A history professor laments too much technology in the classroom: Professors, Stop Your Microchips.
Throughout the class the students took notes on the computers, creating a ceaseless keyboard clatter and making it difficult for anyone to hear the teacher’s voice. Worse, as they faced their screens they looked away from the professor and away from one another. The class had no sense of communal purpose, and some students scarcely gave the professor a glance.
The PowerPoint remote control didn’t work quite right at first — tinkering with it caused a delay — and students periodically whispered to one another about technical problems when they should have been learning the day’s topic.
…
I talked with the professor afterward, and he acknowledged that technology could be a distraction as well as an aid. He added that, although his was a writing-intensive class, the students didn’t like to write, and that they wrote badly. Every college teacher knows it. The current generation of students has devoted thousands of hours to mastering computers but hasn’t learned how to maintain verb-tense consistency in a sentence, hasn’t learned not to follow a singular subject with a plural verb, knows almost none of the more-advanced rules of grammar, and uses apostrophes with chaotic caprice.
Teachers’ overuse of technology sends a baleful signal to students that the machines are necessary. At a medical-history conference last year, I was the only history professor in a group of doctors. Many of them were good amateur historians, but all of them were cursed with a dependency on PowerPoint, which seems to exercise an even stronger appeal among physicians and scientists than among professors of the humanities and social sciences. Every word the doctors spoke was duplicated on a screen above their heads. It was numbingly repetitive. One speaker even spoiled what would have been a pretty good joke, giving away the punch line by bringing up the crucial PowerPoint slide too soon.
Once again NewMexiKen is reminded of the PowerPoint Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication.