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Reminds me of an article in Byte magazine back in the 80s or early 90s. A student at Georgia Tech wrote his dissertation on a program he developed for a personal digital assistant program, hosted on a wearable computer. Partway through his dissertation defence, the examiners realized that he was using his dissertation to defend itself. Would you have voted his thesis up or down?

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I would have voted him up if he was doing AI - the most impressive way to get a phd in AI would be to have your creation defend your thesis for you.

agreed, obviously if you are studying technology and specifically technological assistence interfaces/tools then those specific instances have a place in the classroom. I would think firearms are banned in classrooms right? What about at police academies or your local "weapons manufacturing trade school". See what I'm getting at?

I just see overwhelmingly more times than not students using aim/facebook/meebo/yahoo games/ during class. I'm sure there IS an argument to be made for people that actually use their laptops to "optimize" learning, but they are few and far between imo.

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