Laptops in the Classroom - Glenn Reynolds has a personal take on the NY Times report about students web surfing in college classes. I'm quite familiar with the unique distractions of Internet access when you are trying to get work done. I also am old enough that my school days actually pre-dated the World Wide Web, while my firm had no Internet access during the first year or so of my professional career. On the other hand, we are all having to get more used to multitasking our lives. Just the same, I think I would pay attention to the professor if I were a student today. My patented style of learning is almost wholly derived from classroom absorbtion, since I have always had this severe aversion to doing homework. Keep good notes and pray the professor's exam sticks to the lecture materials. (I hated those profs who would threaten to throw in questions from stuff they "didn't have time to cover" in class. It's hell doing a semester's worth of homework in a three-day reading period.)