Issue 16, Fall 1998

William A. McEachern, Editor

Two Cheers For Low Tech

Students are getting used to slicker classroom presentations. Professionally drawn overhead transparencies like those provided by textbook publishers look a lot neater that what you could draw on the board. But they usually offer a picture of a complete graph. Because students are busy copying that graph, they pay less attention to your discussion of it.

The blackboard is an especially good medium for presenting graphs in a step-by-step manner. Students can follow your moves and duplicate the graph in their notes. You can stop along the way and provide the rationale and intuition of each additional element. Also, as an instructor, you must think about what you are doing each step of the way. The use of pre-drawn overhead transparencies requires no such thought. In a sense, with pre-drawn material, graphs can move from the overhead transparency to the student's notes without passing through the mind of either instructor or student.

At a more sophisticated level, instructors use PC-based on-screen graphing and provide students with printouts of exhibits to follow along. The problem with this is that students usually don't have to draw anything themselves. To me, there is a big difference between looking at a finished graph and drawing that graph-the difference between riding as a passenger and being at the wheel.

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