E-mail at break time is accepted, but not during class time. Keppler looks up from his e-mail to say, It s not advisable to be distracted from the class discussion. And if the program crashes when you do it, you re in big trouble, and everybody knows you re the one that did it. The break is over, and Berque starts the second half of the class with a joke. It s a bad mathematics joke, but it illustrates a point about the next section of class material.
Students understand the math point, but don t fully appreciate the professor s sense of humor.
Throughout, Berque writes notes either on his video tablet screen or the whiteboard, sometimes drawing in various colors to better illustrate the concepts. When caught without a stylus, his finger works just as well as a writing instrument on the whiteboard. However, he s careful not to use his finger too often. Earlier in the semester, he wrote too much and raised a painful blister on the end of his finger. Technology in the classroom is meaningless, unless it coincides with our teaching philosophies and also allows us to convey concepts in a more effective way than we could without the technology.