Diavlog notes and doodles.

From a Bloggingheads recorded this morning. I'll link to it when it's up, but meanwhile, I was amused by what ended up on the page in front of me.

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Notes on a conversation...

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... to be revealed soon enough.

"Trying to keep up w/getting truth to u, like proof there's no 'FBI scandal'..."

Aren't u following Sarah Palin on Twitter? I sure am!

Is it presidential to write "u" for "you"?

Don't you u look forward to the time when world leaders will just text each other? Frankly, I believe when that day comes, we will have world peace.

(Ultra-cute heart doodle from DeniseKerr.com.)

I love these scribbly tattoos!

Much more — from Yann Travaille — here. (Warning: some clickable thumbnail-sized photos have naked breasts.)(Via Neatorama.)

Do these tattoos remind me of death? No, they remind me of taking delightful chances.

Doodling is quite appropriate.

A study shows.

Accordingly, at today's presentation, I doodled:

Another radio doodle.

I was just on Pundit Radio Review. Did you listen? Lots of sound clips and music swirling in and about the commentary. Very different from the Public Radio ambience I'm used to -- and also in quite a different place politically -- but quite fun. So here's the doodle:



(Full size.)

See if you can explain it!

Two doodles.

These are recent. I was listening to something specific while doing each of these. Any guesses what?

The first one is not a picture of anything I was looking at. I was listening to someone else speak. I will leave it to you to say what I was thinking or feeling. Note the hatch marks at the top.



This one was a phone call. I was drawing while listening and while speaking. It's easy to guess the general topic, of course.

What is Althouse doing with her hands during a radio interview?

Well, if I was doing the show from home -- or had an internet connection in the studio -- I'd probably be typing on my laptop, Googling for more information or blogging along with the show. In the studio, if there's no host in the room, like yesterday, I might be doing the NYT crossword, as I did yesterday. But, most likely, I'm jotting notes and doodling. I kept my scratch paper from today's show about the Roberts nomination. If you click on the image and then on "all sizes" you can get to the original size. Feel free to print it out and frame it for an Althouse original, made in real time while thinking about the Supreme Court.

Wireless access in the law school classroom.

Responding to my request for a description of yesterday's "Coffee and Doughnuts" session about the perceived problem of laptops and wireless access in the law school classroom, one of our students emails this:

Say, I went to that Donuts and Coffee discussion. My prediction? We'll default to the current status quo, leaving things as they are. So many speakers offset each other in their opinions, positive and negative, about wireless in the classroom.

One young man seemed truly offended that the professors would even consider taking away his classroom Internet, as he got about an hour's worth of work done on his laptop, before, during and after class, in the down time. When pressed by a prof as to what "work" he was accomplishing, he came up with: responding to emails, reading the newspapers, checking on things, etc. I do this at school too, but on the library and public access computers. If you cut off the classroom access, will the library suddenly become more crowded, meaning you have to provide more desktop computers or open areas for laptops? If the library has wireless access, some spills over into the classrooms, and people can still pick it up there.

Or is the administration considering cutting off access to the whole building? One student said gossip was going around, people were concerned what y'all were up to -- banning laptops? -- on that mysterious faculty listserv of yours. No one really was sure how these things would work out, affect admissions, etc. One woman explained her generation needs to multi-task. She knitted her way through undergrad, and found it helped her concentrate. They feel like time is wasting if they're not doing 3 things at once, giving the example of walking down the street, talking on the phone, or listening to music.

A few people said seeing games and images on other people screens was annoying. One explained she has ADD and these things DO distract. If you don't get there early the day they do the seating chart, there's not a lot extra available seats to switch to. This person, incidentally, reported seeing a semi-porn CSI type video game on the screen, played daily by the guy who sat in front of her. Nobody else said anything when one prof asked, really is porn out there in class?

The discussion, in fact, seemed to get most passionate about this issue. One older student, with a Ph.D who has taught before, was trying to explain how naughty pics might appear on laptop screens in class: if you're checking your email, say from AOL, some people have nude/provocative pics that go with their name IDs. He would just quickly close that window, he said, if it came up. He also was offended the administration would consider shutting off the wireless, said he had undergrads coming to class stoned when he taught, and really, what can you do when the students are adults? His criticism was of teaching methods -- when he can be chatting with the book open, get asked a question, skim to find a line that explains what the prof wants, and then go back to chatting... that's the prof's fault for being boring, and asking simplistic questions.

