Seth, thanks for your article — these “ban the laptops” articles pop up at regular intervals in academic journalism and they all start from the same flawed premise, that the best/only pedagogical method worthy of higher education is direct instruction. Very few of these articles, and the research studies they quote, take pedagogy into account, which to put it mildly seems unusual for articles about education.

FYI the idea of relocating direct instruction from a group context to an individual’s own space is not a new idea — it is the basis of what we call flipped learning and it’s been in practice dating all the way back to the mid-90s. Shameless self-promotion, I wrote a book on this subject for higher education that you and others may be interested in.