Just complaining into the ether

https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/u-of-ts-law-school-wants-to-have-laptop-free-classrooms-where-students-handwrite-notes/

I graduated uni in the early 2010s and had a cute lil netbook in my final year for word processing. All actual computing was done in the computer lab. A beloved thermodynamics professor used overhead transparencies for lecture notes. I didn’t use a computer for class notes and until COVID made virtual meetings more common I would still take meeting notes by hand and type them up later for meeting minutes. So I’m old and old fashioned lol. When I am doing modeling I still write out my assumptions and equations by hand (and draw system boundaries lmao).

(Side note: I didn’t have typing class but I did use a typewriter in elementary school. Now where did I put my walker???)

I find it ironic.gif how rigidly people cling to what they think is best for developing thinking skills.

With many students using laptops to take “copious and comprehensive notes,” Stacey says they cannot critically engage with course content. That sort of engagement nurtures the “rigorous thinking about the law” that Jackman Law graduates are known to have, he wrote.

While Stacey acknowledges taking notes by hand is slower, he notes that pacing helps students “process information critically in real time and make higher-order analytical choices about what to write down.”

I’m going entirely on vibes so I welcome being corrected but have we even had time to study how learning has changed as technology has changed? Do kids who had laptops in elementary school classrooms learn the same way as those in generations before? Or is old man yelling at cloud and being controlling because it worked for him?

Of course, this is ableist as fuck and wildly condescending in a graduate program. The article mentions accommodations will still be respected but that’s a huge burden to put on people who are being asked to change the way they engage with classrooms. How do they know they need an accommodation if this is a they have known for their post secondary career?

Also:

“Faculty members have expressed concern about the impact that increasing use of technology during lectures, including sophisticated AI tools and laptops used for near-verbatim notetaking, can have on this aspect of our academic mission,” Christopher Essert, dean of U of T’s law faculty, said in a statement to CP24 on Saturday.

Each laptop-free classroom will either provide AI-generated notes, a roster of rotating student typing note-takers, or class slides, speaker notes, or a similar record of the material covered in class.

Make it make sense lol.