[icepat]

Why? As a student, giving me access to a laptop improved my ability to get things done by orders of magnitude. I always struggled with messy writing, and being distracted easily. Having a laptop let me pay better attention, because I could work on something and passively listen to the class. My notes were also legible, meaning I could take meaningful notes for the first time ever. I could also combine photos of the chalkboard with captions on days I was particularly distracted, or record important sections of the class and review it later.

If I had to sit with just a notebook, and listen to the class only, I'd rapidly become sidetracked and check completely out. Then when it came to writing things down that were important, I'd have to check back in, and quickly jot things down that were illegible.

Massively improved my retention, and overall ability to function in class.

The "no computers, computers bad" mentality in schools is a major limiting factor for people with different learning styles, and neurodivergent children.

[logifail]

> I could work on something and passively listen to the class

(This is a genuine question) What were the benefits of being in class if you're basically doing something else and not actively listening?

Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?

[icepat]

Active listening is something I'm completely incapable of doing in a traditional way. When I have an activity in front of me, for example code or an interesting task, I listen better and am more engaged. When I was younger, I had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond.

It's just a different learning style. I'm actively listening, but in a more passive way than normal, if that makes any sense.

> Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?

In University I'd often skip class specifically to do this. Worked far better for me than sitting in a lecture hall. Let me work at my own pace, take breaks, walk around, ect. Classes with mandatory attendance were the bane of my existence. Intentionally designing courses to require attendance by not providing complete notes, or incomplete textbooks, also caused me issues.

[logifail]

> I had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond

In school I spent many (un)happy hours gazing out of the windows of the class due to sheer boredom.

Q: Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?

Once I got to University my learning style quickly evolved into "take notes on everything the lecturer said", with pen and paper. Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally writing everything down, at speed.

For me at least it was definitely a most effective way of learning (and then revising). Writing stuff out, over and over and over again.

[icepat]

> Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally writing everything down, at speed.

The issue here is what I mentioned above: illegible handwriting. The more pressure I am under, the higher my stress levels, the harder is becomes to take clear notes. In these situations I would end up with incomplete, illegible, useless, scrawl on pages.

> Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?

All over the map, really. The lack of consistent tempo in most lectures was the issue. If the class was too slow: zoning out, forgetting to take down critical parts. If the class was too quick: overwhelmed, unable to take clear usable notes. The duration of a class was always too long as well, but that's not just a me issue. Empirically, there's a infinite amount of time that someone can stay actively engaged. I don't recall exactly how long, but I do remember all university lectures lasted very generously longer than that.

My highest scores in class were always courses where there was an excellent textbook (or where I had found a supplemental textbook), or where I could effectively teach myself the material. IE: philosophy courses where, instead of attending, I could just read the selected writer's works. One of my highest marks was in a class I never once attended.

[blitzar]

> Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally writing everything down, at speed.

Hard to actually consume the contents of a lecture when you are frantically trying to reproduce a powerpoint slide and transcript of what someone is saying in real time.

[logifail]

> Hard to actually consume the contents of a lecture when you are frantically trying to reproduce a powerpoint slide and transcript of what someone is saying in real time

I would postulate that for the majority of people, in the majority of learning situations, writing out notes could (should?) be an integral part of consuming the contents of a lecture.

There's a 2021 paper from the University of Tokyo entitled "Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval"[0] which is worth reading.

NB: this obviously won't (can't) work for everyone.

[0] https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158

[blitzar]

I would postulate that for the majority of people, in the majority of learning situations, listening, consciously should be an integral part of consuming the contents of a lecture.

Making a hand written transcript of every word said - like a court stenographer is not necessarily listening or consuming the things said, especially when they are new or challenging concepts that require the student to apply some critical thinking or form connections with other knowledge.

[icepat]

I think an important addendum here is that the environment of a lab, and the environment of an uncontrolled classroom are different. So it's entirely possible that the actual real-world effects might be even more different than what we see here. While I agree that the effect of writing is well documented, I still find that the external factors around the act of writing get in the way of properly tapping into that added benefit.

[Symbiote]

Your case is very unusual, and should be dealt with separately. It's not at all reasonable to make generalizations to all children from a single neurodivergent child.

(In England your teacher would ask the school's special education teacher for advice. You might end up with a laptop, or something else that helps, essentially on prescription from an educational psychologist. Class teachers would be given guidance on when and how you can or should use it.)

[icepat]

Not saying it is not, but what I am saying is that you should be allowed whatever learning tools work best for you. A blanket ban on computers and insisting on hand written notes, is just no good. Forcing children to manage bureaucracy to get a simple laptop in class is also senseless.

> In England your teacher would ask the school's special education teacher for advice

In Canada, they just said I wasn't trying hard enough. I can't count the number of times people fought me tooth and nail to prevent me learning in the way that suited me best. You would like to assume that teachers and school administrators are looking for the best way to educate people, but sadly that's not always the case. It often breaks down into a bureaucracy of "well, you don't have xyz condition, and we only allow this for xyz condition, so you don't get it." Another one I got was "we won't let you have a laptop because we're liable if it gets broken".

[logifail]

> You would like to assume that teachers and school administrators are looking for the best way to educate people, but sadly that's not always the case

At the latest since become a parent and having school-age kids it's become patently clear to me that this isn't what school administrators or the indeed the vast majority of teachers are looking for at all.

