I don’t get it. Don’t 99% of students have laptops? Or is your lecturer still living in 1993, perhaps?
This could be me talking, circa 2000 ;D
I’ve been building my own and upgrading since then. Though I do have a work laptop.
Desktops are so much better for serious business - that is, typing up a long report or gaming.
Laptops are handy, but if I didn’t have the laptop dock on my desk with a proper keyboard attached (and a second, proper monitor) I’d never use the thing.
I had a desktop for the first three years of college. I actually found that I was more productive when I didn’t have a desktop because when I left my room to actually get something done, I didn’t have any choice but to use a school computer, which doesn’t have my music or internet bookmarks. Now that I have a laptop, I tend to write papers on it in the library, which is better than doing it in my room but not as good as doing it on another computer entirely. I also take it out of my room about three days a month, so the mobility is nice, but not that often useful. It’s a hell of a lot easier to take home on breaks, though. Only for one project have I used it in a way that’s absolutely impossible for a desktop.
And I never take my laptop to class, and I only know a few people who do. It’s a total distraction, and the benefit of not having to print out readings doesn’t balance the fact that I would miss the entire lecture.
This particular class was a small one and there were only a few students on laptops. But even in other classes (at the cheap state school I go to), I’d say only like 15-20% regularly bring them in to class.
When getting a new computer, I wanted the most powerful, largest screened computer I could reasonably afford; that meant a desktop. No one has made fun of me for choosing a desktop over a laptop (then again, I don’t bring it up); but if they did I’d point out how silly it would be to get a smaller, weaker device that’s just going to sit on my desk, anyway.
My laptop usually just sits on my desk.
But I also take it with me when I go to a friend’s house.
Or on a trip.
Or wherever.
So yeah, I like my laptop. I have an old desktop that I use mostly as storage, but my laptop is actually better than it is. :3
I don’t hate on one or the other.
I took Computer Science in university from 2003-2008. I always told my parents that I never wanted a laptop, because there was no point in paying more for a less powerful computer. The only time that the mobility would have been useful would have been during my very infrequent trips home during the semester. You can’t take notes for anything that has a lot of math or diagrams on a laptop.
But you could say the same thing for note taking by hand. What’s to stop someone taking notes from not making eye contact? or doodling, etc.?
Students taking notes by hand have a greatly reduced likelihood of being on Facebook, playing games, or posting on messageboards instead of doing the classwork, for starters.
But the thing is, now you can get laptops cheaply. The laptop I have now isn’t powerful, no, but it’s better than all my friends’ old desktops and it only cost me $350.
Right, but they would still be making the same amount of eye contact if the student on a laptop were taking notes. Plus it’s not like people didn’t get distracted in the pre comp days.
True, but there’s basically a not entirely incorrect view (at least at my uni) that people using laptops in tutorials really are goofing off and not doing the work, at least fairly often. It depends on the class and the maturity level of the students, of course.
Wow, I had no idea this was so controversial.
I think the presence of laptops in the classroom really depends on the school and the major - in humanities classes I saw tons of them, but in hard science classes the percentage tends to be 15-20%. I also notice that more 1st and 2nd year students seem to crack them out in class than upper year students. I have always assumed that this is because people start to realize how distracting they can be. Sitting in the back of class I could usually see a handful of computer screens, and at least 75% of them were showing Facebook, Minesweeper, or Solitaire. Once I even caught a guy looking at porn!
I have a laptop for work, which is powerful enough, I guess, and gives me the flexibility to telecommute. But all my personal computers are desktops. I’m a tinkerer, and I like to build my own systems (and I get more bang for the buck and almost instant upgradability).
I probably will not buy a laptop for myself for a good while, although I’ll get an iPad after the 4.0 OS has come out and gotten a good shakedown.
Although at the current rate, I’m pretty sure that in 4-5 years, when my oldest daughter is in high school I’ll be buying her a laptop/netbook. Or maybe by then tablets will be ubiquitous.
