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

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

Past Experience

My own experiences in a more traditional, work-station computer classroom helps me see why some of our colleagues could feel the way they feel. This is the fourth computerized environment that I have taught in. The first was at Massachusetts Bay Community College in 1991, in writing lab/workshop space. That was a long time ago--so long ago that I remember having to get to work 30 minutes early to help with the daily ritual of booting up 25 computers and switching out the two word-processing programs that needed to be loaded into each of the 25 stand-alone computers. My second experience was at the University of Louisville, in a classroom dedicated to teaching writing. The third was at SCSU (Southern Connecticut State University) in a classroom that created some of the most discouraging of human relationships I have ever experienced.

I was in this early computerized classroom during my second semester at SCSU. I had requested one of the new computer classrooms that had been developed. I was moved to a classroom that was created for classes in desktop publishing, which was taught through the computer science department. I have no doubt that the room was great for desktop publishing, but it didn't work at all for my class.

I called this a more traditional, work-station computer classroom, and I assume many of you have at least seen or heard of this basic set-up. The computers were at individual, partitioned workstations set around the perimeter of the room. This is similar to the room I taught in at Louisville, although there, there was a large seminar table in the middle of the room. Students could roll their wheeled chairs to the table for discussion. (Note the humanizing face-to-face interactive opportunity.) This was not the set-up in the desktop publishing room: In the center of the room were two black-and-white laser printers, a color laser printer, and another printer that would print poster-sized documents. To keep users from tripping over wires, some wires descended from the ceiling. At the front of the room was a small (maybe 3 x 4 foot) white board along with a teacher work station with a Mac and a PC.

Besides hosting writing students, this room also provided classroom and lab space for the desktop publishing classes with expensive, limited software licensing available on these computers. So students from those classes would constantly walk in during my class and ask to use the computers (or just sit down and begin working). Occasionally, and for the same reasons, one of the professors for the class would walk in while I was leading a discussion at the mini-white board, walk in front of me, and sit at the Mac at the front of the room to do work to prepare for his class later that day. (There's a lesson there about dedicated space--I'll get to that later.)

For a discipline that generally seeks humanizing, face-to-face interaction, this early SCSU computer lab was horrible, although I have no doubt it was great for desktop publishing classes. Students were chained to the wall (almost literally). The stations were separated from each other by partitions attached to the desks. Students were cut off from each other and from me by the jungle of printers in the center of the room. The set up of the classroom encouraged individual, solitary work. Groups had a hard time meeting (a big problem in a technical writing class). Students and teacher had to peer around printers and cables to see one another. Despite the myth of the solitary writer, lack of interaction makes for a bad writing class. The effect is a kind of ironic dehumanizing--even as students are cut off from one another, as individuals they cease to matter because their autonomy and freedom is inhibited.

Node Three of "The Humanizing Effects of Wireless Laptops"