Fashioning the Emperor's New Clothes: Emerging Pedagogy and Practices of Turning Wireless Laptops Into Classroom Literacy Stations @SouthernCT.edu

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

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

Lessons Learned

Clearly, I am greatly in favor of wireless laptop classrooms, and not only for their TCF (Technology Cool Factor). By TCF, I mean that faculty members from other departments will look into the doorway of the classroom, come in when invited, and say "cool." The technology is very cool, and allows us to do lots of things that we couldn't do in a non-tech classroom, or even in the tech classroom I inhabited five years ago. (See Will's text on Why Wireless Laptops? for more on this.) As Will points out, our students need to understand wireless technology because it is increasingly the technology they will encounter beyond our wireless laptop classroom, and beyond SCSU.

My reasons go beyond the technology, which I hope I have conveyed.

Wireless laptops aren't necessarily the solution to every pedagogical problem. But they probably will work for writing and other humanities classes, precisely because they allow for humanization.

I also hope that the classroom may change the culture of the department in good ways--encouraging more faculty members to use the room and take advantage of its capabilities. I believe the experiences I argue here will soften some hearts and get colleagues to consider that computer technology does not have to serve as a tool of de-humanization.

I'm no Pollyanna. I know the wireless laptop classroom won't solve all of our problems. For one thing, people who have resisted technology in their teaching won't necessarily come around quickly, if at all. One problem is a lack of training. We have little time to rethink our classes as it is; learning new technologies and thinking of ways to incorporate it into established lesson plans and teaching philosophies will be tough. On top of all that, SCSU, like everyone else, is in the middle of a budget crisis. Among other things, faculty members have had to fight hard to get reassigned time for a lab director who can oversee day-to-day operations, train faculty, and promote the virtues of the lab. So we've got a long way to go. But this discussion of humanization might help respond to one common concern, anyway.

At the same time, however, I know that the problem of de-humanization isn't completely solved. Nor will it solve itself. It takes work to make the classroom a more humanized place, and the technology still can get in the way. Two instances:

Carra Hood's piece describes the problems she encountered, causing her to suspend online chats in favor of face-to-face discussions for several weeks. Another teacher told me about an embarrassing incident involving two students in a class in which much of the discussion took place online. One student was a quiet women who always wore a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. She had short hair and favored extra large sweatshirts. Another student made a comment that clearly indicated he thought the young woman was male. He turned deep red when he realized his mistake. He had seen the woman as the sum of her visible (and to him, male) markers.

Certainly, Carra's experience would seem to contradict mine,suggesting that wireless laptops were dehumanizing initially. But as Mark Pesce has pointed out,  "A lot of people are concerned that computers dehumanize us. Computers mirror us. If they're dehumanizing, it's because we forgot to make them human. If they're profane, it's because we forgot to make them sacred" (qtd in Haight). Pesce is talking about the Virtual Reality environments he helped to pioneer in 1995, but the sentiment works just as well for computer-assisted instruction: The way we use the tools determines their effects. Humanization takes some work, and non-tech-classroom teachers can just as easily de-humanize their students (and regularly do, in some cases). But technology presents challenges, real or imagined, that are a factor in the resistance of our colleagues and need to be negotiated constantly. Wireless laptops can be an important tool in that negotiation.

Works Cited

Haight, Timothy. "Mark Pesce & Tony Parisi." Network Computing (September 15, 1995). Accessed July 14, 2004. <http://www.networkcomputing.com/611/611ntdpesce.html.>

Nissenbaum, Helen and Walker Decker. "Will Computers Dehumanize Education? A Grounded Approach to Values at Risk." Technology in Society 20:3 (1998): 237-273.

Miller, Carolyn. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40 (1979): 610-17.

Node One of "Exuberance and the Failure to Learn Their Names"