Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class

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By ANDREA L. FOSTER

The forbidden-laptop zone is territory into which few professors dare tread. Students have been known to protest when laptops are banned from a classroom, and even claim that they are being denied a proper education. Professors who have taken the bold step, though, sound like they've experienced an epiphany.

"Not only was I stunned by how much better the class was, the students volunteered that it was much better." says Don Herzog, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He tried a one-day ban as an experiment.

When Mr. Herzog returns to teaching this fall, after a sabbatical term, he plans to keep the machines out of his class for good.

It's unusual to walk into a law class, or any classroom in a professional school today, without viewing a sea of open laptop lids blocking students' faces and hearing the steady hum of fingers striking keyboards.

But a growing — albeit small — number of law professors like Mr. Herzog are pushing back. Students with laptops, they argue, surf the Web instead of engaging in class, and play games, shop online, or e-mail friends, distracting themselves and those who sit near them. The complaints highlight how technologies once eagerly adopted by colleges can later pose problems.

Aside from the Michigan campus, others where law professors have banned laptops include Florida International, Georgetown, and Harvard Universities, and the University of Wisconsin.

Business-school professors, too, complain about laptops' sabotaging discussions. As a result, some business professors are asking students to close their laptops during conversations.

The backlash appears to be primarily in the law schools, however. Law professors say the Socratic method, the cornerstone of a legal education, in which professors ask students to accept or refute a long series of questions, is under assault by the vast array of amusements available to students on their laptops. The learning method calls for focused interaction between students and professor, as he or she tests their assumptions. Laptops, psychologically and literally, get in the way.

Still, some professors strongly defend using them. They say students' access to the Web can actually enrich class discussions. They accuse professors who ban laptops of being Luddites, paternalistic, or, worse, boring instructors who blame the Internet for their pedagogical shortcomings.

Ann Althouse, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, is among the laptop proponents. There will always be distracted students, regardless of the Internet, she says. Before the Internet, students gazed out the window, doodled, or simply fidgeted.

"The idea that we're going to somehow save these students from being distracted is a bit absurd," she says.

Heads in the Classroom

But professors who have banned laptops from their classes say there is no going back. Classroom discussions suddenly come alive when the laptops are gone, they say.

"If half the people are checked out, then the conversation just isn't going to be as rich," says David D. Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Apart from the problem of Web surfing, Mr. Cole and other professors say, laptops encourage students to become mindless stenographers during class. Since taking notes with a computer keyboard is much faster than with pen and paper, students busily take down every word uttered by professors instead of carefully listening and selecting the important points to put into writing.

Mr. Cole has excluded almost all laptops from his classroom for two years, and he wrote about the experience in an article in The Washington Post in April 2007.

In large classes, he allows only two students to take notes on laptops and then post them on the Web for all students to read. In that way, students who feel their handwriting is insufficient can have a backup, he says.

Several weeks into one of his law classes last year, he asked the students what they thought of the ban, letting them respond anonymously. Roughly three-quarters of the students said they favored a no-laptop policy. And 95 percent said they had used their machines for purposes other than taking notes.

"I was happy to compete with Minesweeper and solitaire," says Mr. Herzog, of the University of Michigan. But "I'm not happy to compete with the entire Internet."

Controlling Internet Access

The Internet as addictive entertainment, luring students away from class discussions, was a concern few college administrators predicted several years ago, when they barreled ahead with multimillion-dollar plans to make campus buildings wireless. They sought to attract students and faculty members by embracing technological innovation. But in the process, they created ubiquitous Internet access that professors cannot shut down. Even if administrators block access to college wireless networks, many students have wireless modems that still connect to outside networks like Sprint or Verizon.

Professors still try. At the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, they can ask network administrators to switch Internet access on and off in their classrooms. Most professors choose at the beginning of the semester to turn it off, says Sean M. Pine, chief information officer at the law school.

The University of Chicago Law School in April cut off Internet access to the school's four main classrooms at the request of the dean, Saul Levmore.

The University of Michigan Law School tried a creative approach. The school adopted a system that tied students' class schedules to their ability to connect to the university network, so that students in classes were automatically barred from logging in.

But students find ways around those strategies. At Michigan, students tricked the system by swapping their account names and passwords with friends who did not share their class schedules, says Mr. Herzog. In addition, more students were bypassing the university network with wireless modems from telecommunications companies.

That leaves only one option: the laptop ban.

Internet as Class Aid

But the ban is a mistake, says Ms. Althouse, of the University of Wisconsin, and not only because students will find ways to be distracted without the Internet. In fact, their use of the Internet can enhance class discussions, she says.

She has seen students using their laptops to look on the Web for the language of a statute or case under discussion. As a result, they see additional information, which helps them better understand an issue and keeps the class conversation moving forward.

The Internet aside, students are so accustomed to using a keyboard that taking notes with pen and paper is awkward for them, says Ms. Althouse.

"Especially in law school, I'm on the side of individual responsibility and freedom," she says.

Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School, says the key for professors is to know when laptops are good for class and when they're not.

"Technologies are not good for everything," says Mr. Nesson, who is also a founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "Sometimes they destroy some good things along with the opportunities they make available."

In Mr. Nesson's classes, laptops are good for looking up legal material. During class students are encouraged to find the right evidence rule on the Web and to contribute to a class wiki, a communal Web site they frequently edit and update.

He says laptops are not good, however, during and immediately following a guest speaker's presentation. He requests that the computers stay shut, signaling to students that they should all participate in discussing issues the speaker raises.

Down the road at Harvard Business School, John Deighton often asks students to close their laptops, too. The professor worries that the request may be only a Band-Aid, though. With more students owning iPhones and BlackBerrys, he says, professors may not be able to even detect the Web surfers.

"Ultimately the only way to ensure that a class member is not on the Web," he says, "is to conduct an engaging class."