valued by a minority? Do you want to give those faculty who are already distant from students one more excuse to tune you out completely?
I guess I'll conclude by saying that the small minority of students who text in class or play on their laptops in class are the worse students in my class. They waste a lot of my time asking me about things covered in class or begging for favors and special attention. And they tend to earn poor grades. I wouldn't want to be their boss and certainly not one of their fellow employees. Though as their boss, I could fire the lot of them, and that would be very gratifying.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)