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Joe Miller

It’s not the laptop, it’s the web.

A new A.P. story about differing views on laptops in the classroom (and some professors’ efforts to bar them) prompt Gordon Smith at Conglomerate to offer more reflections on the matter (as well as great links to a thread at Althouse). My views are strongly similar to Gordon’s. Blawgs have hit the topic quite a bit this academic year; you can dip in to earlier exchanges at OrinKerr or CoOp.

At the end of fall semester 2005, a few of us here at Lewis & Clark surveyed about 350 students in a variety of classes to gather some data about (a) how students use laptops in class and (b) the degree to which they find others’ use of laptops distracting or annoying. I’ll summarize some of what we found later. For now, let me pass along a short piece I wrote a few weeks ago, at the request of the student semesterly humor paper here at L&C known as Letter of the Law. The piece is after the jump.
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