The first guy I mentioned, spoke up to say he really wasn't sure what was in his laptop either. Things happen. Pop-up ads, innocently typing in whitehouse.something, etc. can take you places you don't want to go. That's when one prof jumped in to give say listen up people, it can be a felony to have some things on your computer, period, and innocent explanations won't help you later down the line. He's seen cases of it in practice.

Another female prof also spoke strongly, I think this was after the student spoke of the CSI-type game, that NEVER should people have to tolerate porn in the classroom, period. This prof asked what students thought of a policy, laptop users sit in back, non-users sit in front. Sounded like a good compromise, but how would it work with the outlets distributed throughout the room? Some people still need to plug in. And does that create artificial distinctions among students?

Overall though, I think that prof may have had it right. She's no dummy, and reported to students that there's an obvious online, hunched- over look that shows you're not just taking notes. Very little typing, more slight scrolling with the mouse. Even if you're listening and doing other things, it's rude to the prof and to fellow students when you don't look up during a discussion, and listen to what others have to say. (It's different from doodling, one prof said, more like opening a newspaper and starting to read it.) Stay open, and give your attention to the speaker. One gives a little speech early on, during the intro/housekeeping portion of class, saying stay engaged, eyes off the screens occasionally, basically please pay attention people, and you might learn something not in the readings.

More than one student suggested, though, it's survival of the fittest, if people want to tune out, maybe they suffer the consequences come test time, and then again, maybe they don't. In the end, the conversation took a turn that teaching styles need to incorporate all the benefits of online resources. But this seemed like a cop-out to me, after we'd spent all that time discussing the low-level reasons people really are online during class. They're not all checking WestLaw or Lexis-Nexis, or sharing extra details about cases, though I'm sure that happens too.

I'll update this post if anyone has other perspectives on the event or the issue.

UPDATE: A recent graduate of another law school offers this:

1) I think that no matter what you do, a student is basically going to get out of it what he or she puts into it.

2) My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science and I really haven't handwritten anything much longer than a grocery list in 20 years. I simply could not take meaningful notes by hand. While my case may be kind of rare, I'm guessing that there are more and more students who would be severely handicapped if they had to take notes by hand. (Thank God VA had a laptop option on the bar!) [Althouse note: At UW, we have not yet decided to let students use laptops for their exams.]

3) It was very helpful for me to have access in the classroom because of my family. My wife had to work full time and caring for the children, ages 8, 11, and 13 now) was a constant problem. A cell phone wasn't really in our budget and would have been really rude in class. But Net access allowed me to be contacted by the kids' schools or my wife, or even the kids directly. ... I could even have set up a camera at the house if I had felt the need. My oldest son has standing instructions to check his email if he gets home and no one is here so I was also able to handle class running over or deciding to meet another student in the library easily.

4) Finally, and I know this is really weird, but I took all my notes using Netscape Composer. It handles outlines much better than Word and produces nice, clean HTML. My basic class method was to make a web page out of the syllabus with each topic linking to a subtopic. Each subtopic web page consisted of my outline of the assigned text material for that subtopic, supplemented by links to my class notes and to cases, statutes, and other sources that were often on the Net or in Lexis. By doing this I was able to maintain some perspective on the material and decrease the time necessary to find something during an open note exam.

Point 3 is especially interesting. I hadn't seen anyone make that point, but I believe it would have a decisive impact on some decisionmakers. And it should!

ANOTHER UPDATE: A UW law student comments on the controversy and thinks the faculty will adopt a lame rule for the sake of adopting a rule. Bet we don't!

YET MORE: Stuart Buck responds to my post:

I can’t imagine a good reason that law school administrators would go out of their way to offer free Internet access in law school classrooms. ... A law school might as well pay for a poker game and a clown act to take place in the back of a classroom, as well as handing out free newspapers for students to read during class.

And Will Baude responds:

Mr. Buck's attitude seems to be that since the benefits of internet use are very small the school should not subsidize distraction. I think the proper analysis is the reverse-- the marginal increase in distraction is uncertain, and in any case the costs of not-paying attention are personal rather than external. Meanwhile, the internet provides great rewards to some who use it well, which I think swamp the horrors of students' reading ... blogs during class.

I need to point out that my law school is considering going out of its way to turn off the wireless access in classrooms. We want wireless in the building generally, especially in the library.

Students distracting students -- classroom wireless access.

