I see students in my class web-surfing. I don’t find it distracting.

Cut off Internet in the classrooms? That might be doable, but we might have to shut down all wireless in the building to accomplish that, which means students studying in the halls or in rooms between classes will also be affected. That seems draconian to me.

How about we just decide these are Adult students; tell them to Figure It Out. If someone in front of you is regularly distracting, ask the teacher for another seat. Life is full of distractions; Figure It Out.
If a student fails out ’cause they weren’t paying attention; Too Bad. So Sad.

Well, aside from that perhaps being trickier than one might think, the more important problem with that is that there are VALID reasons for using the Internet. For example, I often pull up statutes or cases we’re discussing in class when a professor decides to cite an obscure footnote and not really clarify or connect it (or, rather, they think they make the connection clear, but it isn’t as clear to students). I’ve Googled IMDB for movie titles to frame it in historical context when a movie’s alluded to in class. So I don’t know that completely eliminating Internet access is worth it.

What I do visually eavesdrop on, however, is other people’s notes. I’m not sure what it’s like at other law schools, but there are more than a few Marquette professors who like to either talk at warp speed or else flip through PowerPoint presentations overloaded with information, slides that we’re not permitted access to for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. Now, I’m a pretty quick listener, but even I can’t keep up with the pace. So, I tend to sit next to one or two people I know, and we have an unspoken agreement that we can crib off of each other’s notes when we miss a point. In that way, it’s actually the antithesis to the argument of “disconnection” (or, as it was written on PrawfsBlog when this subject was brought up a couple of weeks ago, like the humans in the movie “Wall-E”)

But, above all, I think the bottom line to the laptop debate is this: Virtually every law student is at least 21 years old when they start law school. Many are older; some are returning students with families and kids. While I completely respect the professor’s perspective regarding a need for students to pay attention to their lectures, one can reasonably argue that it’s their own money that they’re wasting by slacking and surfing. If they feel they can pass their exams without paying attention to the lectures . . . well, they’re big boys and girls, so let them sink or swim on their own. I think we all know that by and large the people who don’t pay attention in class are the ones who are going to suffer come finals, and if they don’t, more power to them.

If you suspect that someone is blowing off your class, there’s a simple solution: call on them at random. See if they can answer a question on the material. If they’re completely lost, if they can’t even come within striking distance of the answer (and I’d trust the faculty to know the difference between a student not paying attention and not understanding the material, of course), then knock their grade down. But that’s not failing to be professional; it’s failing to respond to the requests of the professor.