Quote Originally Posted by geauxtig3rs View Post
Perhaps you should teach them LaTeX? Also, capacitive touch screens with a stylus work wonders.

Maybe I'm a bit biased. I co-own a company that develops and implements educational technologies.
My grad students get taught it; for undergrads it is a waste of my time in all but a few cases. And even if I did teach them LaTeX I really do doubt that they'd be able to keep up during a proof, for example. Maybe it's just me, but even after 20-odd years using TeX it still takes me longer to type it than it does to write it. And then you have the extra complications of the "best latex editor" wars (tricked out Emacs is undoubtedly the winner, but people insist on muddying the waters....).

I am not having a go at you, but how exactly is a touch screen with stylus in any way different (in a physical sense) to a student actually taking notes with a pen and paper? Yes, their notes become electronic (assuming you have decent recognition software that works with math - a very big "if" and if you know of one that does not require copious post-conversion fixing I would love to hear about it). However, they then spend the next 2 hours fixing the recognition stuff-ups, during which time they have either forgotten or lack the wherewithal to deduce the correct equations anyway!

I do agree that technology is advancing, and that there is an onus on teachers and academics etc to move with the times to accommodate and incorporate these technologies into the "learning experience" for students. However, there is also an onus upon the students to accommodate and incorporate the teaching methods of the "knowledge facilitator" into their armoury of learning skills.

It is my firm belief that the student/teacher relationship, particularly at University but I guess the same thing applies to a lesser degree at school level, should be a partnership. It is not necessarily an equal partnership and nor should it be - I have (and still do) worked hard and invested a lot of effort to obtain the knowledge and skills I possess, meager as they are. In my mind it is not the end-product of that process that was and is important - anyone can read what others have found out. No, what is important is the journey because in that journey you discover how you as an individual think and learn and take on information and resource yourself, and all the actually important stuff. Today's "google it" generation are given the destination and they miss out on the journey. And that is a sad indictment of both today's society and the educational system we have allowed to develop - money is all that matters, vocational degrees abound, learning for learning's sake is a quaint ideal.

My concern is what will happen to the tertiary eduction system once the "google it" generation become the academics. It is already happening. Just last week a representative from a text book company ( I have 400 students in my first year course, so I am the target of a lot of "representatives" - Universities are a lucrative business!) sent me a copy of a text and a link to a website containing the "worked solutions" to all exercises in the book. Every lecturer using this book, he said, gets free access to the solutions! My question is why do they need them? Time? - I take my job seriously and as such I am not about to just regurgitate someone else's solutions without checking them first; Ability? - if you are teaching a maths or stats course at university and you need worked solutions, perhaps you are better suited to go somewhere where your lack of skill will not be such an issue - the Finance sector, for example.

Anyway, don't get me started or I may just go off on a rant and no one would want that! lol

James.