THE GREAT CLASSROOM LAPTOP CONTROVERSY CONTINUES:

When Don Herzog, a law professor at the University of Michigan, asked his students questions last year, he was greeted with five seconds of silence and blank stares. He knew something was wrong and suspected he knew why. So he went to observe his colleagues’ classes — and was shocked at what he found.

“At any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90% of the students were online,” Professor Herzog says. “And what were they doing online? They were reading The New York Times; they were shopping for clothes at Eddie Bauer; they were looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco when their new job started…. And I was just stunned.”

Wireless Internet access at universities was once thought to be a clear-cut asset to education. But now a growing number of graduate schools — after investing a fortune in the technology — are blocking Web access to students in class because of complaints from professors.

Herzog first went on the offensive in his own law classes, banning laptops for a day as an experiment. The result, he says, was a “dream” discussion with students that led him to advocate more sweeping changes.

(Via Betsy Newmark). I don’t generally get that problem — but we have small classes at Tennessee, and I suspect that student tuneout grows along with class size. Still, the classroom surfing business is a contentious matter among faculties all over.