Re: Laptop requirement?

["Ivan E. Rouse" <irouse@LASIERRA.EDU>]

At 12:17 3/8/01 -0500, you wrote:
>        Our board, in its infinite wisdom as mainly business
> professionals, decreed all students will be required to have laptops a few
> years back.  They did this without consulting the faculty.  They thought
> the students and the faculty needed to be pushed into "modern methods of
> teaching for the 21st century".  The requiremnt has been ignored. Partly,
> because the faculty recognized such a requirement as having limited
> pedagogical value.  And second, because most of our students arrive with
> their own computers (mainly desktops) anyway.  Our use of computers is
> restricted to labs where they are used extensively for data acquisition
> and analysis.

We also have about the same situation with extensive use of our department
computers for acquisition and analysis but I have two comments:
1.      I realize that Excel and other spreadsheets are everywhere but when a
student does a calculation using a spreadsheet it is not at all apparent
what method, i.e. equation, he used since the equations are not visible
just results.  That seems oppposed to the idea that they should show their
work so the instructor knows how they got their results.  Perhaps there are
ways that students can explicitly state their equations and get around this
problem.  For this reason several departments on our campus have
standardized on Mathcad since the equations are up front and clear.
2.      Another issue we are needing to deal with has to do with students basic
understanding of using computer networks for printing.  We have several
accessible network printers and the students are continually not paying
attention to which printer they sent things and don't know how to do a
basic check to figure out what is wrong when things don't work right.  Yex,
we try to be accessible to sort things out but we have finally put together
a checklist ot things to do to fix the problem in the most common situations.

> We haven't had to teach much spreadsheet work as most of
> the students are already proficient in using Excel, etc.
>
>                Mike Monce
>                Connecticut College
Ivan Rouse, Professor and Chair
Physics Department, La Sierra University
4700 Pierce St., Riverside, CA 92515
email: irouse@lasierra.edu
web: http://physics.lasierra.edu/irouse/
phone: 909-785-2137, FAX 909-785-2215