If laptops are banned from classrooms, when can we get our blog reading done?

I would never be able to take down anything resembling adequate notes without my computer.

I think these professors seem to have forgotten who their customers are. If the students aren't engaged, maybe its because you aren't engaging them...

Is Cole from Boston? What is this heavy-handed reference to the "[distracted] student who is checking Red Sox statistics"? Would a student from Atlanta, GA, not be as distracted checking Braves statistics? Or the clear-eyed, bushy-tailed Canadian from Edmonton, checking his or her beloved Oilers statistics? I submit to you a case of steel-toed provincialism! Cole may represent some Gitmo detainees, but he has to represent a Brahmin!

insert 'yet' in between 'has' and 'to' in the last sentence, above

This trains students to multitask - which is what the workplace is all about these days. Following a lecture while shopping for shoes is just like participating in a conference call while sending email.

If schools want, they should prevent (if possible) wireless Internet in classrooms but laptops are especially for taking and organizing notes. Especially for those who have terrible handwriting. Yes, people can still play freecell but the majority of people slacking off are surfing the web.

If Professors have a problem with this, they should provide us with notes. Even eliminating laptops does not prevent people from day-dreaming or finding alternatives to paying attention.

I love that my fellow students are constantly futzing around on the internet. I take notes on my laptop and never connect to the internet, and kill them all on exams!

"I love that my fellow students are constantly futzing around on the internet. I take notes on my laptop and never connect to the internet, and kill them all on exams!"

Congratulations, douche.

PrawfsBlawg has some interesting thoughts on this topic by Rick Garnett and others in the comments section.
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/04/laptops_and_law.html

@5:27 - Neither law professors nor law schools consider students to be their customers. For them, students are products in a pipeline to be shipped out the door to the real customers: law firms.

for what it's worth--Unlike most of my classmates, I never used a laptop in law school and am now in a job that requires me to be in court every day. no skill I learned in law school prepared me better for my career than the ability to take fast, accurate handwritten notes. I can read a witness's words back to him for cross-examination, for example. In the real world, people don't use laptops in the courtroom, folks. Typing your notes is doing you no good at all.

I can't read my own handwriting. Its pathetic, but true. Its way too late to learn now - and the harder i try the more my writing looks like a pre-schooler on crack.

I've been sitting at the back of my law school taking notes on paper for three years. Internet surfing, IM, and game playing have always been rampant. I've even seen people drunk and looking at porn. Compared with my laptop free undergraduate experience 10 years ago the students are far less engaged and yet strangely, have more sense of entitlement. I don't think laptops are all to blame though.

There are people who take amazing notes on laptops, I know because we share when people miss class.

No one has ever given me a positive reason for needing an internet hookup in class (beyond being able to pull Westlaw headnotes when you haven't read). Perhaps the solution is to block wireless and figure that the people who want to pay $100 an hour to play solitaire deserve the grades they get.

I graduated from law school long before the days of wifi. I wish we had it back then. It would have made some horrible classes with horrible profs (E's & T's, Secured Transactions, etc.) much, much more tolerable.

Heh. Law professors considering students as customers? Good fuckin' luck getting that idea to float.

And yes, when the web browsers get called on, it is always painfully obvious that they haven't been following the conversation. When attention-payers raise their hands just so they don't have to hear every question repeated, and the web browsers call them gunners, I become sad.

Where I went to law school, they rolled out a revamped building in 2001 with an internet port at every seat. Then, less than two years later, they instituted wireless throughout the building. I have heard that since I graduated they installed a system that blocks wireless access within classrooms because of the distractions the good professor mentions. I don't expect a refund, but an apology would be nice, since I'll be paying for some small portion of this technology for the next 20 years.

I actually had a similar experience in law school, where my professors banned laptops in classrooms and there was quite the uproar from students. In the end, however, I found little difference in my abilities to take notes by computer and by hand. Most of my classmates tended to agree to that sentimate, despite not wanting to admit it. Computers don't make you a good notetaker in the slightest, but I do think professors may be too quick to blame the computer for the disengaged student.

I need the lap top to take notes that make sense. But it is impossible to not click IE as soon as some idiot classmate starts yapping. They should just get rid of wireless.

Don't they have a curve at Georgetown?

