At Slate, “The Rules of Distraction – Hey, you—with the laptop! Ignore your professor and read this instead” by Avi Zenilman:
The Internet is, of course, a distraction. There are some ground rules: I always try to position myself so my screen isn’t in the line of sight of the professor or one of the teaching assistants. And after a bad pop-up ad experience, I always press the mute button. Still, even when a lecture engages me, it can be hard to pay attention when the little AIM man starts bobbing up and down at the bottom of my screen.
But are these distractions worse than the old-fashioned ones—doodling, dozing, reading, playing footsie, passing notes?
Key point: “Perhaps the real problem with laptops in lectures isn’t the laptops, but professors’ over-reliance on the lecture as a learning tool.”
Interesting.