By rmay (also here) on Toonpool:

Image: Defendant standing in front of a judge.
Caption: Judge: “… plus thirty days for not turning off your damn cell phone”.

Bonus link: Roy Keane’s reaction to a reporter who doesn’t turn a ringing phone off.

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There are some – related – articles in today’s Irish Independent on themes which have featured on this blog. A report published yesterday by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) shows that the number of students going to college has hit a record high (the Irish Times ran the same story under the headline that there are more students than farmers in Ireland) and that courses in science and computing are now back in favour.

However, technology is not necessarily an uncritically good thing, as is shown by the headline to another story: I’m so addicted to email, Facebook and Twitter, I have to hide it from my wife …. In that piece, reviewing The tyranny of email by John Freeman, James Delingpole owns up to his own addiction to communications technology. Of course, he is not the only person whose life is being ruined by email. Moreover, a similar addiction drives the use of mobile phones and laptops in class as increasingly popular displacement activities.

Finally, and a little more seriously, the print edition – but not, so far as I can see, the online edition (though it may in time be published in the archives of the Education section or, perhaps, of the Technology sections) – has a really interesting piece on distance learning at third level, discussing the Open University and Hibernia College. Online education poses both challenges and opportunities for bricks and mortar universities, and they will have to be faced and embraced if universities are to survive and thrive.

The moral of the stories is, of course, that if the undergraduates who now outnumber farmers can’t tear themselves away from their email and social networking sites, they might decide to eschew traditional universities and study online instead!

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On the sin of mobile or cell phones ringing in class, here’s a YouTube clip of Hugh Jackman stopping a performance because a phone is going off (and remains unanswered and unsilenced for quite a long time!):

As usual, the BBC has more detail. Of course, it’s not the first time that an actor has been annoyed by interrupting phones: like Jackman, but unlike David Suchet Richard Griffiths has stopped a play when a phone went off; but, unlike Jackman, he asked the offending audience member to leave. However, angry actors had better beware: don’t smash the phone or throw it at the offender!

Update: the original YouTube video to which I provided a link is down due to a copyright claim by TMZ, presumably relating to the clip to which this post is now linked.

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The current edition of Times Higher Education (I can’t get used to this odd title, I keep wanting to add “Supplement“; but it was dropped some time ago, so I must resist the temptation) has articles on the temptations that academics and students find hard to resist.

First, the academics:

The seven deadly sins of the academy

… The inward-looking, incestuous atmosphere of university life has long made it a breeding ground for some of the canonical deadly sins. … It would not be hard to draw up a list of traditional academic deadly sins on the basis of such examples. But how many have survived in today’s academy …? Which have disappeared? And, assuming goodwill hasn’t broken out on all sides, what have they been replaced by?

Modernisation and a huge expansion of the sector have brought fresh air into even the stuffiest quadrangles. So, if people in general are subject to avarice, envy, gluttony, pride, lust, sloth and wrath, what are the vices particularly prominent on campuses and in common rooms now? …

The answer, it seems, is:

• Sartorial Inelegance (this matter is always in the eye of the beholder, especially if my tie is too loud);
• Procrastination (this post is evidence that I occasionally succumb, though elsewhere in the THE there is an article advising academics to blog, so really, I’m working, honestly, I am …);
• Snobbery (this will, no doubt, be presumed against me, based on where I work, so I’ll just move swiftly on, waving at the riff-raff [add insulting link to taste here] as I go);
• Lust (no comment; does the Fifth Amendment apply in cyber-space?);
• Arrogance (oops, see my Kingsfield post);
• Complacency (I’ve never seen any need to worry – the recession isn’t going to have an impact on the public service, right?);
• Pedantry (oops, see my Fulsome Pedantry post).

By way of balance, there is also an article about students’ sins (one of which, at least, has detained me here in the past):

Mind your manners, not the phone, please

Students’ use of mobiles tops the list of uncivil teaching disruptions … They turn up late without doing the required reading and then they sit chatting to their friends, texting or looking bored. Just when you thought you finally had everyone’s full attention, a mobile phone rings, and students start packing up their things 15 minutes before the end of the session. If this sounds familiar, it is because these are among the most common examples of student “incivility” in university lecture and seminar rooms, according to a new study. …

Enough said.

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Given my views about mobile phones in class, I’m grateful to John Naughton for his post about this YouTube clip:

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By way of update to my recent post about laptops in class, here’s Torill Mortensen thinking with her fingers about recent research on the consequences of mobile phones going off in class:

Why we don’t like cell-phones in class

… Apart from being annoying, distracting and rude, ringing cellphones makes students forget what they learned before and during the ringing of the phone. If the ring tone is a popular, well-known piece of music, this is even worse.

For my classes, I have this rule which has these consequences; in my view, those who visit such consequences upon offending and offensive mobile phones are not criminals but heroes!

Torill concludes with excellent advice for students in class:

So: That mute button? Use it!

Hear hear!

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