Cornell Law students must leave their laptops at home—at least for one course. Law professor Robert Summers (left) has banned the use of computers in his contracts class. He posted the notice on his Blackboard site, saying that the use of laptops during lectures discourages students from thinking on their feet.
Summers isn’t keen on iPhones either, according to the New York Times.
“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Summers said of the iPhone, once a description of the device had been provided to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop all the wide range of complex reasoning abilities.”
If CAMblogger remembers her collegiate experience accurately, students who want to escape “an active intellectual experience” in class have only to stare at the head of the person in front of them. You don’t need a laptop for that.