Having both used "technology" (laptops, phones) during classes as a student and taught to students which used them, I still can't make up my mind about this debate.

Arguments for technology use:

- There are legitimate uses of computers to take notes, so banning technology overall seems misguided, and it's hard to ban specific usages meaningfully. (A better approximation would be to block Wi-Fi/phone in rooms. It takes much more dedication to get distracted with no connectivity, and arguably connectivity isn't necessary if you want to remain focused. That being said, people could still legitimately want to look things up during the class...)

- It is each student's choice to pay attention or not, it doesn't look like you would want to force them. (The article does a good job of justifying this claim, though it goes a bit far in saying that students just cannot help but get distracted. Having just a text editor to take notes requires some discipline but it's not entirely impossible either.)

- It is a valuable lesson to figure out that multitasking is a sure way to both not get anything done and not get anything out of a class, and maybe you need to experience it yourself. If everyone prevented students from realizing this, maybe they would still need the time to figure it out later. People who were adults when laptops and phones came around are now figuring out about this at the workplace.

- Sitting in a class and not paying attention is not even necessarily a mark of disrespect. As a student, sometimes if I had one free hour with nothing better to do, I would go to an a-priori irrelevant class to work on homeworks/projects. So I could work if the class indeed wasn't relevant to my interests, but sometimes I had pleasant surprises and ended up paying attention. Sitting in the class and working silently on something else would seem disrespectful, but what if I was doing this rather than not showing up?

Arguments against technology use:

- It's a hard lesson to figure out that multitasking is often a bad idea. It may require sometimes kicking you out of the habit for you to realize the difference. (I'm not yet sure if this is a lesson that we are "getting", as a society.)

- The second-hand distraction effect is real: of course, it's harder to pay attention individually if people around you are not. (Although it's not clear whether it should be your responsability to not be influenced. The line between passively and actively distracting fellow students is quite a bit blurry.)

- Even more viciously than that, even if a student is individually dedicated to paying attention no matter what happens around, a room where 90% of people are listening feels very differently from a room where 10% of people are, from the teacher's perspective. When you're addressing a sparse group of survivors among a mass of people who zoned out, it's hard, you feel bad, and the quality drops. Teaching isn't a one-way process where the teacher is not influenced by the students and the students individually retain what they want out of the teaching, so the simple reasoning about students individually doing what they want doesn't exactly apply.

So I don't know what the right answer is. I think a minimal step in the right direction is to encourage people who use computers for other things than work to sit towards the back, and encourage those who want to pay attention to sit towards the front. In this way, second-hand distraction is reduced (you can't see the screen of someone sitting behind you) and the teacher is motivated by what they see in the front row.