Laptop for College

[pakman]

Take no offense. This is not directed toward you or anyone in particular. When I saw people with laptops in class they didn't take many notes. Instead, they played solitaire, minesweeper, etc. I even saw one guy play Planetside, I don't know how he did it, but he had a pretty good KDR :P About a year ago, one of my friends and I were in the same class, he happened to have a laptop. Instead of paying attention to class we surfed the internet, coincidentaly, I surfed these very forums. I got the impression that laptops in class were more of a distraction than a useful academic tool. I think it is much faster to write notes on paper, then transfer that to the computer. Transferring the notes can be used as a study tool. I personally could never type that fast to kleep up with the notes. <aside> From my own experience, power point presentations suck at getting complex information across.</aside>

However, laptops are good when you want to go to group meetings and do everything else that you use for course work. The onloy thing I have against laptops is that while you can make them great for games, it can be hard to play on them, otherwise they do whatever any other computer can do.

But maybe in CS there is a use in class for getting demos of the material so that everyone can see how things work and can dissect it at their leisure later.

There was a person who brought up putting class texts onto cd or some other digital format. I highly disagree. While assignments can be put into a pdf format, a whole book in pdf defeats the purpose. First of all, you might still have to buy the $0.10 cd for the normal book price of $100+. Secondly, it would be hard to ask for help from anyone. Lugging a laptop around with the cd in it, finding the page(s), asking questions, etc. I just think that laptops will be more efficient to take notes than pen and paper. <_<