From next week’s Chronicle of Higher Education:  Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class, 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. …

[A] growing — albeit small — number of law professors … 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. …

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.

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.

As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that faculty should embrace technology to help students resist their laptops’ siren song.  Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning, 54 J. Legal Educ. 311 (2004).  (Hat Tip:  Jim Hart, Brad Mank.)