Surfing in Class

Ian Ayres reports on U of Chicago's dean of the law school recently announcing that laptops cannot be used to surf the web during a lecture. I may need to make a similar speech in my undergraduate classes (my grad classes are so small and require constant note-taking that cannot be done with laptops [read: mathy]). I remember my old colleague from grad school, who did a joint PhD/JD, telling me about being in one class with every student having a laptop out while the prof lectured. One student - who was not amazingly at the back of the class - was watching the then-new Paris Hilton porno on his laptop! Definitely a negative externality if there is one.