a conundrum

From Inside Higher Ed:

Hey You! Pay Attention

The students sit in class, tapping away at their laptops as the boring old law professor mechanically plods through his lecture. Except one. Instead of hunching over a portable computer or a notebook, he’s playing solitaire with a deck of cards on his desk. The professor halts his droning. “What are you doing?” he demands. The student shrugs. “My laptop is broken,” he says.

It was a sketch, performed at a Yale Law School skit night some time ago, that sent a chill through the professors’ section in the auditorium.

Ian Ayres, the William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale, remembers it well. Long a critic of giving students free reign to surf the Web during class, he’s tried multiple approaches to discouraging laptop users from distracting themselves with e-mail, games (like solitaire) and gossip. Now his theories are being put to the test.

Late last month, as students returned from spring break, the University of Chicago Law School announced that Internet access would be blocked from classrooms. While individual professors at law schools have created policies banning laptops or allowing them only for specific uses — and while some colleges don’t even have classroom Internet access, or mandate classroom-only use without any enforcement — the move by Chicago appears to be the first institution-wide directive of its kind. Already, there’s been an uproar among students and even senior administrators, while some law professors have stepped up to defend the policy.

As first reported in the blog Above the Law, Dean Saul Levmore sent an e-mail message to students on March 25 announcing the change, which came as a surprise to many. Calling the policy “experimental,” he said it would now be considered a “breach of our norms” to use the Internet during class time. . .