John Bartelson over at Legal Geekery has a great post up on an age-old law school problem: laptops. It’s a battle as old as, well, laptops. On the one side are students who believe technology can solve just about any problem, including that of learning Property. On the other side are professors who know or suspect that most of the tapping there here is from one website to another rather than students taking good notes.
As a side note, I do think students tend to embrace laptops too quickly and too completely. The laptop falls into the “if some is good more is better” philosophy that plagues many law students. If some notes are good, a transcript of every word the professor speaks must be better. I would challenge students to take a week this fall to ditch their laptop and see what happens. Perhaps you’ll miss something important or your hand will cramp up. Or may you’ll find you take better notes and pay more attention.
But the real problem isn’t laptops. Taking away laptops is throwing the baby out with the bath water. If professors want to blame a scapegoat, rather than their boring lecture or the students who don’t want to listen to it, blame the right scapegoat: wifi.
Without wifi, a laptop gets closer to being a glorified electronic notebook. Sure, there’s games of Solitaire, work for other classes, email, photos, and even movies even without wifi. But the vast world of internet distractions is gone. No Facebook, no Twitter, no shopping, no fantasy football, no (well, less) email, and no online Scrabble.
Just like law students should give a laptop-free classroom a chance, professors should give laptops a chance. Get away from the podium and wander the room. You’ll be surprised how bold law students are; if people are surfing the web and ignoring the lecture, you’ll see if. And if it appears to be a widespread problem, and dealing with law students as adults doesn’t work (which includes asking them why they aren’t paying attention rather than just telling them not to play on the internet), then when dealing with them as children make a better choice about punishment.
Get rid of the toys in the room rather than the pencils, homework, and books. And to the one guy who inevitably will stand up and point out how he uses Google Docs for his notes (not a bad idea, btw), point that guy the word processor or text editor on his computer, the copy and paste function, and the idea of reviewing, synthesizing, and formatting your notes after class, rather than on the fly.
