CALI Executive Director John Mayer has interesting post over at CALIopolis about laptops and classroom distraction...

It is not that students with laptops are distracted, it's that before laptops, faculty could not really tell if students were distracted.[...]

So does that mean that in the past, students were not distracted? I doubt that. The issue is that laptops have brought to the surface the polite fiction that occurs in classrooms all the time. Faculty teach and students listen or pretend to listen. Now, that pretension is manifest in the student's averted gaze to the laptop screen and faculty cannot ignore that.

The impetus for John's post is a forthcoming study claiming that laptop use in the classroom hurts student grades.

Assuming only for the sake of argument that some students get lower grades because they become distracted by their computers, there are two reasons why I think professors should never ban student use of computers. First, many of today's students are far more efficient writers and note takers with a keyboard than with a pen. By forcing these students to handwrite their notes, instructors are putting them at an unfair disadvantage. (At this point, Josh would say, "But Tom, how many of those students do you honestly think are using their computers to take notes? This leads me to my second reason.) Second, if a professor really wants students to pay attention during class, shouldn't they make their class more interesting? I'm not trying to be a smart ass here. Honestly. Think about it: if every student in the class has his or her head buried in a laptop, maybe everyone has weighed the pros and cons of the situation and decided that nothing worthwhile will be missed by checking email or playing solitaire instead of listening to the professor.

Naturally, even in the world's most riveting class, a few students will still get distracted. But they do so at their own peril. If they can still ace the exam without paying attention, they don't need to listen to the professor anyway. Really, it's their own loss, because if they already know the subject matter that well, they're wasting thousands of dollars on a class they don't need. Perhaps next time they should enroll in a course in which they might actually learn something.

[CALIopolis] The Real Reason Faculty Dislike Laptops in the Classroom