Smith
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Laptop Deals

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/laptops.htm

Those of us who do pay attention will be richly rewarded.

Kullervo:
Well… you could have gotten the same effect by writing it out with a pencil or a pen, couldn’t you?

Can’t write 90wpm.

The comments from some about how much harder it is to take notes by hand is another reason to ban laptops from your class. Any lawyer who can’t take good notes by hand will be seriously handicapped in at least some meetings and some courtrooms.

I’m not saying every professor should ban laptops, but some should.

ii: And all that’s on it are solitaire, Facebook/ESPN/Volokh.com/Whatever, and the occassional Gmail chat.

That might be all that’s on your laptop. But you have a boring laptop. Others apparently have Pr0n, video games, and lingerie sites up during class. Much more entertaining, if not downright creepy and illegal. Still genuinely stunned?

Shouldn’t we be focusing on what prepares students to be lawyers? Sure, professors could ban laptops, or introduce any number of other restrictions in the name of curbing distractions. But isn’t distraction part of practicing law? I mean, a judge might limit the distractions in a court room, but who has the authority to do so in a deposition, or a negotiation, or a client meeting, or a committee, or a Continuing Legal Education seminar, or even just day-to-day operations in law office?

You don’t train lawyers to be professional and courteous by artificially removing their options to be anything else. You train them to professional and courteous by teaching them the reasons to do so, if there are any. IMHO, there still are. For one, it makes the day-to-day interactions in the legal field a hell of a lot more pleasant, probably for everyone involved.

In the law school context, is calling people out on their obvious unprofessionalism still effective? It was at my school, because people didn’t like any negative attention that might taint their $100k degree. If professionalism is out of vogue with the young’uns, what about docking grades for inappropriate laptop use? Students still want good grades, right? I realize professors abhor classroom micro-management, but the trade-off seems worth it. Particularly when the proposed alternative — banning laptops — would work harm on “innocent” laptop users, like Lalala.

Lalala: My own perspective may be different from many other students, but having a laptop in class was critical to my success in law school. I learn not by hearing but by seeing. Sometimes it was difficult for me to process everything that was said in class, and my remedy for that was simply to type most of what was said. That way, if there was something I didn’t follow in class, I could easily review it by looking at my notes after class. This allowed me to absorb just as much of the in-class material as other students, and I graduated near the top of my class — if laptops had not been allowed, my grades would likely have been significantly lower.

Well… you could have gotten the same effect by writing it out with a pencil or a pen, couldn’t you?

ii: I am genuinely stunned at the inability of grown-ups to avert their eyes away from the laptops of others. It’s just crazy to me to think that there are people out there who struggle to not look at what’s going on with someone else’s laptop, as if the thing is a giant jumbotron affixed at the front of the room. It’s a tiny 15 inch screen. And all that’s on it are solitaire, Facebook/ESPN/Volokh.com/Whatever, and the occassional Gmail chat. Why do these things catch (and hold!) your attention any more than an attractive person of the opposite (or same) gender sitting next to you; or the clock on the wall; or the notes on the whiteboard that haven’t been erased from the previous class, or any number of potential distractions that abound in any given classroom in any given law school? What is it abut someone else’s Facebook that sucks you in so much? Is it really that distracting? No. Not to normal, well adjusted people. Just no. If you are so distracted by the pedestrian, unobjectionable visual content of someone else’s 15 inch screen that you can’t even concentrate on a discussion being had right in front of you, then there’s something wrong with YOU, not that person.

I would disagree. The human body is wired to be attracted to moving objects. For example, our inability to avert our eyes is part of the basis for epileptic seizures. Its not the static image that creates a distraction, its a moving image that causes the problem. Its not quite the same as the people complaining about howard stern but not turning the radio off. The eye is a complicated mechanism, so when things move in front of it, it instinctualy finds it. Thus, this is the reason why people scrolling through computer screens are a distraction for others. A static screen of gchat is actually fine. Its the perez hilton girl who creates the problem-she might as well have a television on.

Apparently a distinction without a difference.

Skyler: ii has the best plan. All cute women are hereby and forthwith banned from all law school classes for their tendency for passive disruption of the class.

Then I quit.