What's college like these days?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I graduated from college in 1991, right before the internet era and before owning a computer was common for a college student.

While I used some software packages, for the most part my college days were mainly based on reading books and typing papers on a typewriter. Computer access for a non science major was very difficult.

So, how has the internet and easy computer access changed college? I imagine students waste time in boring lectures updating facebook rather than reading the school paper like I did.

I’d think that research papers are longer and are supplemented with graphs and charts which are easy to do with Office, but were impossible to create on a typewriter.

Is most research done online? Is there a way to cite a website?

Are most professors computer literate? Do most students take notes with a laptop or do some people still take them by hand in a spiral notebook?

2

I’ve never seen nor written a paper with graphs in it. Some people take notes on computers but it’s relatively rare. In high school, the teacher would often put caveats on research papers to the effect of so many cites must be from actual physical books that you checked out of the library. That’s not as prevalent at college. They mostly just demand you not use wikipedia. Which is silly because if you use it correctly, they’ll never know and if you use it incorrectly, then you deserve to fail. I mostly just find things like facebook and online episodes of tv shows to be distractions from doing homework but not problems during class. And every citation style came up with their own website cite format ages ago.

3

I graduated from college in '93 and taught at the college level from '01 to '08. (Engineering)

Computers have changed a lot, in good ways and in bad. On the plus side, they can allow for better student collaboration, realistic simulations and a wide variety of multimedia materials.

On the negative side, students with laptops in class can find themselves easily distracted. Written papers have not gotten notably better. While there is a wealth of material on the web, the students have yet to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. They typically cite the first thing they find and stop looking. We probably did the same thing in my day, but since we had to look at the library, the chances of that first thing being scholastically solid were much higher. (Properly citing a website is challenging, because information such as author, date and its sources are not always apparent.)

As a professor, I would often try to take advantage of the students being required to have laptops by using them in class. While this worked fairly well, in any class of 30 students there are going to be two whose laptop is not function, one who downloaded a virus and had to take it to IT and three whose laptop refuses to run the software that an identical laptop runs perfectly.

Some professors preferred to try and keep teaching the same way and ignore the changes, but I think that is the wrong approach. The ubiquitous computer is the reality of the students’ lives and their future. It is up to the professor to adapt to that while attempting to utilize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses.

4

I swear! It’s nothing but sex, drugs and rock and roll.

5

I’m in university now, and I was in university from 2000-2003 for a previous degree, and even in that time frame some things have changed, but many things haven’t.

Then as now, the student who used a computer to take notes was pretty rare; most students use a notebook, binder or looseleaf and take notes during a class. The exception is courses that are primarily based on Power Point slides, and that’s only if the prof posts the slides on the course website before the lecture. Then I’d say about a third to a half of the class has a laptop with the slides open to follow along, most don’t take notes in that case, and many are also on YouTube/Facebook/messageboards/whatever as well. Personally, I take notes based on the slides without copying the slides. You actually get what the prof says that way!

At least at my school, having a dedicated course website is now the norm. My school uses software called WebCT, where all pages are basically the same and the profs simply add files or turn on quizes or assignment hand-in modules as they see fit, These pages generally include the syllabus, may include course notes, will include homework/assignment questions and answers and usually midterm solutions once they are handed back. Assignment hand-ins allow for doc or pdf submissions, but in my engineering classes, we usually still hand in paper versions of assignments because they are calculations and sketches and that’s not really feasible to hand in via computer most of the time. In 2000, having a course website was an optional thing for the prof, and very few took advantage of it, but the ones that did made the same stuff available other than submissions/quizzes.

The vast majority of my profs use a computer to lecture from. They hook up their laptops (department provided, I’m sure!) to projectors and use power point, or sometimes other software packages to show us stuff.

Between classes is when you really notice the increased use of laptops/smart phones, although there are always students texting in class. My school has wifi all over the campus, and they have set up many desks/tables along hallways or outdoors for people to sit at during their breaks and do whatever they want on their computers. The small netbook computers are incredibly common; I have an EeePc that I use nearly every day. I use it to do my homework; I open the pdf of assignment questions on the screen and work away. This wasn’t possible at my previous school, but it also had many more public computers in more buildings.

My school has eliminated paper-based correspondence with their students, other than my first acceptance letter. Once you’re in their email system, all correspondence comes via email, and you can get seriously screwed over if you don’t check your school account regularly. This was beginning to happen back in 2000 at my other school, but we still got a lot of paper communication in on-campus mailboxes (I’ve never seen a student mailbox cluster at my current school).

Course selections, unofficial transcripts, statements of fees, tax receipts, program changes, etc are all available online, in my case through a more-or-less customized “portal” page that also links to my email. Library holdings catalogues are online, and I can search that from home, put books on hold for myself and view electronic journals via VPN.

