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Quotation of the Day for October 14, 2010"I teach at Yale, where lecturing is taken seriously -- and in history, which boasts some of the best teachers. My ratings as a lecturer are consistently high. But even here, I would not have the attention of these very gifted students if I did not ban laptops and smartphones from my classroom. Part of the problem is that students are not paying attention at a given moment; part of the problem is that they often lack the ability to pay attention at all. "Of course, some of them think they are paying attention: The well-intentioned are checking the professor's facts by googling. This is not a good use of that powerful tool, because what they learn in the class comes only from the class, and has a richness and precision they won't get online. Once the search happens, the students miss the next minute of lecture, or even more, as they then follow the next appealing link. It doesn't take long to get from googling Habermas to reading about Lady Gaga." - Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, in an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. [http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/1007/Why-laptops-in-class-are-distracting-America-s-future-workforce] Submitted by: Terry Labach Oct. 13, 2010 |
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