A week into classes now, shaping up to be an interesting semester. Federal Courts, Telecommunications, Criminal Appellate Clinic, and an Independent Study. Yay 3L, I guess. But it was a comment on day one of Fed Courts that prompted this entry: the professor, based upon the quality of final exams, is convinced that using laptop computers in class short-circuits critical thinking and analysis. Her evidence? That as students use laptops to take transcriptive notes, the insightfulness and flexibility of their thinking on exams declines.
It's funny, the more things my computer can do, the more minimalist I've become. I've got this blog, but I post to it FAR less than I Twitter. I have e-mail, but I use IM/GTalk more often. I have a whole stack of fancy word-processing and writing applications, but I do most of my writing in plaintext (exception: class notes).
I stopped using Linux not long after I graduated from college—my priorities had changed, and spending an evening trying to get my sound to work after a kernel update didn't seem like quite as much fun. I don't write my own shell scripts anymore.
Maybe it's part of growing up. Maybe it's part of the technology maturing, where the differences become more of quantity and less of quality. Maybe I've just become a more perfect consumer, shifting from computer-as-object to computer-as-verb. I do lots of things with it, but at this point I kind of want it to be as transparent as possible.
Who knows. All that said, I still vastly prefer Macs to PC's, and I still get some joy out of using this wonderbox to elegantly solve a problem. For example, video skype still kind of feels like magic. But computers AS computers just don't interest me so much anymore.
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