labs

Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles (2000) recounted the development of a “usability lab” that garnered institutional respect for professional writing at Purdue University in part because the lab metaphor aligned this endeavor with the dominant scientific paradigm favored by the university. Indeed, scientific knowledge is widely accepted in twenty-first century North America as the best and most valuable way of knowing. Laboratories are places for serious, precise, and often prestigious work. Purdue University’s Writing Lab is a model writing center. Its online counterpart, the Online Writing Lab (OWL), was the nation’s first virtual writing center, and it currently receives between 1.5 and 2 million requests for information per month (OWL Fact Sheet, 2003). At Research 1-designated institutions, occupying a virtual or physical lab can lend cachet to the goings on of an already dubious enterprise—English studies. Thus, those directing the importation of wireless technologies into conventional writing classrooms may be particularly tempted to reclassify these sites as labs (or some derivation of the term). At the University of California Riverside, for example, the recent completion of a campus-wide wireless network has led the Graduate School of Education (GSOE) to construct a Hybrid Lab with built-in laptop friendly accommodations and fixed desktops. In the years preceding its development of the Hybrid Lab, the GSOE acquired several mobile labs (laptop carts) (McGrath & Schwarz, 2003). This dead metaphor, however, comes with a complicated heritage.