The law faculty here is having an email list debate about the perceived problem of students using the wireless internet access during class to check websites, do email, IM, etc. Blogging hasn't been mentioned yet, but presumably, where there is wireless access, there is blogging. Some faculty don't like the idea that students aren't paying full attention. That has always been the case of course -- who pays full attention to a lecture? Personally, I find doing something like playing a simple video game or doodling helps me pay more attention to a lecture. There is nothing that special about wireless access when it comes to this complaint. I consider the inability to lock onto a speech and pay 100% attention to be part of what is, in all, a positive human capacity: we retain our independent thoughts and desires and do not achieve oneness with a person who is talking at us.

But there is a more specific problem: the way computer screens distract other students. How much of a distraction is a computer screen? I know when I was a law student, I chose to sit in the front row because I found the backs of people's heads distracting. There are always distractions. In fact, it's funny how distracting the least interesting things are when you're at a lecture. Suddenly, you want to watch someone take a sip of coffee or sharpen a pencil. This is human nature, part of our connection to the concrete world. We want to see things, feel things. This is good.

Do students really mind the images on the other computers? If you glance around and can see which blog someone else is reading or that the Drudge Report has put up the revolving siren image, can't you deal with that? If you find it especially hard, choose a front row seat.

Now, somebody in the faculty email discussion said that some students have complained that other students look at pornographic images during class. I was surprised to hear that, because what student would be so disrespectful of other students and so unconcerned about being disliked? Is that really happening? That is so out of line with basic social etiquette that I find it hard to believe. But if it is, can't the students apply some peer pressure to these social outliers? IM the clod.
Anyway, send me some email, law students, and tell me if I'm not taking the problem seriously enough. On the faculty email list, I offered a proposal that there should just be a clear rule against displaying any images on screen during class. You can have all the text you want, but no images. But really, I'm inclined to think the whole thing is just not a real problem.

UPDATE: You know, it wasn't that long ago that people thought the students shouldn't be typing on laptops during class, because that was too distracting. In the early days of laptops, some students had laptops that they kept in their backpacks during class. They thought it would be offensive to use them to take notes. Now, no one thinks of that as a distraction.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My colleague Gordon Smith offers his thoughts on the subject. My son John, a first year law student, writes:

I don't think the school should have rules dealing with distracting images (unless, of course, they're offensive images). I sometimes let my screen saver (a slideshow of photos) turn on in class. It's possible that another student could start looking at my photos and stop listening to the prof. But I just don't feel that that would be MY responsibility!

Note that distracting images are nowhere near as bad as distracting noises. You can't just close your ears to certain noise, whereas you can choose not to look right at someone's computer screen. And you NEED to HEAR the prof; you don't need to SEE the prof.

If it's a problem for students to display distracting images on their computer screens, then shouldn't students also be prohibited from wearing flashy clothing?

My property prof is always putting up extraneous images on her PowerPoint slides, e.g. while she's discussing a case about marriage she'll put up a photo of a random married couple that she got off the web. Should SHE be forbidden from showing distracting Internet images?!

Law profs shouldn't deal with the problem of "not paying attention" by coming up with regulations; they should deal with the problem by making their classes more interesting!

But wireless access should be blocked in the classrooms (as it is at Cornell), because it destroys the Socratic method to let students IM and email answers to each other in class.

A Yale undergraduate who is planning to go to law school wrote this:

I personally don't bring my laptop to class -- I like writing down my notes, because I type quickly enough that if I typed notes I would just transcribe the lecture and glean nothing from it, and I think it is a valuable skill to discern on the spot what information is important or not -- but a ton of my friends do. And of course there is rampant IMing, emailing, surfing (not porn sites though...what total creep looks at porn in class?!) but I wanted to mention to you something that professors might not think about, which is students using the internet in to look up additional information on the topic at hand.

I've seen this happen plenty of times. The professor brings up a new topic, or mentions a particularly interesting anecdote, and students start Googling away to find out more. If that isn't a sign of the intellectual curiousity that we as college students are always encouraged to have, I don't know what is.

On a sidenote, I don't find laptops particularly distracting, unless the lecture is poorly delivered enough to warrant my desire to FIND distractions. And if that's the case, I will find distractions anywhere -- typically in the crossword puzzle, which is something that just cries out for collaborative whispering and note passing among students. Oh, the horror!! Ban the crossword!!

