by Christopher Dean, Will Hochman, Carra Hood, and Robert McEachern

The Humanizing Effects of Wireless Laptops: Node I
By Bob McEachern

Computers have a bad reputation in some circles. One of the fears that many people have is what I would call the de-humanizing effects of computers. Some fear that computers will eventually become like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They worry that computers will have brains and desires of their own, which will blur the line between human and machine.

Others have less extreme fears, but fears nonetheless. I would characterize the members of our English department as, overall, as among the fearful. That de-humanization, though, comes not from an anti-HAL, Luddite fear of technology. In fact, most of the faculty members in our literary-studies dominated department are fairly computer savvy, using some common applications for their own personal and scholarly purposes: e-mail, web surfing, word processing, and the occasional excel spreadsheet.

Their fear manifests itself when it comes to using technology to teach. We have few faculty web pages, for example, linked on our department web site. There are few literature or creative writing courses that use WebCT. The technology committee (of which Carra, Chris, Will, and I are members) was created a few years ago out of a fear that the administration would force us to teach online courses; its unstated purpose was to fight that push (a push which never actually came about). Soon, the committee turned to looking at ways to support faculty members who were interested in teaching with technology: offering hands-on training, workshops, and a listserv devoted to issues of teaching writing, including technology issues. Eventually, the committee took on the task of advocating for, designing, and teaching in the wireless laptop lab, as Will Hochman describes in both the Introduction and his piece "Why Wireless Laptops?"

The discussion about online courses was revealing to me. I was, at the time, the "technology person" in the department: the one that people came to when they had trouble underlining text in Microsoft Word, or when his or her mouse got stuck. So I was put on the tech committee. One faculty member's comments seemed to represent the general tenor of the department: Online courses are bad because there needs to be a direct personal link between teacher and student in order for learning to take place effectively. Remove that direct, unmediated interaction and education changes, in very bad ways, for both teacher and student.

Computers, then, in our department, became a tool for de-humanization. It's different from the anti-HAL sentiments; no one believes that computers will take over the world (not anytime soon--although, of course, the discussion of online courses took place in 1999, and HAL hadn't yet been realized in real-time). The fear is that computers will become a barrier to learning because the relationship between student and teacher becomes mediated through technology--learning requires human interaction. This concern about de-humanization is certainly not a new concern, nor one isolated in our department or in departments like ours (see, e.g., Nissenbaum and Decker).

What I want to argue is that a wireless laptop classroom comes closer to a kind of ideal education (as defined by members of my department) by allowing the benefits of technology while also cutting down (though not necessarily eliminating) the de-humanizing forces that computers often create. As a department in the humanities, that kind of humanizing becomes important, by definition. Even as a teacher of technical writing, I am held to the kind of humanistic tradition that informs pedagogies of literary and composition studies (Miller). We don't do big lectures; we do discussions. We don't grade by Scantron; we read and respond. We don't post grades by ID number; we know our students' names. The wireless laptop classroom lets us create and maintain those relationships as we always have.

Node Two of "The Humanizing Effects of Wireless Laptops"