Ban the Laptop!

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Monika Bauerlein,
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At the beginning of his Criminal Law class last semester, Eugene Volokh decided to ban laptops as an experiment. So how did it go? As the post-class survey summarized below shows, pretty well. Unsurprisingly, the ban was a net negative for note taking, but it turned out to be a pretty strong net positive on every other scale. This is mostly of interest to students and professors, but even outside academia it’s an intriguing data point for anyone who thinks that the increasing device-driven ADD in modern America might deserve a little more pushback than it usually gets and would like some evidence to back up their instinct.