Queries

In this article, I have argued for wireless pedagogies that are accountable for the social and material scene of classrooms, even though the lenses used to see these scenes are still being shaped. I have also provided a rough sketch of dilemmas that invite ethical critique and practical solutions. And, I have left much unanswered:

  • Why should we value a social and material classroom scene that is so fragile, so fraught with politics, so frenetic?
  • Who benefits from wireless classrooms and who is at risk in them?
  • How should instructors be prepared to teach in such a scene? What assumptions enable them to act in it?
  • How should students be prepared to learn in such a scene? What assumptions enable them to act in it?
  • How might wireless classrooms invite us to see what happens in classrooms in terms other than teaching and learning?
  • If pedagogy includes the ways in which an instructor constructs the material and social spaces that she, her students, and their tools will inhabit as they accomplish a curriculum, how do teaching evaluations need to be redesigned for wireless classrooms?
  • How does a curriculum morph when it is accomplished in a wireless environment? Likely as not, few courses within a composition program are wireless. So, what are we to make of those changes at a programmatic level?
  • Though furniture solves little, what kinds of furniture and equipment would give wireless instructors the most classroom configuration options?
  • What kinds of social relationships make furniture invisible to students? What does furniture’s invisibility mark in wireless spaces?
  • How is authority constructed by thoughtfulness, shared language, and knocking at the front door in wireless classrooms? For whom is this authority enough and for whom is it not?
  • How is an instructor’s authority in a wireless classroom significantly different from her authority in any other classroom scene? Is the claim of priority visible or does the priority by right still mask it?

Even more has been left unquestioned. I invite readers to add their own thoughts and questions to this list. We have much to discover and discuss about wireless laptop classrooms.