>lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing I spent five years as a university

>lauded mainly by professors who can’t stand that their student’s attention can’t be held captive by their awful soapboxing I spent five years as a university professor, and I did not care at all whether my students were taking notes on their laptops, or trying to multi-task by studying for something else (or even checking their Facebook, or whatever). I know I did the same (studying, not Facebooking; I'm too old for that) when I was a student, and I'd rather have had them in class, no matter where their cost-benefit analysis directed their moment-by-moment attention. If it was a discussion-oriented class, then we arranged chairs in a circle; I sat (very non-hierarchically, lol) in the same circle. No problem there. If it was a more "conventional" classroom setup, then I always asked the laptop-users to sit in the back. This was because I'd observed (our department had us sit in, once per term, on a colleague's class, which was excellent) that students frequently viewed distracting material in class. I don't know which was worse: the dude looking through photos of his girlfriend not-quite-nude, but definitely NSFW; or the girl reviewing for an A&P test, and flipping through really gory human dissection photos. No one needs to see those. I always explained the reason to my students, with those exact examples, and no one ever had a problem -- though I remember sometimes seeing a few red faces on the first day as the laptop-users switched seats. You're totally right, though, about adults making their own decisions about knowledge processing. I always tried to respect students' autonomy to the greatest extent possible. I saw my laptop rule as an important part of that ethos.