I would have been so fucked if this rule came down in one of my classes in law school. I type WAY faster than I write, and can barely read my own handwriting at this stage of my life. I mean, literally -- i can hardly read it. i wouldn't even know where to begin making an outline if i wrote my notes by hand. i think the laptop revolution made me way more successful in law school than I would have been otherwise. And i wasn't just steno-ing by rote -- I was thinking to myself, organizing the information on the page, asking myself questions in brackets next to my notes, etc. Note taking on a computer has made me a much better writer/ thinker. Today's law students are tomorrow's brief-writers.

This guy should just issue an edict that internet cords/ wireless cards must be pulled out and placed where he can see them in his class. This laptop ban is kind of like demanding all notes be carved into wax tablets by stylus because newfangled ink pens are too colorful and distracting.

Hey 7:12 -- I bet that was a great school where your classmates agreed with your "sentimate".

Gallion OUT!

Considering that the vast majority of these law students will be in workplaces in front of a computer for the rest of their lives, teaching students how to DEAL with the 21 Century distractions of the internet would be a better task in shaping them as lawyers. A well placed "I do not tolerate surfing, IMing, and e-mailing in my classroom" would help create this discipline.

Law students are generally pretty good at cost/benefit analysis. If they're saying that playing a worthless game is more valuable than listening to the professor's lecture, it seems like the professor should do something to add more value to his class. Not eliminate his competition.

Graduate students in virtually every other field do not use laptops in class. I did six years of graduate work and every class was engaged and involved, and the discussions were much more in-depth than my law school classes.

That said, the anti-laptop crowd has mistaken the symptom (laptop use) for a disease (systemically poor pedagogy). The socratic method is a bullshit tool with virtually no teaching value; it demands rote memorization under the threat of public shaming. If that's the game, then you can't blame students for playing it by using their laptops (professor asks an empty question, student hits CTRL-F and provides an equally empty answer, and 100 people are the poorer for having wasted their time). And if they're reading the news while the teacher is asking facts-of-the-case questions of somebody else, who can blame them?

If people like Cole want students to leave their laptops at home, they should learn how to teach a class instead of relying on an intellectually lazy strategy that does little but fill time and create distance between teachers and students.

I read ATL while in class, and I've never gotten less than a B+. Eat it!

Law school is boring.

I never surfed at all during my first two years. One particularly boring class broke me. Now, I do surf on occasion, but the amount is directly proportional to how engaged I feel. These are the classes I'd rather study for on my own, but am forced to sit through thanks to ABA compliance.

Law students should learn that arbitrary rules, handed down by someone in a position of power, are an important part of being a lawyer. Judges, Partners and Clients all want things done the way they want them, not the way you do them best. If you can't surf the net, and are bored by class, do what I did and catch up on your sleep instead of going to class. I don't remember anyone in law school getting a perfect attendance award at the end of the year.

I did a humanities masters and half an MBA before starting law school (crazy, I know). The humanities classes were all less than 12 people and no one would dream of bringing a laptop. I went back to take one more humanities class after I started the MBA and brought out my laptop and after class the prof asked me to never bring it again.

In the MBA program, no one takes notes or does anything productive on their laptops. I know many students who write papers during class, duck out near the end to print and then turn it in!

This year I try not to browse the internet during class because I don't want other students to think I am a slacker. It is definitely a reputation thing and not trying to be engaged!

In most classes, I always removed my wireless card before the lecture started so that I could pay beter attention.

When my laptop broke, I had to handwrite for a week until I got it fixed. It sucked because I couldn't smoothly incorporate my reading notes with the lecture notes. I also had to shuffle through the papers when outlining, instead of hitting the crtl + F to find all the notes on one topic. Finally, having all of ones courseowrk on one hard drive is far neater and easier to organize that folders and notebooks for every class.

Used properly, laptops aid learning. If people want to surf the net during class, screw 'em.

Graduate students in virtually every other field do not use laptops in class. I did six years of graduate work and every class was engaged and involved, and the discussions were much more in-depth than my law school classes.

I did four years of graduate work in the humanities and then law school both long before laptops, and the discussions were much more in-depth and the students more engaged in 'real' graduate school than those in law school.

