Surfing the Net in Class

  Saul Levmore, Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, has announced that the school will ban internet access in the classroom to eliminate internet surfing.  Ian Ayres (Yale)  agrees with this policy, as  does Brian Leiter (Chicago).   Kevin Yamamoto (South Texas) argues that laptop surfing in class is a significant cognitive impediment.  I remain skeptical.  Students who do not wish to engage the material will find some method to check out, whether or not they have a laptop handy.  Moreover, if you can't make your class more interesting than solitaire or the Drudge Report or the Daily Kos, maybe you should retool your approach to teaching. 

Comments

[lawprawf]

I've seen this argument many times. Of course students have always found a way to goof off and not pay attention. But professors didn't enable this sort of behavior by passing out crossword puzzles. And the old sort of (mostly subtle) goofing around is not remotely comparable to what's occurring in classes today. I've sat in on a good many classes. Even in what I consider to be the classes of my "best" colleagues (some of them award-winning teachers), this nonsense is occurring on better than half of the laptops. It's thus too simplistic to say that teachers should just be doing a "better job."