<story><title>Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac98</author><text>To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer&amp;#x27;s slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams&amp;#x2F;coursework.&lt;p&gt;I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures.&lt;p&gt;I expect this isn&amp;#x27;t the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking I could have just paid to take the exams and self-taught the rest of the material. In hindsight, I was really taking out huge loans for a few years of drinking, socialising and playing video games.&lt;p&gt;In the working world, I&amp;#x27;ve found meetings to be similarly pointless. 95% of the time I&amp;#x27;d rather hash out a problem on an email thread where thoughts are expressed clearly, re-read and understood by others in their own time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cyphar</author><text>I found that the usefulness of lectures depends very strongly on how good the lecturer is, as well as the topic being discussed. When studying physics I found that the lectures were incredibly useful, because it&amp;#x27;s quite hard to get in the &amp;quot;zone&amp;quot; of understanding the derivation being discussed when at home. However, with mathematics subjects the textbook was almost always a much better learning tool, because the derivation did not require a discussion of the physics that justified said derivation. Computer Science lectures were almost unilaterally a waste of time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac98</author><text>To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer&amp;#x27;s slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams&amp;#x2F;coursework.&lt;p&gt;I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures.&lt;p&gt;I expect this isn&amp;#x27;t the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking I could have just paid to take the exams and self-taught the rest of the material. In hindsight, I was really taking out huge loans for a few years of drinking, socialising and playing video games.&lt;p&gt;In the working world, I&amp;#x27;ve found meetings to be similarly pointless. 95% of the time I&amp;#x27;d rather hash out a problem on an email thread where thoughts are expressed clearly, re-read and understood by others in their own time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaymzcampbell</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer&amp;#x27;s slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams&amp;#x2F;coursework.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This was very much my experience too. My first foray to university was the traditional full time format. I really didn&amp;#x27;t get on well with the lectures - it felt too slow in some cases, too fleeting in others and beyond a few particular classes, not very illuminating at all. For what it&amp;#x27;s worth this was at Imperial so I guess a &amp;quot;top&amp;quot; uni.&lt;p&gt;In later life, I did a degree with the Open University which has  no lectures at all (well almost, there&amp;#x27;s a few online and night schools but they are more like practicals than lectures). Instead it&amp;#x27;s all self-study from guidebooks and notes with regularly graded coursework which for many of the courses is a pre-requisite to pass the examinations. I greatly preferred the latter option and felt I had a much better understanding of the material.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, but audio&amp;#x2F;video recordings are a different ballgame all together for me. I actually really like lectures in that way. I guess it all boils down to the idea of tailored, self-service. I can review&amp;#x2F;pause&amp;#x2F;skip and repeat at my leisure.</text></comment>