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I taught my first composition course in a wireless classroom in the spring of 2002—a foolhardy decision in retrospect. It was my second semester of teaching . . . ever. Plus, I knew next to nothing about computers in general and laptops in particular. Since then, I’ve learned the hard way what people had tried to tell me. This webtext identifies situations in a classroom full of personally-owned laptops where pedagogy reveals itself and offers several strategies for rising to the occasion.

For the purposes of this webtext, pedagogy refers to the ways in which an instructor designs the material and social spaces that she, her students, and their tools inhabit as they accomplish a curriculum. This view of pedagogy builds on Karla Saari Kitalong, Dickie Selfe, and Michael Moore’s concept of instructors as “architects of increasingly electronic environments—or information ecologies—for teaching and learning” (141). They borrow the term information ecology from Nardi and O’Day, who define it as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment . . . . where the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology” (49). Understanding an instructor’s role as an architect of an information ecology means thinking about how students should experience community, curriculum, course policies, and course materials in and out of the (in this case, wireless) classrooms within the institution; it also means worrying about the ideological freight of these experiences.

I am focusing on pedagogy as an ethical act, a series of choices from a position of institutional power that situates self, students, and resources according to one’s own sense of what is right and good and useful in a classroom. I am particularly interested in how course policies and instructor practices concerning wireless technologies affect community within the classroom. And, I am arguing that the lenses through which we have learned to notice pedagogy are inadequate and sometimes inappropriate for wireless spaces. In my view, pedagogies of wireless classrooms at institutions requiring student-owned laptops

must account for ownership, for the ways in which students are marked by ownership and for the ways students mark their ownership.
must negotiate space differently by avoiding being trapped as the instructor and in facilitating group work.
must establish a classroom culture that is ethically sensitive by thoughtfully anticipating and responding to needs, by intentionally developing a shared language, and by respectfully behaving as a front door guest.

I identify several scenarios that invite critique and suggest practical ways of constructing the material and social space of wireless classrooms differently.

This webtext, like an earlier one by Daniel Anderson, Robin Seaton Brown, Todd Taylor, and Kathryn Wymer in “Integrating Laptops into Campus Learning: Theoretical, Administrative and Instructional Fields of Play” (Kairos 7.1), extrapolates from experiences in the Writing Program at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Five years ago, our campus became an IBM contract school and began requiring all students to purchase a laptop that meets minimum standards set each fall by the university. The laptop requirement also initiated the development of a campus wireless network. Bandwidths now crisscross specially designed multimedia classrooms as well as classrooms that were most recently updated in the early 1980s, have only one electrical outlet, and bear the scars of desks that were once bolted in place. In the Writing Program, only 30 composition sections of the 150 taught each semester are taught in wireless classrooms, so instructors move in and out of wireless spaces throughout their career as scheduling permits. Whereas the earlier webtext addressed wireless classrooms at a programmatic level, this webtext is especially meant for those composition instructors who have little interest in becoming computer geeks or even composition scholars yet who want to teach in wireless classrooms. In other words, this webtext is for those instructors, I contend, whose non-wired pedagogies will not serve them or their students well in wireless classrooms.

Despite the differences in perspective, this webtext continues several themes addressed by Anderson et al. One theme, for example, is that a sense of community is essential to learning. A related theme emphasizes the importance of deploying an instructor’s authority in ways that foster participation by all students in this community, in and out of class. Both webtexts also acknowledge how challenging such a task is in wireless classrooms and call attention to issues like furniture, screens, surveillance, and distractions. I hope that this hypertext essay stimulates instructors to reflect on their own course policies and teaching practices, seeing themselves as designers of material and social spaces in which students will inhabit and, hopefully, form a collaborative learning community.