A law student writes:

I LOVE it. I am like you, in that I can't really pay 100% attention, and in my undergrad, I'd just doodle. This way, I am doing productive things like reading your blog, catching up on the news, doing assignments for other classes and work, talking to my wife at home on the home computer, etc. Not only that, but when I am really interested in something the teacher says, I'll go to Lexis and pull up the case, or do a quick search on Google and find that his facts are all wrong and therefore, so is his argument. More than a few times, a friend has been called on, and been way off, but with a little helpful IM, he's back on track. Wireless is a beautiful thing, and would only help the students. Like you say, those who won't pay attention, wouldn't pay attention anyway. Moreover, I've found that my attention span is about the same as it was before. If class is interesting, I'll pay attention.

As for being a distraction, the way our classrooms are set up, you can see what website someone is on, but you can't read it (too small font), so it isn't a temptation. I've never seen porn during class, and I sit closer to the back in each class. I have seen at one time, approximately 95% of the laptop users in class (which at any time is between 60 and 90%) playing solitaire during one particular dry lecture.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: This is very interesting, from a fairly recent graduate of NYU School of Law [ADDED: it's Matt Marcotte of Throwing Things]:

[D]uring my law school time …, Internet misuse during class was rampant -- online gambling, day trading, checking the news, etc.

Honestly, I never found it that distracting, and it's basically unregulable without doing a complete ban on Internet use, which I think is a bad idea--having Internet access allows access to a wide range of information and commentary which (when used well) can open up class discussion dramatically.

But a story on how broadband can be good--I was actually in class on September 11 in New York. At the time, I didn't have a broadband hookup capable laptop and sat near the back of the class. While the professor (who was apparently wholly oblivious -- not out of malice, but out of general obliviousness) prattled on, a student in the front row was constantly refreshing various Internet news sources on his browser and putting up the headlines on his screen so everyone behind him could read. (And yes, we heard the thud as the buildings collapsed in class, as the professor droned on.) So sometimes, "distraction" is a good thing.

Carnival of the Doodles.

Ambivablog has taken up the doodle mantle, which I dropped a while back. She's got some nice doodles at the link and is trying to put together a Carnival of the Doodles, so why don't you help? She's raised the issue of defining the doodle: "Honor system: we'll just have to take your word that it's an honest-to-God, spaced-out doodle and not a deliberate fake." So, what, once you think about the fact that you are drawing, you've deprived the thing of its essential doodlosity? I was more coming at the subject from the other direction: once you call something a "drawing," you invite serious art criticism. By offering your drawing up as a doodle, you fend off judgment. You're thinking people will look with a more forgiving eye and be slightly entertained or say "that's pretty cool." But by Ambivablog's account, you'd be a fraud if you did this.

A drawing for the last Monday of the semester.

This was drawn while I listened to someone else speak last week, so let me use it to mark the last day my Monday-Wednesday-Friday class will listen to me speak. Who knows what doodles they've drawn in the margins of their notebooks? I suppose with laptop computers, far fewer doodles are drawn and far more games of solitaire are played. Of course, one could compose a blog entry. If I went to law school these days, I'd have a laptop, and I'd keep my fingers typing constantly, mixing observations about the teacher, my classmates, and my mood with the substantive content of the course. After class, I'd cut out the extraneous material as I compressed my notes down to a study-able outline. If I had the time, I'd paste the cut material into another document which I'd compress and rewrite for whatever insight and humor I could find. If I had the nerve, I'd make that a blog entry. Yes, now that I think about it, law school would be much better with a laptop and a blog than with a Pelikan pen to doodle in the margin of a legal pad.

A genuine doodle.

Exactly what if feels like to listen to a moderately interesting speech:



UPDATE: This email amused me:

Gloriosky, you're channelling the chaps who carved the wall art in the ancient Incan or Mayan Temples!

Quick, tell us how the Egyptian pyramids were constructed before you fall out of this trance!

My eyesight and a doodle scrap.

Sometimes I get so involved in staring at the computer screen all day without taking a break that my eyes hurt and I can't see well the next day. Part of it is a failure to blink often enough -- as if I just don't want to take the time. Few people in this world have worn hard contact lenses as long as I have (since 1964), and I'm just conditioned not to pay any attention to eye irritation. But that last post is irritating the hell out of me, that Reznor 90s-font-nostalgia GIF. Remember when that hard-to-see fontage was everywhere? Remember Might magazine?



I'm sure there are great 90s graphic design nostalgia sites out there. Send me a link if you know of one.