I don’t write many essays or papers, but lab reports certainly do require lots of graphs and tables, and I have never had a prof that would accept hand-written reports/tables unless the tables/graphs are the original data collection sheets of data collected during the lab itself. Excel and Word (or their OpenOffice equivalents, in my case) are what are most often used. This was the case back in 2000 as well, though.

While computers are more prevalent now, in general school is still assuming that you don’t necessarily have your own, and a lot of things are still done on paper as before.

It’s the cell phones that I notice more!

Not only because they are ringing (which they often are!) but because of the extent to which people use them. I haven’t noticed a student actually answer and talk on a ringing cell phone in class, but some students are constantly texting and seem unable to go 15 minutes without communicating to friends somehow. They are just more used to being in constant contact, while that certainly wasn’t the case in 2000, nor when I was back in high school. Way-back-when, I simply learned my friends’ class schedules and we always met up at the same place, but now it’s constant “where r u? in cls? meet at timmy’s?” I’m sure many of them are saying much more profound things, but general conversation with younger classmates (I’m the old fogey at 28) suggests that most of the time, it’s just trying to figure out where to see each other. Of course, I bitch, but my cell phone doesn’t do texting all that well, and I’m thinking of getting a new one, because my new friends just don’t socialize the same way!

6

Basically, computers are everywhere.

I’d guess that around 25% of students bring laptops to class, though some professors don’t allow it. Netbooks are pretty popular.

Most research is done on the internet. There are online journals, newspapers, encyclopedias, etc, etc, and etc. The library’s catalog is completely online to the point where they have retired the actual old-fashioned one. If we had to go back to the old dewey decimal system they taught us in the 4th grade I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Yes, there is a way to cite electronic sources like websites, as keeper0 noted. I think most of my professors are too lax on the quality and scholastic integrity of sources.

Incidentally, I work at my university (as well as being a student there) in one of the technical support departments. Overall, professors are nowhere near as computer-literate as their students. Most of it is just completely foreign to them. There are a minority of older ones that have taken to using computers and our online courseware stuff extensively though, which is kind of interesting.

As for myself, I just use one big ol’ spiral bound notebook for all my classes. All my notes are in chronological order and it never crashes or catches a virus.
I sometimes envy people who went to college back in the day. Their college would have had a kind of cultural isolation that was distinctive to where they were. I think the internet and social networking diminishes that.

That, and there wouldn’t have been such an overwhelming volume of information just everywhere. It seems like everything we do is connected to the internet somehow. Want to order a pizza? Look on the internet and you can find 15 places near you along with their phone numbers, online maps, menus, and you can even order online. Before the internet, you’d just whip out the phone book and call up Pizza Hut. Although technology has made information alot more accessible it also seems to have complicated our lives, IMO.

7

Here in law school the class is 80% laptops. In college, just two years ago, only a few people had laptops in class. I guess it’s just a law school thing because other posters are saying it’s still rare to see laptops in college.

I take my notes on a laptop. I tried writing them once but it felt extremely slow.

During class you can see everyone surfing the web for a particularly boring professor. Others are chatting away on AIM. I saw one girl play tetris throughout the whole class.

As for research, we obviously have to use case law and not random internet sources. My legal writing professor would probably stab me if I cited wikipedia.

The professors are completely computer illiterate. I think law professors are special in this department. All my professors need to have someone come in and set up their power point presentations. One professor could not copy and paste in Microsoft Word because she’s too used to Word Perfect.

8

I got my BA in 2000. I returned to school last year to do my Masters. Technology has changed like WHOA in eight years, I tell you what. Everything is online and we’re so spoiled about it! We get grumpy if a professor won’t let us turn our papers in online. I was annoyed with one of my professors because she didn’t put the syllabus online and I had to go find the original paper version (oh, the humanity!) every time I needed to see what to read.

Lots of professors put their readers (or as we call them here at Michigan, coursepacks) entirely online, so you don’t have to spent lots of money on them anymore, like I did in undergrad. Well, I still print out the longer articles, but you don’t have to.

I do almost all of my research online, although not on Wikipedia, obviously. When I was an undergrad, lots of stuff was online already, so this isn’t SO different, but it seems much more normal now.

WiFi has changed things a lot.

PowerPoint has changed things a lot. And not always for the better.

I rarely take notes on my computer, but sometimes I do. I almost always have it open in class, though. Which is naughty of me, I know.

9

I just graduated in Dec., and I was an older, returning student. Things sure have changed since the first time I went to college in the mid 80’s.

My school did not require laptops, and seeing students taking notes on them was rare. Some profs didn’t allow them - they are distracting in dark lecture halls. Most profs use some sort of visual presentation. The ones who write on chalkboards/whiteboards is rare.

