Computers and Papers

This is just an interesting question that I came to at one point, play nice, it is just thinking, I’m not convinced of this myself.

Is the fact that computers are more affordable causing a lack of good school work for students?  Sometimes it appears so, now that it is pretty much expected that all students have a laptop with them they can do work from anywhere whenever they want, at least that what it feels like is assumed sometimes.  So because of this ability to type up papers and do scholarly work at all times, do we, as students get more busy-work?  I have two classes which require “reading responses,” which are approximately two page short papers responding to our readings, was this the norm in universities pre-computers? How about pre-typewriters?  Did everyone just write these out by hand instead, and is that necessarily worse?  Or did it mean less random writing assignments were given and students were expected to, instead of producing a lot of pages with ink on them all of the time, create good pages with ink on them, if fewer?