In no particular order:
- Wikipedia is mentioned A LOT more.
This is obviously some what to do with the fact that when I was last in school (2005) Wikipedia had ~500,000 English entries[citation needed]. Now in 2010 it has ~3,278,000 English entries. Of course it’s not just a shear increase in volume, over those 5 years those original 500,000 entries have been refined and expanded.
Also, before a certain demographic jumps at me, there is a great and overwhelming understanding that everything on Wikipedia may be completely inaccurate. It’s typically brought up as a “for more information on this topic which is completely tangential from our actual course material check Wikipedia” or “If you’re having trouble understanding topic X then Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, with graphics and links to more explanations”. It’s not (surprise, surprise) like everyone thought it would be waaay back with people citing it as a legitimate source.
That said, there are of course certain people that don’t understand this. Life is statistics.
- Cellphones are more ingrained.
People forget to turn their ringers off in class, which blows me away. Apparently I’m the only one though, the professors must have given up trying to care and just give a scowl and move on. But people have been forgetting to turn off their ringers ever since cell phones could fit in pockets. What I mean by more ingrained is that when it rings, the people don’t check to see who’s calling - they just silence it. Back when it was more novel to have a portable phone, everyone always looked to see who it was -- which gave the impression of evaluating the social worth of taking the call over ignoring it and doing whatever they had been doing when it went off.
Also by ingrained, I mean that EVERYONE has one. To paraphrase from one of my professors this past semester “If you’ve already seen this, it will likely be pretty boring for the next 20 or so minutes. Please feel free to text your neighbor, just try and keep the chatting down so as to not distract the people who are new to this material.” Not to mention the ability to text Google.
Text Google? This is 2010, not 2008. As a rough estimate I’d say 75% of students have “smart phones”. Now we can look up the vaguely related Wikipedia article as soon as its mentioned. And we do.
- The professors are...different.
My first semester my “professors” were 2 grad students and an “instructor” which is a postdoc who has no research responsibilities but appears to be used by the university to offset the cost of wasting valuable professors to teach introductory courses.
My second semester my professors were actual professors. One gave the distinct impression that they had no taste for teaching. By taking this (required) course we were wasting valuable research time god damn-it! Actually I had another professor who gave this vibe in an even stronger way. I transferred out of his section though.
Conversely, I did have one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had in my life this past semester. In a 3 hour class I would go in knowing either nothing but the name of the topic we were to cover, or knowing just what a quick Wikipedia skim had taught me. At the end of the lecture I would leave thinking “Why did we just talk about that for 3 hours? I’m fairly sure I’ve known that stuff inside and out my whole life.” Those 3 hours were spent in mostly a lecture format but with a heavy encouragement of questions. Those of us that took advantage of that probably got the most out of it.
Which brings me to my next point...
- Small class sizes really do make a difference
This is something they tell you at Kenyon, but you have to take it on faith. I think the largest lecture hall there is some where around 150 seats. I saw signs outside of a 200+ seat lecture hall at SFU the other week saying “CHEM 101 Final. Surnames L-T”.
In the bigger classes the professor can’t talk to you, they can talk to everyone or no one. In smaller classes I can ask a question and I can get an answer. Probably more importantly, if the format of the small class has become comfortable then not only can I ask a question, but the answer I get might not come from the professor -- it might come from another student (another I!) This has some pretty great ramifications for everyone involved.
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