The distractions that wireless network access in classrooms bring are just too much for even the most gifted instructiors to compete with, according to a participant in a Chronicle forum on whether instructors should ban laptops.
“Sorry, folks. Many of us are crackerjack lecturers—and that’s what my ratings say, too. But the web, TM, and e-mail are like visual heroin—best left out of lecture,” the anonymous professor writes. “I don’t think I want students running to the web in the middle of a discussion, even to bring in new information—usually the discussion should have some boundaries, centered, we might hope, around the readings for the day, which, of course, we might hope students did.”
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