[TheOtherHobbes]

The elephant (ha!) in the room is the fact that lectures are as good at passing on facts as any other method, but very bad for softer teaching goals, including debate and inspiration.

Here's an informal article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/lectures-dont-wor...

And formal research: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic38998.files/Bligh...

I'd guess Shirky's classes are more about promoting debate and asking questions than plain 'learn this' science/math/engineering lectures. So the lecture format - even with discussion - probably isn't very efficient for teaching anyway.

Whether people are distracted by devices seems secondary.

Perhaps it would be more useful to students to (say) work out a way to dramatise the effects of device addiction or some other Internet experience, so they can discover it for themselves and make their own decisions about distractions and cognitive loading.

Banning devices might have some of that effect by accident. But I'd guess teaching a class on internet sociology while taking notes on paper is going to be kind of weird.

(Full disclosure: I always used to hate writing paper notes. It's not unusual to lag behind the content, and it certainly never helped me understand what I was supposed to be learning.)