Originally posted on May 21, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
Many colleges allow their students to use their laptops to take down notes, or even write their final exams. Cool stuff. Wish I had that when I was studying, since my handwriting was so bad that even I couldn’t understand it. (I bet my teachers would’ve been happier, too.) And it makes synchronizing or cross referencing notes so much easier.
But it has its drawbacks — like when a virus hits and a whole semester’s worth of notes disappears a few days before exam week. That’s what happened to the kid of a friend of mine. Of course, this tech savvy student forgot the first rule of the computer age: back everything up.
Odd to think that less than 20 years ago I was typing away my college thesis on a clunky typewriter, and manually writing my research notes on index cards. Yes, I had to go to the library then. There was no “Google” — the only search engine I had was my own brain. Hopefully today’s generation of students won’t forget to use THAT, lest they reach a point where the specs of their gadgets are better than their IQ.