From the University of Pennsylvania newspaper:
… There’s no reason why students should use the Internet so heavily during class. Unless a professor asks everyone to navigate to a certain page, open laptops do nothing more than attract eyeballs that should be attending to lecture notes. Bright, shiny monitors in front of a college student during lecture are evolved bug-zapper lamps.
Sure, you may say that you’re not affected by it. That you can pay attention, take good notes and still catch up on the latest headlines at nytimes.com. Or that you have the discipline to remain oblivious to your neighbor’s open PennLink page. But then you’d be lying to yourself.
The evidence? Take this annual example. Every spring, there’s that one fraternity pledge who causes a stir in a big lecture class because he’s watching porn in the first row. If no one was paying attention to the laptop ahead of him or her, the annual commotion would never occur – but it always does, without fail. Just wait a few weeks from now.
… [L]ast spring, the University of Chicago Law School … cut out non-class related computer use. As Dean Saul Levmore said in his letter to the school’s students and faculty, “we know that class time is not for shopping and e-mailing.”
… In the name of the New Year, let’s all make a resolution to cut our internet activity while a professor is talking. If not in the name of our own GPA, then for the sake of our classmate whose notes may suffer because they’re distracted by the porn two rows up.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:24PM
How ’bout them Quakers? What a stand up bunch.