Flashes of Panic

This being a CS program, there are plenty of us with laptops, and it’s not uncommon to see them open in class. They’re handy tools; with the back of the screen to the instructor, there’s no indication given of whether you’re attentively taking notes which you will actually be able to read, or if you’ve got the email client (or chat client) open, aside from whether you manage to contribute to the class.

I’ve resisted having the machine open most of the time, figuring that I would rather not even offer the option of inattentiveness. Today, I experimented with the open laptop.

It was a class that leans heavily on Java, and the professor works frequently with examples on the course website. He has his laptop jacked in to the classroom projector, which puts his browser window (at a relatively low resolution, in order to be big enough to read) on the screen. As a result, there’s only a dozen or so lines of code visible at a time, which makes it hard to grasp them in context. When he flips back and forth between the running code and the source, that’s another chance to lose the context.

Today, I grabbed the code from the website early in the class and pasted it into text files open in TextWrangler. With the whole screen available, I could see much more without scrolling, and look around the project if I needed to follow my own thread. And I could compile and run whenever I needed. Despite having that potential distractor, I actually understood more of what was going on. I was actually surprised at how quickly the class passed, compared to my usual clock-watching in there.

Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that the building’s wireless connection went down quite early in the class session.

Next step is getting Xcode running (I keep missing software, and discovering that I had installed it at work, not on the laptop,) and using that instead.

Now Playing: The Myths You Made from Somewhere Else by The Church