At my college (St. John's College Annapolis) it would just be considered offensive to even consider bringing any sort of computer to class. Then again, we tend more towards classics and related disciplines than towards any sort of computer studies, so I can understand why some schools might find it slightly less rude. I still can't imagine why anyone would need a computer in class, short of a programming workshop at least. I think that this professor was absolutely right to expect that law students be competent enough with pens and paper, and with brains, to attend class without laptops. Jenifer Bellott, the student arguing that the "snowball effect" of many professors banning laptops, fails to give any reason that this would be a bad result. Cory Winsett, who feels that he will be unable to keep up without a laptop, should perhaps have gone into a field more suited to his talents than law, perhaps that of accounting. Given the choice between having our law schools are produce a generation of cripples, of men who can't think without their computers, and having a few incompetent individuals drop out because they never learned how to wield pens, I would pick the latter and advise the byblophobes to learn to offer fries with that.
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At my college (St. John's College Annapolis) it would just be considered offensive to even consider bringing any sort of computer to class. Then again, we tend more towards classics and related disciplines than towards any sort of computer studies, so I can understand why some schools might find it slightly less rude. I still can't imagine why anyone would need a computer in class, short of a programming workshop at least. I think that this professor was absolutely right to expect that law students be competent enough with pens and paper, and with brains, to attend class without laptops. Jenifer Bellott, the student arguing that the "snowball effect" of many professors banning laptops, fails to give any reason that this would be a bad result. Cory Winsett, who feels that he will be unable to keep up without a laptop, should perhaps have gone into a field more suited to his talents than law, perhaps that of accounting. Given the choice between having our law schools are produce a generation of cripples, of men who can't think without their computers, and having a few incompetent individuals drop out because they never learned how to wield pens, I would pick the latter and advise the byblophobes to learn to offer fries with that.