I liked your takeaway message on this, Arash. Instead of forcing strict rules in the classroom, we can consider the ‘useful’ use of technology as a professional conduct. Also, I think elaborating on this in designing the course syllabus will be worthwhile.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Yes, I also believe creating an environment in which students respect the use of technology is an important point here (although being challenging). Especially, the more engaging a classroom becomes, there will be less chance that students will be inclined to check their phones/computers for non-related stuff.

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Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and your previous experience on the same topic for teaching in high school! I believe the benefits/downside of using technology is definitely dependent on the course content and also the course level (like undergraduate or graduate). At least for me, using the internet (or googling some technical terms) during the lectures shown to be useful and helped me to independently follow a discussion. Nonetheless, it’s all going to be related to how the students are going to respect the beneficial use of technology in the classroom setting.

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This reminds me a lot of our first week of class. What is the ideal with critical pedagody? The machine based hyperefficient learning idea is from an old culture of what teaching is for. What is the sci-fi future ideal, now?

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I really wanted to be able to post this week (even now I’m commenting on my phone, my computer hates me) exactly for this. I like everything you brought up and I’d like to see it applied to our classroom setting. The room we’re in seems to have been built with maximizing the range of technologies in mind rather than a class. Isn’t it all rather distracting?

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Yes! The thing you said that resonated most with me here is how we talk about our brains as “like computers”. This has bothered me for so long, we may not know much about neuroscience yet compared to a tehnology we invented,
but that doesn’t mean we should look at ourselves as “like our technology”! I’ve always theought that should inspire more neuroscientists. ngu. My apologies if there are typos here, for some reason I can’t see the text in the box as I type. said that res

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I like the graph! My past research project was related to OER. We built a computing educational portal site http://computingportal.org/ to gather all the open education resources from multiple places on the Internet. Ensemble is a NSF funded project and a distributed portal for computing education. This portal provides access to a broad range of existing educational resources for computing while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes.

Up until this point, i agree that tools are only tools. However, as we keep on innovating we might get to a point where education can be done at the hands of robots. I’m not saying this will happen soon, or ever, but I do think it is a possibility. If you come and think about it, education is primarily transfer of knowledge and it is different from innovation. As you mentioned, human emotions play a very important role in the education process, but given enough time, i don’t see why robots wont get to a point where they are able to incorporate at least some level emotions in their education process. Now whether this approach will be effective, i have no clue, all we can do is speculate and hope for the best.

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Text books are ridiculously expensive,there is no doubt about it. Additionally, even though i would like to think that a professor can have really good notes or slides, its always comforting to use a text book especially when confronted with situations of uncertainty. In the case that a textbook is mandatory for a class, why not bundle the textbook with the price you already pay for the class, where the university provides everyone in class with the textbooks. Given that they are a huge organization buying books in bulk, they should be able to get to an agreement with the publisher where they can get the books much cheaper than we can.

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As far as I know, humans have one consciousness, so as long as we cant control our subconscious behavior, all we can do is concentrate on one task. I have always felt than multi tasking is a myth, especially when doing tasks that require heavy concentration. Even when I multi task, like watching youtube and cooking, cooking takes me longer because i sometimes get drawn in the video and forget I was cooking. Its good to know that other people have the same opinion.

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