[Symbiote]

I draw your attention to where I wrote the laptop would be on prescription from an expert, with guidance to teachers. That puts it outside any blanket ban that might otherwise exist.

Some process is inevitable when your needs are far outside the norm and have the potential to disrupt the education of the rest of the class.

(I can't comment on the situation in Canada.)

[icepat]

And I did note that, and address it. This is exactly like the line of reasoning that blocked my access to the tools I needed to learn. Like I said, the bureaucratic process of getting an assessment is often prohibitive. Many educational experts are stuck in specific ways, and unwilling to suggest accommodations unless there's obvious disability. Radically different learning styles are not considered a disability, but rather a problem the student must rectify on their own. Now that I'm out of school, I'm completely functional at work, and in other domains of life.

I see it as similar to being left-handed in the 1800's. Eventually we're going to see that the approach we're taking now is just as nonsensical. We're essentially beating the devil out of children now by forcing them to adopt a learning approach that was developed over a hundred years ago when there was no other way.

I think you're error here is in assuming that you will be given what you need if you simply ask for it in school. I assure you, this is not the case. In many cases, I've had teachers (and later profs) explicitly go out of their way to exempt themselves from having to provide any accommodations at all. Even when supplying them was legally mandated by provincial government. One sticks out in my memory as having quite literally saying "then sue me" when I was refused an accommodation specifically required in my student file.

[logifail]

> I am saying is that you should be allowed whatever learning tools work best for you. A blanket ban on computers and insisting on hand written notes, is just no good.

Umm, not sure whether I agree with this.

Don't we expect children to learn basic mathematics without access to a calculator? This despite the fact that there are certainly children who struggle with laborious long multiplication and division. Our eldest was one of them!

[icepat]

I think there's a major difference between using something that removes the need for basic knowledge, as opposed to allows that knowledge to be learned in a different way. I'm not advocating not teaching people to write, I'm suggesting we do that, but then provide them the option to use a computer to assist their learning.

If you provide someone with a calculator, there's no need for them to learn how to do basic math. If you provide someone who can write with a computer, you're just altering how the information is retained, not what information is retained.

[scrollaway]

I'm not the person you responded to, but when I was in school, if a class didn't captivate me, it wasn't going to be any better if I "paid more attention". It was either I'm listening and actively learning, or I'm bored.

We didn't have laptops back then. Now when I do learn, with the benefit of experience and technology, it's a mix of videos + active research / googling. And I often enough just leave educational videos running in the background while doing something a little more mindless if I'm not in the mood to fully pay attention.

People learn differently. I want to stress this: There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out. That said (and this is completely anecdotal), the smartest hands-on "easily distracted" learners I know run massive circles all the meticulous book learners I know.

[icepat]

> There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out.

You get it -- this is exactly what I'm getting at. The second issue here is that many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.

My favorite example is the one computer science course I took, I failed. And I failed it hard. This was a course in a programming language I'd been actively using for a year, as a contractor, working in data engineering. Needless to say, I was baffled.

[folkrav]

> many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.

I spent half my life convinced that I was bad at mathematics. My math grades in high school dropped sharply the second we hit algebra, and they never really recovered. When I decided to reorient my studies towards programming approaching my mid 20s, this led to me missing some HS prerequisites. Long story short, we have 3 levels of math classes in the last two grades of high school here, I passed the mid-level of 4th grade, needed mid-level of 5th grade at least. So I enrolled in remote HS for this one class.

All it took was me sitting down with the teacher once and grilling him with all my questions for everything I misunderstood as a teen to finally click. Working on exercises on my own terms, and actually having the opportunity to understand _why_ things work the way they do rather than just learning obscure formulas and applying them, let me realize "well shit, this stuff's actually easy". I aced the class, got my prerequisite, and got in my CS program. The rest is history, I've now been working for almost 7 years, stepped up from junior to leading my own team.

I'd wager I'm far from alone in this situation. The one-size-fits-all approach to education is IMHO doing more harm than good.

[folkrav]

> What were the benefits of being in class if you're basically doing something else and not actively listening?

I can only speak for myself, but back in school, I've always found actively listening in to class to be extremely laborious. There was seemingly just no way for me to focus on someone talking without additional stimulation for more than 20-30 minutes at a time. I typically just read the teacher's slides or was done grasping the base concept faster than the rest of the class, then lost focus the second things started to get repeated or re-explained for other students. Bringing in a laptop helped me stay focused as I could Google stuff the teacher/speaker talked about, tag my notes, insert links as relevant, etc. Basically, it let me go at my own pace rather than forcing the class' pace on me. I could use the time to do further research on the subject as I was taking my notes instead of relying on me going back to them (which realistically never happened).

In the end, it turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD/PI, for which I've now been getting treated for the last 6 months (which helps tremendously!). Not pretending like it would be beneficial for all kids, but there's a case to be made that not everyone learns in the same way.

[kzrdude]

Not everyone benefits, the computer is just a huge source of distractions and it can really set people back.

[icepat]

That's why I'm not saying to it for everyone. Reverse that logic, and apply it to the regular teaching style. It cuts both ways.