What was great was notes online; .pdfs or Powerpoint usually. Some students take that as permission to skip class, but many profs would leave key words blank on the slides, meaning to gt the answer you had to be in class or ask someone who was. Especially in classes that relied on visuals, it was a lifesaver. I’d write my notes in the sidebars or print them out in note form.

Being a science major I had to do a fair amount of research papers. Most profs wanted the majority of cited sources to come from journal articles. But most articles can be found online now, so that made it easy. Every so often I’d need to go and make copies from a journal in the library, or even request articles from journals my school didn’t get through interlibrary loan. Sometimes these came physically, but often they would be emailed to me (just the article, not the whole journal). Some info was found from websites, and there is a particular way you need to cite them. I relied on “Keys for Writers”; there is no way I could ever remember how to cite sources.

Placing graphs/charts/pictures is common in scientific papers. For me, it was basically mess around with it until it looked OK.

In my GIS classes, which are taught with students seated at a computer, they had to start a monitors off policy during lecture because people were checking Facebook, and it was distracting to other students to have monitor glare in an otherwise dark room.

I recently bought a tablet PC and I wish I’d of had it when I was a student. I could have handwritten my notes, and it would have converted it to typed text (saves room) and still been able to draw diagrams and pictures. In my science classes it seems 30% of notes contained diagrams & pictures.

Some problems with computers in classrooms is that it would be a big competition for plug-ins. I don’t know if my battery would have the juice to last through longer lectures, especially with back to back classes.

10

College professor, here. Yes, a lot has changed since I taught my first classes in 2000, and certainly since I started my undergraduate degree in 1994.

Almost all universities use some sort of online course management system, like Blackboard, Moodle, or WebCT, although it’s up to the individual professor to decide how much he or she wants to make use of it. These systems allow profs to post the syllabus, assignments, and course-related announcements online, keep an online gradebook, and create discussion boards or online drop boxes for assignments.

Most universities also have “smart classrooms,” which feature computers, projectors, and usually a VCR / DVD player; lectures usually come with more technological bells and whistles than they used to. PowerPoint is especially popular. Some schools also require students to invest in game-show-style clickers, which professors can use to take attendance in large lecture courses or use for quick polls and quizzes. (I think this is a fad with dubious pedagogical benefits, and it’s insanely expensive for the students who have to buy the clickers, but administrators love it.)

New textbooks often come with passwords that allow the student to access various special features on the publisher’s website.

Yes, there are special citation formats for online sources, and it’s no longer assumed that print is the default medium. In fact, the new MLA guidelines, which just came out about a month ago, specify that print sources have to be described as “Print” (!)

The biggest research-related change, though, is the prevalence of online databases. Even a small school will have dozens of database subscriptions, through which students can access journal articles, reference works, and other sources. (To be perfectly honest, I find this a mixed blessing – subscriptions to databases are so expensive that they’ve eaten up virtually all of the library funds at my little state university, and it’s harder and harder to get students to go into the stacks. But it is very convenient.)

Students text message constantly. Many of the younger ones seem blithely unaware that this is inappropriate classroom behavior – you’ll call them out on it and they’ll look surprised, as if they didn’t realize the professor could see their phone under the desk, and then ten minutes later they’re doing it again. In wireless-enabled buildings, I’m told they browse Facebook constantly (luckily, the humanities building at my school does not yet have wireless access, so my classes are free of at least one set of distractions). Oddly, many of them seem clueless about technology in other ways – it’s not unusual for student to be unable to change the default settings in Microsoft Word, or to have no idea how to save a paper as an .rtf file instead of .docx. The mixture of comfort and discomfort with technology is very weird; I’m not sure what to make of it, except that I think there’s a big, big gap between middle-class students who grew up with home computers and working-class students who didn’t, and it’s only getting wider.

11

I don’t see many laptops in class. Maybe 1 of 20 people bring one. It’s a matter of battery life/PitA factor of finding an outlet. Outside of class, however, everyone has one. It’s the main way to do research. I didn’t go to the library once to do research. Everything I need is online.

A few of my papers contained charts and graphs but it wasn’t really worth the effort.

Contrary to what others have posted, most of my professors were very computer literate. That doesn’t mean they were particularly skilled at it, however. Most lectures were delivered via PowerPoint slides.

As for taking notes, if the professor posted the slides online (and most did), you’d print them off before class and take notes beside each slide. It saves from having to copy each slide into a notebook and automatically gives the notes a time and date.

