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

With the incredible help of Chris Dean, Carra Hood, and Bob McEachern, we convinced a 35 full-time English faculty team to support our plan based on our need to be critical and vigilant about the effects of computers on writing and our learning space. (The same department had produced almost no research and innovation about the use of technology in their English classes.) We four techie teachers in the department next convinced our academic computing leaders to give us a cart of 24 new wireless laptops. And perhaps hardest of all (yes, Virginia, we wanted a "room of one's own"), we convinced our administration to give us a new classroom in a newly renovated wing of a building. The room came complete with ceiling projector and screen, electronic overhead, computer, VCR, CD player, and a laptop jack. We even convinced architects of the wing to make last-minute changes like removing desks and giving us tables and chairs.

This is the third time that I have had the privilege to help English faculty members engage cyberspace as learning space. At NYU and at Southern Colorado, I was always careful to make my colleagues understand that pedagogy comes before technology. This third time though, perhaps more than ever before, the technology is so powerfully affecting pedagogy and innovation that I realized it must be more critically understood as an essential part of my teaching.

The authors of this hypertext are the authors of a proposal (http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/Laptoplabproposal) that created the laptop lab we study and write about in this piece. We have worked together from the beginning as a group of teachers committed to offering our students more guidance into and through their brave new learning worlds. The importance of our pilot study to our institution and the field are one and the same as we focus the initial four questions on a single, final question: How well do computers assist us in teaching multi-layered approaches to college reading and writing as we learn to synthesize literacies?

To Node One of "The Humanizing Effects of Wireless Laptops