Legible note-taking at speed was a skill one developed over many years. I took almost verbatim notes in some classes and virtually no notes in others, depending on the material.

I agree with those who suggest preventing internet access (though some students will have broadband data access cards even if you kill wifi) rather than banning laptops; those who want to take notes on a computer ought to be able to, if only because it makes putting together an outline from one's notes easier. The counterargument, of course, is that the effort involved in manually constructing an outline from notes was central to mastery of the material. That never convinced me, because I never made an outline and was quite successful in law school.

Simply put...you engage me, I listen. You bore me, I surf. I don't understand why any other student would care what I do during class. It could be to your benefit if I surf.

While we did not use laptops in class in undergrad, I was still quite capable of tuning out the prof/discussion just as if I was surfing.

Profs need to try to be more engaging...or in some cases the material is just not interesting, and the web is the only thing that will get me thru the course.

I don't feel so entitled to surf, but come on, I am the one paying for the education. If I want to fuck around in class, its on my dime.

The current generation would have been lost in the classroom of only ten or fifteen years ago. I still get hand cramps thinking of the notes I used to take, and I wasn't even in law school!

And this is the generation that will be ruining [sic] things when I get old. God help us.

1112 - isn't that what every generation says about the subsequent generation?

don't you remember the stories from your parents and grandparents about walking to school uphill both ways stories??

Please, enough with the "oh, these kids today" bs

Gallion, thanks for pointing out my typo. You are correct that my law school must have sucked since I misspelled a word. I bet you are a joy to be around, arrogant prick.

You damn dirty kids. In my day we took notes with charcoal pencils on pieces of bark that we picked up on the ten mile walk to school. We respected our elders, and we hung on every word--even if it was a summary of something we just read. We were grateful to have someone give the same uninspired lecture that they've been giving for ten-years, and we loved paying too much to buy books our professor's wrote. You kids just don't know how good you have it!

any clerkship bonus news?

Hmmm, I blame professors who take 10 minutes to say what should take 2 minutes. I hate profs who read the book. If I pay $150 for a book I don't need to pay hundreds more to listen to somebody read it out load.

Classes should be more like meetings then presentations.

Don't ban laptops, it's the way I can compete. I take notes by hand and if the rest of my classmates weren't so distracted by the internet, I'd never get the grades that I get now.

It's interesting that a civil libertarian like Cole feels the need to enforce his own vision of how students should "properly" engage in his classroom. To the extent that they don't actively distract others, why does he care what his students get up to?

I graduated Georgetown law, myself (with honors, btw), and, though I didn't have Cole for any classes, I would never have made it through the lectures of some of his colleagues (Prof. Cashin comes to mind) without reverting to a little solitaire now and then. Four years out, as an attorney practicing at a top 10 law firm, I do the same thing when stuck on an interminable conference call. In both cases, the presence of a time-killer allows me to keep awake during the extraneous nonsense without preventing me from focusing my attention on the items that need it.

Having crossed paths with Cole on more than one occasion, I reckon that his problem with laptops stems more from his need to protect his fragile ego than from any real pedagogical concerns. The simple fact is that Professor Cole cannot bear to be anything but the center of attention, whatever he's doing. The thought that some of his students might be in His holy presence yet not fully attentive to His precious wisdom drives Cole--not his students--to distraction.

My first semester of law school I took full advantage of the Ethernet or WiFi connection available at every desk. When a lecture got boring I tuned out and surfed the web. My grades that semester reflected my inattention in certain classes. By my second year I stopped using my laptop in most of my classes, writing my notes longhand in class and typing them up later.

What I noticed is that when I had my computer, I tended to simply type whatever the professor was saying without any filtering process (this is easy to do when you can type 80+wpm); I rarely re-read my notes, too. But when writing the notes by hand, I had to think about what was most important at the time of the lecture, and again when re-typing them. My grades improved rather dramatically and I managed to do reasonably well thereafter.

10:40=bitter unmployed JD/PhD.

Seriously, I'm probably older than most of the other readers, and when I was in law school (early 90s), laptops were just starting to come into play. One of my professors complained that too many people were playing solitaire (how quaint!) during lectures.

If you can type faster than you write, then by all means, take notes by computer. If you want to goof around, I don't know why you need a computer to do it.