Professors have attempted to do a decent amount of banning of laptops from their classrooms as per this article. I'm actually a huge fan of the one professor Siva Vaidhyanathan who is quoted in this article. He has the best quote/thinking about this is that the problem is not the laptop it's the screen. "The question 'Laptop or not?' isn't as big a question as the question of a screen or not..." I think he is absolutely right. I am not sure how 'traditional' teaching is going to survive with wired students who are not interested in unplugging themselves. I think that the possibility exists that students are going to start falling into two groups 1) those who are constantly plugged in and refuse to even unplug for class and 2) those who unplug purposefully to learn. This second group raises the bar for professors because they are fully investing themselves as students in the process. The first group is deeply challenging and often ultimately frustrating because there is very little for which they are willing to fully engage w/o being plugged in.

On the David Foster Wallace front, his papers were donated last week to the Ransom Center at the University of Austin. This is just huge and there have been pictures and scans, all kinds of good stuff and wallace-l has lit up like the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center which has been extremely joyous. Wallace-l is also going to be starting up a group read of GWCH which should be awesome.
Wallace's papers going to Austin is another temptation to try to get down to that area for 1) the papers 2) SXSW and 3) the Interactive conference also happening at the first half of SXSW.