Photo by Billy V on Flickr.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Click-clack click-clack click-click-clickity-clack.

You glance up from your notebook, distracted by the girl banging away at her keyboard next to you in lecture. She stifles a giggle as she clicks through photo after photo on her best friend’s latest Facebook album, commenting on every other image. You wonder: How does she do it? What are her grades like if she spends all of class surfing the Internet?

For most Northwestern students, the ability to take notes on one’s laptop is both a blessing and curse. While the benefits of having a laptop are plentiful – most students can type far faster than they handwrite – the distractions that come along with computers are overwhelming. The wireless internet in most Northwestern classrooms makes it too easy to use iChat, Facebook, e-mail and web games in the middle of class.

Weinberg sophomore Jessi Lim says she brings her laptop to “whatever classes allow me to.” She says the device is not a big distraction – what makes a class meaningful or not is the mindset she goes in with.

“On days when I’m not in the mood to go to class, I use it as a distraction,” said Lim. “If I go into class saying ‘Ok, I’m going to pay attention today,’ I can be on Facebook and iChat and still pay attention to the lecture.” Besides socializing, Lim said one of the primary benefits of her laptop is the ability to look up course-related material on Blackboard during class.

Medill professor Steve Duke agreed that laptops can be beneficial, but only in certain classroom settings.

“Laptop use in smaller, seminar-style classes can be useful,” Duke said. “Students can quickly search new information about the classroom discussion and use it to contribute to the discussion.”

“There is less reason and less utility in hunting for things on the Web to share with a class that large,” Duke said. “Rather, the lure is to check e-mail, surf or play games, and miss much of what is going on [in] the lecture.” For this reason, laptops are completely banned from his 100-plus-student lecture classes.

Psychology professor David Rapp, who taught a course last spring called Learning Design and Technology, said laptops can be distracting to the teacher as well as the student. If a teacher notices several students in class typing away, never once looking up from their computer, the teacher begins to wonder what those students are really doing.

In addition, students who insist they can check their stocks, eBay bids and Facebook notifications while simultaneously listening to a lecture are probably not getting the most out of their classes.

“Anytime you cut into the attention required to take notes, you’re lessening your dedication and comprehension,” said Rapp. “I could drive home without ever looking in the rearview mirror, but that would be dangerous.”

In late March, the University of Chicago Law School blocked internet access from its classrooms because the problem had become so overwhelming. In an e-mail to the student body, Dean Saul Levmore wrote, “Many students say that the visual images on classmates’ screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so.”

According to Rapp, however, blocking Internet access would do little to solve the problem.

“Even if the Internet were banned, you could still download things onto your computer before class that would be a distraction,” Rapp said. “You don’t even need to have a laptop. If you just had a piece of paper you could be doodling, folding it up, reading something inside what you’re supposed to be reading.”