Edward McFowland is rarely seen in one of his Carnegie Mellon University classes without his laptop. For him, it's faster to take notes on a computer than on paper.

	Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

And since the whole campus at CMU is equipped with wireless Internet, the 18-year-old freshman also checks his e-mail during class every so often. Or manages his fantasy sports team. Or, um, plays his Super Mario Brothers video game.

"You have to be very productive with your time here," he said, noting that -- aside from taking notes for the class he's actually in -- he uses the computer in class to do work for other classes.

Wireless Internet has become all the rage in college classrooms, with more schools locally and nationwide installing it each year. But schools are starting to learn that the educational advantages of wireless Internet are accompanied by relentless distractions.

Suddenly, students have the ability to transport themselves anywhere the Internet will take them -- whether or not it has anything to do with class.

"The problem I have is not with the laptops, per se," said John Soluri, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon. "The problem is that I know that some people use laptops to e-mail, to watch movies, to do whatever, and they're not really using them to take notes."

About 40 percent of college classrooms nationally are equipped with wireless Internet, according to a study released last month by the Campus Computing Project. Local schools such as Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, Chatham College and LaRoche College all have wireless Internet in some or all of their classrooms.

Laptop use is still minimal in some math and science classes, where writing down formulas is easier on paper. In other classes, there's a large range -- from about 20 percent in Dr. Soluri's history lectures to about 85 percent of students at Pitt's law school and 100 percent at some classes at CMU's business and public policy schools, which require them.

Professors say they like having wireless Internet in the classroom because it permits students to organize their notes easily and immediately access outside resources during class discussions. But many are bothered by the distractions behind the screen.

At Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Soluri acknowledges students could sleep, daydream or doodle long before laptops. But he worries about more substantive distractions to students using laptops and to anyone else who can see their screens.

To cut down on "extracurricular" Internet use, he asks his teaching assistants to keep an eye on students' laptop use in his 200-student lecture classes.

If other professors did the same, they might be surprised. During a recent statistics class at CMU, one student with a laptop was seen pricing plane tickets and hotel reservations for a trip to Canada, another reviewing the Power Point lecture for a psychology class and a third e-mailing and checking Web sites like Facebook.com. Nearly all of the students with laptops took a cyber detour from strictly class business at some point during the lecture.

But while such activities might strike professors as rude or disrespectful, many students see them as "efficient" or "multi-tasking."

Yael Klionsky, a CMU freshman from Squirrel Hill, said she brings her laptop to class and does work for other classes during lulls.

"There's too much to do," said Ms. Klionsky, who also swims on CMU's varsity team and works at a research lab. "I'd rather work during class than be one of those kids up at 2 a.m. writing a paper."

In some ways, the practice of "multi-tasking" during class reflects a fundamental difference in how current college students behave -- and learn.

"Students are used to having these multiple channels going," said Geri Gay, a professor of communication and information science at Cornell University. "There's a restlessness that sets in in this generation."

Dr. Gay said her research showed that it is sometimes possible for students to concentrate on a lecture while, say, reading news headlines. Once they actually start reading the news story, however, they forget about the lecture.

Lawrence Frolik, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh law school, has also noticed the phenomenon of students treating lectures as somewhat like background music on their iPods.

"They think there's no reason to be a captive in the classroom," he said. "They really believe that downtime can be profitably occupied by e-mail and fantasy football."

So what's a professor to do when students are "physically in one place but mentally someplace else," as Mr. Frolik puts it?

Some professors take the burden upon themselves. "If you're engaging the students, they won't be text-messaging with their friends and family members," said Michael Rectenwald, a Carnegie Mellon English professor.

Others take more drastic approaches.

At Harvard Law School, some professors have now banned laptops from their classrooms. Ironically, the ubiquity of laptops in Harvard's classes was featured in the 2001 movie "Legally Blonde," in which Reese Witherspoon's character gets into school there and finds herself laptop-less in a classroom full of them.

Joel Smith, chief information officer at Carnegie Mellon, said that a few professors have asked whether it's possible to shut off wireless in their classrooms.

But for most professors, it's the price of technology.

"For the students who are susceptible to being distracted by their own machines, that's their loss as far as I'm concerned," said Joel Friedman, a professor at Pitt law school visiting from Tulane University. "The downside [of laptops] is minimal."