So the hell what? Your job is to teach. Not to tell the students what they can and cannot do. If they don’t do the work, you fail them. It isn’t high school, and you are not acting in loco parentis. They are just as much people as you are, and they have the same rights you do. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone, why do you care?
You betrayed that your concern was merely emotional earlier when you said it didn’t matter if they are good students. This is an indication that it doesn’t matter to you that it helps them study. If the students do well, and there are no safety concerns (like the chemistry lab mentioned above), what is it to you? Do you just feel you must have 100% control of the classroom?
Because those teachers are at best ineffective, and at worst don’t last long.
Now, as for the actual subject of this thread:
I don’t really see the greatness out of a larger screen. The applications themselves aren’t going to be more useful bigger, and leaving them non-maximized leaves a bunch of clutter that makes it harder to focus on what you are doing. The taskbar/dock exists for a reason: to keep you organized better than just having a bunch windows lying around.
I also do not like it when computer shops say stuff like “Gaming laptops are an oxymoron.” Maybe if you define a gaming computer as a computer that can play the latest games at the highest resolution and settings. But I say a gaming laptop is a laptop that you play games on. And back when I had a working laptop, I used it for that.
Furthermore, I don’t buy a new PC often enough that even a bargain laptop is not going to be better than the last computer I owned. I’m pretty much going to have one up-to-date computer that does everything. So that means I compromise a bit and get a laptop for portability reasons over having extreme raw horsepower. And I’m happier that way. I hate being tied down like I am now.
I hate it when shops try to tell me what I want. I find it arrogant when they tell me that I can’t get a gaming laptop. Because I did, and will again.
It’s not so much about controlling them, the problem is that the laptop of one student can, and most likely will, distract multiple other students - also that when you’re teaching the feedback of the students (confused looks, ‘aha’ type looks, etc.) are good feedback and allow you to adjust your pace and the amount of detail you are giving. When a students face is stuck in their laptop it really detracts from that.
I’ve got both a desktop and a laptop, and there are advantages to a desktop. The ergonomics are better on a desktop (I have an ergonomic keyboard and my back is straighter than on a laptop). Plus the hardware (CPU, hard drive, graphics card) are better than on my laptop even though it cost less. The desktop is much better for gaming (I don’t think I could play Civ2 for 4 hours on a laptop).
They both have advantages.
I don’t care if other students want to use their laptops in tutorials at all, actually. I used mine all the time in my tutorials for my Master’s subjects and it was very handy. The thing is, I’m not an immature 17 year old undergrad spending the entire tutorial playing Java Games on Facebook.
It’s worth bearing in mind that in Queensland, most first year undergraduate students are only 17 or 18. They’re still in the high school mindset and simply saying “Fine, go ahead, Spend all day on 4Chan instead of doing any work and see how spectacularly you fail” isn’t particularly productive for anyone-
University degrees aren’t cheap and it’s not in their interests to have students failing, and neither is it in their interests to have students passing who don’t know anything about the subject involved, either.
My university has no problems at all with laptops and most students- especially by postgrad level- have one. My tutors and lecturers have had no problems with students using laptops in class, FWIW, and like I said, I found mine to be invaluable in several subjects.
What? I didn’t say any of those things, nor was I talking about having control of the classroom. I think you might have me confused with someone else- I’m not a university tutor (yet). I merely observed that one reason a tutor might prefer their students not use laptops in tutorials is the high likelihood said laptop is being used to mess around on Facebook or surf the net and not do any work, which is distracting to other students and als.
It’s all dependent on the course and the subject and myriad other factors, I’m just saying that there are valid reasons for a tutor to prefer students not use laptops in tutorials without said tutor being a luddite technophobe or an Education Nazi.
We’ve just had a new, special “gaming” laptop come into work and I’ve been trying to explain to my boss that it’s actually not a particularly good rig for gaming, despite what the promotional literature says.