The Authority of Thoughtful Planning

A friend recently told me an adage that clarified the threat that is underneath students’ mostly amiable compliance: “Your lack of foresight does not constitute my emergency.” Ouch. The adage focuses on timing; but, writ large, it speaks of respect. In wireless classrooms, the following kinds of foresight respect students:

(1) Identify when laptops are necessary. Bringing a laptop to class at all is cumbersome and unwieldy; powering it up only to shut it down is annoying. Early on, be clear about when laptops will be used in class. As you do so, remember that the danger in not using laptops every day is that one or more students will forget to bring it on those days when you do need it.

(2) Account for different proficiencies. Though more and more students are comfortable with the Internet and the Microsoft Office suite, they only know how to do what they have done before. Some students have a conceptual awareness of what they are doing when they make something happen; others have only memorized a set of steps and will only feel comfortable when a set of steps are provided. I handle these differences by providing a dual set of instructions. For instance, to prepare for an online draft workshop, students must post the draft as an attachment and supply questions in a thread of a discussion forum. So, my instructions state:

In the Assignment 3 discussion forum, attach “3lastname.doc” to a post that is titled by your group’s name and that contains your 3 questions for reviewers. That means:

1. Save the file that contains your draft as “3lastname.doc” in the folder we created in class called ENGL in My Documents on your computer.
2. Log into Blackboard and select our course.
3. Click on the Discussion Board menu option, and select the Assignment 3 discussion board.
4. Add a new thread.
5. In the subject line, type your group’s name.
6. Click Attach. Browse to find “3lastname.doc” in the folder called ENGL in My Documents on your computer and click Open. You should now see the file in the attachments section of the thread you are composing in the discussion forum.
7. Click in the body of the thread (where you can type), and list the three questions you want your groupmates to answer about your draft.
8. When you have attached “3lastname.doc” and listed the three questions, select Submit.

If we talk through the process and its analogous class activity, I find that I only have to provide this dual set of instructions twice per task. In other words, I might tell students that attaching a file to a thread is like attaching a file to an email.

(3) Schedule simultaneous learning curves. Build activities that teach students to use technology in the ways you want it used, and in the context of the intellectual tasks you want them to accomplish. For example, give students a task like “format these sources into an MLA-style bibliography” (and provide sample sources or require them to use their own). As you discuss the elements of a successful bibliography, have each student report how they used a word processing software to accomplish the task. Though there are no wrong ways to format the bibliography so long as it looks right on the page, there are better ways of doing it. Composing is a heavily computer-mediated process in a wireless classroom; but how to use a computer to mediate that process effectively is not transparent.