The Authority of Knocking on the Front Door

One of the hazards of wireless classrooms is overconnection: There are too many convenient ways to interact with each other all the time—course webspaces, chat rooms, instant messaging, email, office hours. Plus, there are too many convenient ways to be distracted while appearing to be on-task—web surfing, chatting, instant messaging, email, writing essays for other courses, and so on. These hazards alone deter many instructors from teaching in wireless classrooms, but I find that being a front door guest serves me well.

(1) Emphasize community space. Outside of class, being a front door guest means that I interact with students most often through Blackboard, and I rarely ever send emails to the entire class because email is a backdoor. Blackboard is community space, and email is personal space. Therefore, if students want to connect to the course outside of class, they log into Blackboard; they don’t login to email to see if I have sent them a message that tells them to check Blackboard. By using course webspace as a front door, we create a classroom culture that respects the boundaries between community space and personal space.

My front door is email because I am one person. Other doors are open to students—office hours, online office hours—but they are not likely to have considered their homework when I’m available in these ways. Even so, students understand that email may go unanswered until I have re-entered those office spaces.

Because group work is so important in my class, groups usually negotiate a front door and one emergency access door. Some groups exchange screennames; others email addresses; others cell phone numbers; and others choose to use their group spaces in Blackboard. No matter what they choose, students understand that the front door is the best door and the only door that guarantees the group’s acknowledgement. Every student is busy, and group work can only occupy so much of their time and resources. By committing up front to making one way of interacting primary, they streamline their process and protect themselves from overconnection or underconnection.

(2) Claim priority. In class, being a front door guest means that my requests structure our encounter. It is odd to think of an instructor as a guest: An instructor is largely as unwanted as a door-to-door salesperson, as dreaded as a house inspector, and as unwelcome as a robber. And, it is certainly easier to sell your way of doing things, to size up student’s property, and to steal their confidence than it is to act like a guest as an instructor. But, thinking of myself as a front door guest reminds me of my responsibilities to honor students, to respect their property, and to engage them in doing something with me and the class. Operating on a moving-train principle means that we are always doing something and we always have something else to do. I assign multi-tasking tasks, and students should give them priority.

Wireless classrooms full of personally owned laptops undoubtedly give students access to more competing priorities. Thinking of instruction in such a scene strips away much of the academic posturing that masks institutional narcissism: In wireless spaces it is easier to see instruction as having a claim of priority instead of having priority by right. As clichéd as it sounds, when I stand before a classroom full of students with personally owned laptops, in my head I can hear the chorus of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II”: “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” At any given moment, I understand that students can find another way to use their laptops to engage their minds in ways they find relevant and important, and I’m not always sure that I could rebut their choices. But I’m also sure that I don’t want to operate in a consumerism-driven classroom where students do only those things they find relevant and important.

This tension generates self-reflexivity that leads me to talk to the class about the class in the ways Jane Tompkins’ advocated in “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” Off-task laptop use is, in my mind, only a problem if it impedes work; it is not a clear sign that the student is bad and the teacher is worse. Not being on-task is not the same as being off-task, and I think the distinctions are harder to make in wireless spaces, especially if we use the lenses that work well in pen and paper classrooms. If we name off-task laptop use as a problem, solutions will only lead us to surveillance and policing, which won’t enable us to see how the nature of students’ work in classrooms is changing. My approach is to work at developing a way of talking about what is lost and gained by off-task laptop use in class in terms of the ethics of participation and contribution. I begin that conversation by acknowledging that students may not need “my” education.

(3) Garden variety rudeness. This suggestion does not reflect my own pedagogy, but I recognize its appeal. Listing unacceptable off-task behaviors in a course policy that also stipulates consequences is an effective way to make your case for on-task laptop use. The burden of enforcement, however, falls on the instructor, and rarely is that enforcement engaging for students or instructors.