When I matriculated at Wake Forest University in the fall of 1998, they were one of the most "wired" campuses in America. The internet boom had yet to turn bust, and recently-graduated Sanskrit majors were leaping headlong into the information revolution and becoming overnight millionaires (then, it turns out, overnight thousandaires). Wake had a really pioneering program wherein a part of our exorbitant tuition costs allowed each student to receive a laptop upon enrollment. Then, two years later, you’d trade in your laptop for a different, newer laptop.

It didn’t suck.

Since then laptops have become ubiquitous on college campuses; some people even argue that it’s hard to learn without one. To tell you the truth, I think that in my four years of free-laptopdom at Wake Forest, I actually took the thing to class exactly one time, and even then I sat there talking to a friend on AIM. We all had them, sure, but I never saw a Wake Forest classroom where people were wildly typing notes. You just didn’t see them in class. I’m sure this has changed now.

When I started my abortive half-semester at Yale Divinity School in the fall of 2002, I bought a brand-new Sony Vaio. Things were different in the Ivy Leagues, and on the first day of class, when I whipped out a pen and paper to take notes, I found myself in a minority of me; everyone else had their computers out. So I thought, what the hell, Nate, join the now.

Thing is, I found that I didn’t remember anything. I type about 110 words a minute, give or take, so I could literally almost type the lecture word-for-word. But none of it stuck. I quickly went back to being a one-man minority. I find that the physical action of writing things down, even if I don’t get every single bit, helps the information to stick in my mind. Typing doesn’t do that; it lacks the physical connection to the information. Going back and reading my typed notes later, I found myself thinking over and over, "I don’t remember him saying that." I felt disconnected from the lecture.

This isn’t true for everyone; it just is for me. At any rate, by the time I made another go at grad school and found myself as the teaching assistant for an Introduction to Mass Communications class at the University of Oklahoma, laptops were everywhere. So was MySpace. I warned the students in my discussion group within an inch of their lives about using the internet during the lecture. Bring your laptop to take notes, fine. But I stationed myself at the back of the class and watched those laptop screens.

One student in particular became a problem. Not only was she constantly MySpacing even after I asked her not to, she was distracting the people around her with it, showing them videos or photos or wall posts that entertained her. ALL WHILE THE PROFESSOR WAS TEACHING. Maybe it’s that my father is a college professor, but I found myself enraged by this behavior. The professor noticed it and asked me to do something. So, one day, after I’d already asked her once to either keep it on Microsoft Word or put it away, I walked down and sat next to her, a big, big grin on my face.

"Give me the laptop," I said happily.

She giggled. Oh, you’re so funny. Ha-ha.

"I’m not actually kidding. Give it to me." 

Her eyes got wide, but her smile remained.

"Right now." 

I’d tried to whisper, to be quiet, but now the whole class, comprised of somewhere in the neighborhood of 175 students, mostly freshmen, were staring at me.

"I want the computer. Hand it over. Right now." 

"Are you serious?" 

"Do I look like I’m kidding?" 

Her face orange with shame and fake tanner, she closed the computer and handed it over. I stood up and suddenly noticed the sea of kaiser-roll-sized eyeballs staring at me.

"LET THIS BE A WARNING TO THE REST OF YOU." 

The professor was barely managing to suppress a laugh. At the end of the class the student walked up to me.

"Can I have my computer back now?" 

"What computer?" I asked.

"My computer. My laptop. You took it away."

"Oh, that?" I said. "I threw that away. You might be able to dig it out of the garbage can out in the hall. But I also threw half a yogurt in there."

Her eyes welled up. I couldn’t take it anymore; I pulled her laptop out of my bag and handed it to her.

"You understand that MySpacing during class is, like, super rude, right?" I asked.

She nodded, chagrined.

"See you Wednesday." 

All that is to say, as awesome as I think the internet and mobile computing are, I somewhat question their value in the classroom environment. This long, long story drives home a point that was put much more succinctly by a professor at that same august institution, the University of Oklahoma, in a video I found on Engadget: