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U. of Chicago Law School Blocks Internet Access
Scott Jaschik writes "While some individual professors have banned laptops from classes at various colleges, the University of Chicago law school is going further, cutting off wireless and wired access in its classrooms to confront what officials see as out-of-control Web surfing. The story was first reported in the Above The Law 'legal tabloid' late last month. Students and the university's CIO question the strategy." Things will get interesting when Sprint WiMax service lights up in Chicago later this year.
If you spend all your class time surfing the web, you should fail.
If your students are able to pass without paying any attention to you, you must not teach very much in your lectures. And if you don't teach anything, well, why should they pay attention?
This isn't high school, it's college . The people there are paying good money to be there (well, at least their parents are...). If a student wants to cheat himself of the maximum benefit of a very costly education bu dicking around on the Web during lectures, that should be his lookout. As long as they're not bothering other students, I don't see how this is an issue.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
That said, overall I don't have a problem with students wasting their tuition money (or their parents' tuition money) by browsing the internet in class all day. But this isn't some power grab to squelch independent thinking. These students are free to browse the internet in their dorms, or the library, or the dining halls, etc. It might be poorly thought out, but I think people (or at least you) are freaking out over nothing.
The right solution is, IMO, to simply ban laptops from being open during lectures. It sends the same message as people using laptops during meetings basically: if you can't be arsed to even pay attention (to the lecture, or the meeting), why are you there in the first place. For meetings it may be the case that you are basically "forced" to attend, however this is seldom the case for lectures (at least at my university).
So I fully understand lecturers who urge (or force) people to make a conscious decision *either* to stay in the lecture room and (at the very least pretend to) pay attention, or if you don't feel like paying attention, want to browse the internet, or absolutely *have* to chat with your neighbour about the previous weekend, can you please just go to the lunchroom next door, thank you so much and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Because it's not like anybody is *forcing* you to be there. If you think you'll do fine by reading the lecture sheets and/or the book, you're free to do so (and in many cases that's perfectly possible, too).
If you want to take notes during the lecture (the excuse everyone uses), paper still works just fine, as it has for ages.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Internet access in the classroom always seemed to me like a boon from the "ignorant IT gods" of hasty wireless implementation by blithering idiots who didn't know how to make it secret and only let professors in the building have access (or smart peoplel like us.). It never made sense that it would continue long past this point, kind of like internet tax freedom or net neutrality. Once people realize its just too good to be true, they're going to stamp down it somewhere.
But no, controlling internet access in a classroom is not hand holding, its simply a common-sense measure to direct attention towards the teacher, like facing all the chairs in the same direction at the beginning of the class.
Um... no, you're completely wrong. The lawyer has numerous ethical duties to his client. The most notable of these duties is a duty of zealous representation - the lawyer's personal feelings have to be put aside to represent the client's interests. The lawyer also has a duty as an officer of the court to not make false statements to the court (judge/jury) and to not counsel or assist the client in acting illegally. Maybe if you were paying attention in your mandatory ethics class in law school, rather than dinking about on the internet on your laptop, you would have learned some of this...
There is a certain advantage to taking notes on paper. The attention I pay and the way I take notes when I'm using paper is markedly different then when I use a laptop. I'm usually doing it to be lazy (which may just be me), but I'm a kinesthetic (sp?) learner, which means taking notes and paying attention in that manner helps sear in the information in my brain. It also forces you to occlude information, and consolidate, instead of simply typing nearly word for word (which is usually just by brain saying, 'I'll retake this lecture later.') I'm just saying, like most synthetic inventions (margerine, vitamins, artificial suntanning) there are usually always drawbacks compared to the harder, "natural" method. Maybe that's just me though.
I suppose next citizens will want every single state and federal law posted on there so they can try to interpret it themselves!
The parent makes one really good point. I was recently talking with a friend of mine just fresh out of law school. Aside from learning the language and protocol of courtrooms and some law theory a huge portion of a law degree today is learning to use some very expensive law databases. These for profit databases are the _only_ practical means of knowing the law. It seems to me, that of all the things our government could spend money on, making the law and cases knowable to the general public at an accessible price to everyone would be somewhat high on the list.