To celebrate the start of term…
I bring your attention to a piece on Slate about browsing the net when you should be listening to your prof.
There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I’m currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking notes. Another is looking at the registrar’s Web site. The other two keep checking their e-mail.
The LSE has wireless connections to many but by no means all classrooms and to my surprise even now laptops are fairly rare in the lecture halls here though certainly a higher ratio than one in ten - one professor I remember three years ago told off a student for typing on one!
January 11th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
I remember that too (the person being told off at LSE). It actually happened more than once. I had my laptop open in a smaller seminar once — actually typing notes relevant to the topic — and the seminar leader snidely asked ‘what’s that?’. Before I could answer my friend Luke sharply replies: ‘It’s called a COMPUTER!’ Laughs, and the seminar leader looks embarassed… Ah the memories…