Meanwhile, this is the last weekend of the semester, a good time to get some exam writing done. So today's doodle comes in the form of a scribbled post it, part of a scrambled corner of my office desk:

Doodle of the day.

A surrealistic still life discovered two days ago while idly wandering with the penpoint on my notepad and listening to a talk.

The last week of law school, and an old law school doodle.

It's the last full week of the semester here at the law school. Consequently, I feel a lot of pressure to get through the material--none of the usual expanding into areas that stimulate good discussion. It's time to be crisp and on task. You can't just increase the flow of information because it's close to the end. That's not fair. Yet you have to get to the end somehow. In one class, we've stayed on schedule and will finish simply by continuing at the pace we've followed all semester. In the other class, I've had to use the technique of cutting readings and switching to lecturing. But then there is a special obligation to make the lectures clear. Things we would have puzzled over, had we read a case on the subject, must be simplified now.



I'll have some more news-oriented blogging later. I'm especially interested in two federalism cases to be argued in the Supreme Court today. But, for now, I'll leave you with a doodle I did years ago in the margin of my law school class notes. I used to find drawing in the margins like this helped me focus on what I was hearing. The date was 5/6/81, sometime close to the end of the semester in Federal Courts, where maybe we were encountering new material, tying things together, and still leaving a few threads dangling.

Doodle of the day.

Doodle of the day.

Happy Thanksgiving. This was drawn some years ago in Paris, hence the big ashtray on the table. I don't recommend smoking for Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving smoke--that's not a tradition, not for me anyway. But I do recommend a nice glass of wine, and whatever else you've decided to make.







I've decided to make arrosto di maiale al latte--pork loin braised in milk (which I know sounds horribly wrong from some religious perspectives). This is an old favorite recipe from Marcella Hazan's "Classic Italian Cookbook," which is by far my favorite cookbook. After cooking for two and a half hours, the milk is not at all recognizable as milk, but has become a delicious gravy.



I have not had this dish, which we used to make all the time, since 1989. I was just thinking yesterday about how much I love it and why I had not made it for so long. It took no time to remember the reason: the last time I sat down to eat it, I received a phone call and heard shocking news about my father. Shortly thereafter, my father died. Thanksgiving is a good time to gather with the family that you do have, but it can also make you think of the ones who have gone. Yet I didn't make a special Thanksgiving effort to think about my father. I was just running through my mental file of festive meat dishes and remembered that pork roast that became associated by chance so long ago with a sad memory. Nevertheless, it has been 15 years, and that pork roast was quite delicious. The moratorium is over.

Doodle of the day.

Yesterday, I looked through a folder of class notes that I had kept since 1981, when I studied Federal Courts at NYU School of Law. I suppose I kept these notes (and not all my law school notes) because this was the first course I taught here at Wisconsin (where we call it "Federal Jurisdiction"). I've never referred to these notes, in my teaching preparations, but I've somehow always thought maybe I would. I still do!



There are 167 legal-pad pages of notes, written in black fountain pen. I'm shocked at how many topics we covered in that class, far more than I cover when I teach the course. How did we do it? A week of these notes is copied from someone else's: I had a baby on March 17th of that semester. That fell on spring break, luckily, but, having a C-section, it took another week to make my way back to school. Consequently, the Eleventh Amendment has always been a special mystery to me, but I have discovered over the years, that it is a bit of a mystery to everyone.



There are many marginal doodles in these 167 pages. Here's one:







UPDATE: An emailer writes:

I saw your doodle today and have to say that it looks like an individual contour from a contour map of steep terrain.



I used to be a mining engineer, and, to be more precise, would produce maps that estimate where mineral deposits would intersect the surface. Your doodle looks like a map that would be produced for such an investigation.



Its odd to see something so familiar in such an unusual venue. The unusual aspect is that the doodle looks like a mineral deposit that is dipping to the right where it intersects more surface than it does on the left. That your spacing would emulate this scenario surprised me. Of course you may have seen this type of map before.

Maybe I was a mining engineer in a previous lifetime. Spooky!



ANOTHER UPDATE: My email correspondent writes back:

Just checked your site and appreciate you including my comment. I probably didn't make myself clear but the previous doodle was the one I was referring too.



So if you get comments that my comments don't make sense, you should know that I was referring [this] doodle.



Since I work for NASA now, I'd have to say that the doodle the update is attached to looks more like a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Well, that proves I didn't steal my ideas from mining engineering maps!

Doodle of the day.