Legal Commentary

A recent post on banning wireless at Chicago Law School prompts me to ask how many readers of this blog ban laptops during class.

I do, with one exception. I assign four students (rotated alphabetically) to take notes for each class and post them on the course website. As a general matter, these are the only students permitted to have laptops during class hours.

I also audio-record every class with a hand-held digital audio recorder and post the recordings on the website. In this way, I eliminate any possibility that students will not be able to obtain an accurate record of the class proceedings. I was warned that this tactic would reduce class attendance, so I made a special point of memorizing my students' names (there are 85 of them), keeping track of those who skipped, and e-mailing them later to ask what's up.

I've found that the results have been entirely beneficial. Attendance has been fine, and the attention level is much higher than the pre-laptop days. The single greatest benefit of the policy is that students make eye contact with me and each other, not their screens. They also stop behaving like maniacal stenographers, transcribing every word without trying to understand what is being said. Finally, there is much more pressure on me to question them rather than drone on in lecture format -- a format that Gutenberg surely rendered obsolete with the invention of printing. (Why is there any point to listening to a lecture in person rather than simply reading a transcript in the comfort of your home?)

But perhaps others have different experiences with bans on laptops?