Hunter: I don't understand your complaint at all. Don't you test
your students on the material? If they can show that they've
learned it, what does it matter whether they're multitasking in
class? If they can't learn because they're distracted, isn't that
their problem, not yours?
And as for "pay[ing] sustained attention to public policy debates
so they can participate meaningfully in the democratic process"
-- are you really suggesting (in a blog post!) that
people who don't spend much time at their computers are better
informed?
The fact is that once you're used to taking notes on a laptop --
which I spend a lot of my time as a journalist doing -- the
advantages become obvious. A computer keeps all your notes in one
place, where they can be instantly searched by keyword. Notebooks
fall apart. They get lost. They can't be searched automatically.
The one big advantage that pencil-and-paper has is portability --
but by the time your son goes to college, that will almost
certainly be less of an issue. Some super-light hybrid
large-screen smartphone-type thing (or maybe something even
cooler that I can't even imagine) will have replaced the laptop
as a note-taking device. But he probably won't be using a
notebook and pencil, and you'd be doing him a tremendous
disservice by demanding otherwise.