[extropy-chat] no electronics at Singularity Summit???

[Hal Finney]

Here's an article from USA Today about the issue of people laptopping
during lectures:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-03-unwired-grad-school_x.htm

> Professors want their classes 'unwired'
> By Maia Ridberg, The Christian Science Monitor
> NEW YORK - When Don Herzog, a law professor at the University of Michigan,
> asked his students questions last year, he was greeted with five seconds
> of silence and blank stares.
>
> He knew something was wrong and suspected he knew why. So he went to
> observe his colleagues' classes - and was shocked at what he found.
>
> "At any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90% of the
> students were online," Professor Herzog says. "And what were they doing
> online? They were reading The New York Times; they were shopping for
> clothes at Eddie Bauer; they were looking for an apartment to rent in
> San Francisco when their new job started.... And I was just stunned."
>
> Wireless Internet access at universities was once thought to be
> a clear-cut asset to education. But now a growing number of graduate
> schools - after investing a fortune in the technology - are blocking
> Web access to students in class because of complaints from professors.
>
> Herzog first went on the offensive in his own law classes, banning
> laptops for a day as an experiment. The result, he says, was a "dream"
> discussion with students that led him to advocate more sweeping changes.
>
> This school year, the University of Michigan Law School became the latest
> graduate school to block wireless Internet access to students in class,
> joining law schools at UCLA and the University of Virginia.
>
> The problem professors face is "continuous partial attention," an
> expression coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, to
> describe how people check e-mail and try to listen to someone at the
> same time.
>
> "As a teacher, you can tell when someone is there, but it's just their
> body that is there," says Douglas Haneline, a professor of English
> literature at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Mich. "Their face
> is on 'screensaver,' so to speak, because what they are really doing is
> checking their e-mail."
> ...

I understand that to people accustomed to multitasking, sitting and
listening to a single information source may seem excruciatingly boring.
I can suggest as an alternative, critical thinking about what is being
presented.  Instead of distracting yourself, use the ideas from the
speaker to trigger your own associations and extrapolations.  This will
often lead to an overwhelming desire to ask questions.  A good idea is
to write those down and then perhaps ask the best one or two at the end
of the talk.

Or, if you're so sure that you know everything the speaker has to say
that you won't get anything new out of the talk, maybe you shouldn't be
there taking up room, especially at a conference with 1700 full seats
and 250 in the overflow lounge.

Hal