12

I’m old-fashioned with my notetaking; I use loose-leaf in a clipboard, and once every week or two I dump all the notes into duo-tangs (skinnier and lighter than binders). I put the date, course code and put a number at the top of each page, so everything stays in order. In class, I just write what I hear. I’ll make a quick sketch of power point slides if I have to, just enough to make a note about whatever I need a note for, or just scribble down the title of a slide next to what the prof has to say about it. Because I write quickly, I can usually get most of what the prof says, which is always supplemental to the slides, and I learn a lot more that way. I have never bothered to print out slides/pdfs for classes beforehand - I might do it to help me study that material before exams.

I also don’t buy textbooks unless I have to, and then I get the cheapest one possible, usually several editions out of date. I have never needed to do exact problems from a textbook for assignments, but if I did, I’d just go photocopy those questions in the library. I’ve done several classes using textbooks on the same subject, but totally different books, given to me by people who did similar courses in other universities. The basics of physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, biochemistry, calculus, etc do not change every 6 months, and I am quite capable of reading a table of contents and/or index to find the chapters and pages that cover the course material without panicking that it’s in slightly different words than the “official” textbook. In two years of engineering, I think I’ve spent 100$ at most on textbooks. I’ve bought two off of Amazon for 5$ or less.

None of that is particularly on-topic, other than that I feel that schools assume students can and will spend a fortune on books, computers and their own paper to print stuff out, and although everyone has learning styles, it is very possible to do things differently and still do very well in school!

13

mnemosyne: I envy you’re being able to buy books online. My school liked to update every book every year, so you would be forced to buy a new book.

As for laptops in class: well, I was usually the only one. There might be one other person. I find I can type a lot faster than I can write. Being the only one meant I usually had access to an outlet. People often assumed I was just playing games, but I was really taking notes, even if I would occasionally work on something else if the professor got on am irrelevant tangent.

The education and computer departments always used Powerpoint, but a lot of the others didn’t. It wasn’t odd to have a teacher who didn’t even use a single visual aid (including a chalkboard).

14

Re: outlets - I’m a student at one of the professional schools at UM, and in 2006 we got a brand new building. It has plugs up the wazoo. It is awesome. The result is that EVERYONE has their laptops on, all the time.

Not that they’re necessarily taking notes. But they’re open, and plugged in.

I took a couple classes in older buildings outside of my school last semester and the lack of plugs was tragic.

15

Maybe it depends on your course of study. When I was in college, business projects included graphs or charts or any manner of visual aid that was called for. One of my favorite professors had the grading philosophy that an A paper in his class meant that in his best judgement you could provide the same caliber in a professional environment and have it be completely acceptable. It’s hard to write a 25 page marketing plan or company analysis/valuation and not include any charts or tables. Not because 25 pages of double spaced text is so boring, but because you’re presumably referencing data that ought to be represented visually.

16

I know that when I was writing papers (graduated in 2003), we were expressly told to NOT include graphs and charts. Teachers see them as a waste of space.

17

This seems so odd to me. If the clearest way to convey information is in a graphical form why would you communicate it any other way?

18

Some teachers are a little old school. That and I’m an English major. If I need to eat up space, I’ve got block quotes.

Besides, if I can’t convey the information in the graph through my words, I’d deserve a poorer grade.

19

One topic I’m surprised hasn’t come up yet in this thread is plagiarism. I’ve read dozens of stories about students who get caught plagiarizing because the professor found a key phrase that didn’t look like something the student would have likely written him/herself and Googled it. How much of a problem is plagiarism these days with the Internet being so prevalent, and how do professors curtail it?

20

My experience is very much like mnemosyne’s. We also use WebCT and it is very handy - especially when you have a class like Anatomy where you are learning new terms that you’ve not used before and the teacher has an accent that uses different pronunciations (for example, “valves” would be pronounced “walls”). Most of my classes were in a “smart” classroom that had a station for each student where you could go online to WebCT and watch the presentation as he was showing it in front of the class and make your own notes on the slides or in the notes section of the Power Point and save it to your laptop.

I was still one of the few that used a laptop in class. I use it mostly for organizing the information into a “flow” that makes sense to me. I also would occasionally abandon the computer and take notes in a 3 ring binder and retype it later just for the repetition, which seemed to be more the norm.

For papers we were encouraged to use the internet but to use Google Scholar as certain sites would not be accepted. We had two or three classes dedicated to what constituted an acceptable reference online.

I graduated HS in 1993 and went to college after that for a few years before I dropped out so I have a pretty good time span between the first and second attempts. The biggest difference to me is the whole “plugged in” aspect of the students with the constant communication. It was not unusual for someone in my class to ask for my cell phone number or email so we could trade notes. Normally I would think of this stuff as private information but to young students now it’s as common as asking your name. I got used to it and made some good friends (young friends!) by letting go some of that privacy and now FaceBook with some of them.