Class acts

Just a thought. A lot of students today use laptops / netbooks in class. Because of this "emerging trend", there's this new law school lingo that has recently emerged. When I first entered law school, there were at least 2 technology-related law school terms related to classes that I was supposed to be familiar with:

radyo (verb) - conveying the right answer (sometimes, it could be an educated guess or a wild guess) to your classmate, usually a seatmate, by means of mouthing, whispering or just saying the word while such classmate is reciting as a form of assistance, which may or may not anger the professor

-and-

tv (verb) - same as above, except it's conveyed by means of writing the answer on paper; one variation is typing the answer on a laptop screen and then enlarging the answer so that it can be seen several rows back

As technology advanced and as the UP College Law jumped onto the wi-fi bandwagon, so too have class recitations or class discussions evolved. Recently, I've been seeing a lot of comments on facebook about "livefeeds." I got the joke, and I agree that it's funny. As it turns out, there's now "livefeed" of classes via students surfing the net and communicating through social networks, specifically, facebook. I think, for incoming freshmen, it's not enough to familiarize them with radyo and tv. Livefeed must now be on the list.

Unlike radyo and tv, however, which sometimes do not anger, but instead, relieve professors who are getting impatient with the person reciting and hopeful of moving the discussion forward, "livefeed" is not something professors will ever appreciate. The problem with "livefeed" is that it's not so much that persons outside classrooms are tuned into what's going inside the classroom, and maybe even, learn from what's going on inside the classroom. Rather, it's the student that's actually tuned out and jeopardizing learning inside the classroom.

I do not claim to be holy. I use my netbook in classrooms as well, for the purpose of "multi-tasking".



Salma F. Angkaya
Entry #10