News-Record.com

Newsweek has a piece about professors pulling the plug on students using laptops in their classes. Too much Web browsing; not enough eyes up.

I've spoken to classes in which most students looked at laptop screens instead of me and what I was writing on the board. Imagine talking to a group of people while they were casually paging through magazines. That's how it felt. The non-laptop users were also by far the most active discussers, too.

My conundrum: Because much of what I was talking about involved digital journalism, I didn't say anything about the laptops. I did call on some of the students tapping away, though, just for fun.