When professor Henry Kim noticed a student this week paying more attention to his laptop than the class discussion, he asked another student to check out the suspect’s screen.

Twitter.

Busted.

The business professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business quietly asked the tweeter to leave for the rest of the 90-minute class for breaking the pledge his students must take not to use laptops for anything but class work.

And it meant using another new pledge this frustrated teacher had students take this fall; to spy on a classmate’s screen, if asked, and report truthfully what they see.

By recruiting this new breed of screen snitches, Kim hopes to make digital distraction so socially awkward that students will close forbidden windows — Facebook, email, Sikh field hockey matches — and plug into class.

“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class,” said Kim, “where using the laptop in distracting ways is embarrassing not just for you, but for other students who may be asked to report on you.”

Kim is one of a number of professors scrambling to cope with digital distraction in the increasingly wired world of higher learning.

He said he no longer believes that students — even today’s so-called digital natives — can truly learn while flipping between multiple windows. To prove his point, he shows students the gripping video of a boy struck by a car whose driver was distracted by texting.

“There’s not an ounce of scientific evidence that students can actually multi-task and learn,” argued Kim, who is not against technology in learning; he spices up lectures with YouTube clips and holds an iPad with the class photo so he can call on students by name.

“But our addiction to technology is like a powerful drug, and in my class, I want them to try to stay focused and able to learn.” He also bans cellphones in class.

Philosophy professor Paul Thagard of the University of Waterloo agrees. He has banned laptops and cellphones for the past two years because he said brain research shows even screen-savvy millennials can’t multi-task as well as they think they can.

“The cognitive effects of laptop distraction on learning are disastrous. It goes against everything we know about how the brain works and the number of things we can hold in our mind at once,” said Thagard, director of Waterloo’s cognitive science program.

He has had grad students spy on his undergrads’ screens from the back row, only to find just 10 to 20 per cent were open on class notes. The rest were on Facebook, Jersey Shore reruns, even sports video games.

“Since I banned laptops in class, I get twice as many compliments from students as complaints, because they say it’s less distracting for them. And I no longer face a wall of screens instead of students.”

Still, Tyler Epp, director of advocacy for the College Student Alliance, called it “strange to ask classmates to turn each other in. That’s got to create an uncomfortable atmosphere between students.”

A survey of laptop use at Canadian universities last year noted that while laptops can enhance learning and help students take faster notes, research shows the more students use them on non-class activities, the lower their marks, the longer they take to finish assignments and the more mistakes they make.

“I think the pledge against laptops is perfectly fine. Technology does interrupt our daily lives even though we need it,” said Kim’s student, Kesavan Ganeshalingam, 18, who admitted he did reply — discreetly — to an urgent text message on his cell during Tuesday’s class on ethics and technology.

Seneca College professor Valerie Lopes calls laptops a “very powerful learning tool” and often pauses during her class on digital trends to say “Let’s Google that right now and have a discussion.

“But every so often I’ll also say, ‘Shut down your laptops and listen to me. I really need you to pay attention, and I know laptops can be a distraction.”

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Second-year business student Jack Wang is in Kim’s class and said he appreciates the lack of distraction because “I’ve been to other classes where five people are watching a soccer game in class; it’s hard to concentrate with that going on.”

Schulich professor Jean Adams studies digital learning and agreed students’ attention span drifts after no more than 20 minutes, so teachers must either change pace or watch their students’ eyes drift back to their laptops.

“I tell students in my introductory class on management that they have to manage their own screens, and if someone else is doing something distracting with their laptop, either tap them on the shoulder or move seats, Adams said. “A lot of them seem to be moving around.”