Christina Domenico | Trying to go topless during class

I'm easily distracted. I have to have my background noise while studying, and during class there are plenty of things that can steal my attention away from the professor --- Gchat, Digg and Perez Hilton, to name a few.

The majority of my distractions have one thing in common - they originate on a lovely little thing we call "the Internet" and are accessible on a portable device called the "laptop." For all the great advancements in communication and technology that the Web has allowed, it is a brick wall standing in between a pile of research and a student's term paper. Even worse, open web browsers are tempting eye-candy for those of us who go the old-fashion route and Five-Star it.

There's no reason why students should use the Internet so heavily during class. Unless a professor asks everyone to navigate to a certain page, open laptops do nothing more than attract eyeballs that should be attending to lecture notes. Bright, shiny monitors in front of a college student during lecture are evolved bug-zapper lamps.

Sure, you may say that you're not affected by it. That you can pay attention, take good notes and still catch up on the latest headlines at nytimes.com. Or that you have the discipline to remain oblivious to your neighbor's open PennLink page. But then you'd be lying to yourself.

The evidence? Take this annual example. Every spring, there's that one fraternity pledge who causes a stir in a big lecture class because he's watching porn in the first row. If no one was paying attention to the laptop ahead of him or her, the annual commotion would never occur - but it always does, without fail. Just wait a few weeks from now.

Currently, some Penn professors choose to ban laptops from the classroom to prevent any distraction they can create. Marketing professor Tony Adams announces on the first day of his classes that his is a "topless" class. And he's not talking about clothing.

"How could you have been 'great' (in class) if you were hiding behind a lap top screen?" he asked in an e-mail. "My last 2 undergrad classes, I've instituted the 'topless' rule - and everyone seems to get more out of class."

Of course, taking notes on a computer has many benefits, and more and more students are doing so. I mean, it's easy. Students can write more information quicker and more accurately. For those who love the greener side of the street, electronic notes also reduce the amount of paper thrown out at the end of the semester. When a class is heavy on content, a computer definitely comes in handy.

So to cut out distractions and get the most out of our tuition dollars, one drastic and evil option is to shut down wireless access in classrooms. And since we finally, sort of, have one AirPennNet system, I don't advocate this.

But last spring, the University of Chicago Law School took this step to cut out non-class related computer use. As Dean Saul Levmore said in his letter to the school's students and faculty, "we know that class time is not for shopping and e-mailing."

Still, that's what it has become in many lecture halls around campus. You can find a wide array of non-academic content popping up on every computer around. Perhaps, then, this problem shouldn't be blamed on wireless internet access or the presence of laptops, but on students themselves. If students don't care to pay attention to class, then it's their loss.

In the name of the New Year, let's all make a resolution to cut our internet activity while a professor is talking. If not in the name of our own GPA, then for the sake of our classmate whose notes may suffer because they're distracted by the porn two rows up.

Whatever the case, the overabundance of web surfing during class detracts from the overall atmosphere. We go to the class for the material - not to read over our peers' shoulders as they catch up on the latest celebrity gossip.

Christina Domenico is a College senior from North Wildwood, N.J. The Undersized Undergrad appears on Tuesdays. Her email address is domenico@dailypennsylvanian.com

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