[carstimon]

There are two situations which black/white boards are awesome for. -Giving lectures in subjects which desperately need drawing and writing. Look at what happens at 1:16:27 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPSEpDq6QYc The speaker can just go draw a picture, in response to a question. I know of no alternative which can do something like that nearly as well.

-Collaborating in subjects which need drawing and writing. I can stand next to someone and talk over a problem. They write some formula on the board. I insert some additional bits and pieces that they missed. We draw pictures.

I'd like to hear what you think replaces black/white boards.

The black vs. whiteboard thing is a whole different issue :)

[lisper]

Look, I have nothing against blackboards, just as I have nothing against horses. Horses are really handy in some situations. If you're in the wilderness and you need to cross a stream, a horse can be just the thing. There's no technology that can compete with a horse in that case.

But to constrain your infrastructure (notation in the case of mathematics, roads in the case of horses) according to the needs of a blackboard or a horse is, IMHO, a serious mistake in this day and age. If you design your roads for cars instead of horses you get tremendous productivity boosts, even as you lose the ability to deal with some edge cases.

Notice that to find an example of the real utility of a blackboard you had to bypass >95% of the lecture and go to the very end. Imagine how much better things would be if the rest of the lecture had been presented as source code that a student could analyze and manipulate and error-check using some automated tool.

[carstimon]

The great thing is we're not constraining our notation. As reikonomusha said, the standard notation is easier to read. Other notation is better for programming or certain things, and that's what we use there.

Re: your last paragraph. I only went to the end because I knew that there must have been a good example in the questions. If you want I can give you examples from the middle of a talk.

[j2kun]

To constrain your infrastructure according to the needs of a computer is also silly. Imagine if, in order to hum a tune, one needed to write sheet music using a programming language. Or if every spoken conversation were halted the instant a word is used incorrectly.

Mathematics (and a lecture on mathematics) is closer in nature to a conversation than a road.

[edit sp]

[wtallis]

Computers can have pen input too for situations where that's more efficient, and for less expense than that lecture hall's complicated apparatus of multiple sliding blackboards to get around the finite drawing area limitation that computers don't have.