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by buugs 6071 days ago
In other facebook news everyone in my freshman level class spends the whole lecture on facebook on their computer and is very surprising to me that the teacher doesnt ban computers from the classroom. ( When I started 2 years ago no one even pulled out computers during lectures unless they were at the back of the room. )

Maybe facebook is planning world peace through extended computer use.

3 comments

We can't fight any more wars if we're all too busy circlejerking on each others' walls.
Maybe, but we can still fight plenty of mob wars that way.
If the content of the lecture isn't compelling enough to win out over Farmville for an hour and the content of the test isn't dependent on the content of the lecture, I pray professors don't attempt to artificially monopolize my attention.

Additionally, the idea of a weekly (worse, daily) lecture as an effective means of information transfer for everyone in attendance is pretty silly.

Lastly, my college classes _expected_ that people would tune out a bit, especially as freshmen, since we didn't have the mental strength to last through a 3 hour discussion of a text. 'Attendance' was a fairly fluid concept. It worked well.

Maybe they were doing puzzles in the newspaper instead and it was harder to notice. Computers are just a more visible mode of distraction.
Okay sure a few people did crosswords but I'm talking like 50 percent of the students having their computers out on facebook and playing dumb facebook games. It is distracting to me who ends up sitting in the middle of the class cause my other class is across campus and ends late and having a bunch of flashing computers in front of me.

Makes me glad I'm in engineering where people need to focus, it doesn't help that this freshman level class enforces attendance either cause these people probably wouldn't even be showing up.