Wireless Internet In The Classroom

A few reasons SWLAW may want to consider on having wireless internet accessible in the classrooms.

Personally, I find doing something like playing a simple video game or doodling helps me pay more attention to a lecture. There is nothing that special about wireless access when it comes to this complaint. I consider the inability to lock onto a speech and pay 100% attention to be part of what is, in all, a positive human capacity: we retain our independent thoughts and desires and do not achieve oneness with a person who is talking at us.

There are always distractions. In fact, it's funny how distracting the least interesting things are when you're at a lecture. Suddenly, you want to watch someone take a sip of coffee or sharpen a pencil. This is human nature, part of our connection to the concrete world. We want to see things, feel things. This is good.

I've seen this happen plenty of times. The professor brings up a new topic, or mentions a particularly interesting anecdote, and students start Googling away to find out more. If that isn't a sign of the intellectual curiousity that we as college students are always encouraged to have, I don't know what is.

Law profs shouldn't deal with the problem of "not paying attention" by coming up with regulations; they should deal with the problem by making their classes more interesting!

But wireless access should be blocked in the classrooms (as it is at Cornell), because it destroys the Socratic method to let students IM and email answers to each other in class.

[D]uring my law school time …, Internet misuse during class was rampant -- online gambling, day trading, checking the news, etc.

Honestly, I never found it that distracting, and it's basically unregulable without doing a complete ban on Internet use, which I think is a bad idea--having Internet access allows access to a wide range of information and commentary which (when used well) can open up class discussion dramatically.