Speaking of laptops in auditorium-style presentations: In my job as a university teacher, I tend to see it the other way round.
My responsibility is to help create a situation where people learn as much as possible and as relevantly as possible. For interaction design, that entails staying in constant contact with the web, with peer networks, with databases and galleries and portfolios and encyclopedias and blog rings and a thousand other sources while you are in the studio (or classroom), off the streets. Cutting all those connections and sitting silently for hours among hundreds of other people sitting silently for hours is both inefficient and irrelevant in terms of learning. Personally, I find lecturing less rewarding and useful than studio teaching. Much less rewarding and useful. Sometimes, I still have to do it. I have to say that I prefer lecturing to a roomful of students with connected laptops -- it even happens on occasion that students raise their hands in the auditorium to ask a question or share a finding based on some browsing while I am talking. Nearly always good questions and comments, which I may be able to use in the rest of the lecture. (On a related note, I wouldn't dream of testing students in written exams without books, Internet and other resources either. But that is another story.) However, this thread started with people's inability to engage in f2f conversation at conference breaks without allowing themselves to be distracted by handheld devices. That is a different topic, which seems to have everything to do with civil behavior and politeness, nothing to do with learning. So I guess I am digressing here. /Jonas Löwgren ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
