The main “revolution” with which I’m experimenting this semester is abandoning the idea that classroom time is for content delivery. I’ve tried as much as I can (I’m still doing more lecturing than I’d like) to make the classroom hour a time when students are investigating in small groups and integrating what they’ve found with what they already knew, setting myself up as an authoritative and reticent teacher, one who insists upon their digging into the questions at hand rather than waiting for me to do so.

In other words, I think that one should use the tools that have passed from the hands of specialists and into the hands of English teachers to become more, not less, Socratic.

Just to give an example from what I’m doing with my class today, I’ve had my students read (review for folks who had me last semester) a section of their comp textbooks on clause structure and common clause-combination errors (comma splices, sentence fragments, and such). During our class time, they already know by this point that I assume they’ve done the reading and will come to class ready to try out the material on scenarios I’ve created. So using laptops connected to a dedicated class chatroom (available for free on the Web), my students, in small groups, will take miscombined clauses that I’ve generated, combine them in two or three conventionally appropriate and thought-out manners, and post the results on the class chat room, which also appears on the smartboard in front of the classroom. As they appear, I use our class time to commend those combinations that are especially good, to call on groups who don’t yet get it to try again and post the revised sentences, and as a whole to use their texts as the sites for instruction.

When my department chair observed this sort of lesson last semester as part of my new-faculty evaluation, she was quite impressed, and several of my students, in their semester-end evaluations, noted that those lessons helped them actually internalize the structures of English prose in ways that lectures in high school hadn’t.

I’ll agree without hesitation that Powerpoint is boring. I’d go further to say that, poorly done, computer-assisted instruction can be boring. I’d take one more step and say that a poorly led discussion without technological mediation can be boring. (Certainly you’ve been a part of some of those in all the grad courses you’ve taken, Michial.)

I was more of a curmudgeon about computers in the classroom before this school year, when I decided to take a run at it myself and actually plan the sequence of my courses around instruction using computers instead of planning it around computers and hoping that instruction happens. I think that when one get’s one’s Aristotelian “for-the-sake-of” chain in the right order, one can bring to bear the technologies of textbooks, notebooks and pens, and laptop computers in fruitful manners.

Now I’ll grant that each of those technologies calls for different sorts of thinking, but I don’t think that any of them in its own right negates the possibility for engaging classroom experiences.

I’m afraid the article it links to has been taken down, but what you do with a study like the one I describe here (http://ladderonwheels.blogspot.com/2009/07/smash-your-computer.html) that suggests that using technology in the classroom is actually counterproductive?

RE: “the perpetual extension of one’s comfortable circle,” I was on a high school campus recently. I expected to find the same noisy hallways and rambunctious interaction I’d known, but instead when the bell rang and the students spilled out of their classes each placed his earbuds and powered up his ipod and pulled out a cell to begin texting. And it was silent. Creeped me out. Give me the old cliques any day. Coming from one who was a band nerd back in the day, that’s saying a lot.

To the actual point, excluding the technologies from the classroom is certainly a fool’s errand and working to civilize/baptize the gadgets/media and their use to at least some degree is good and necessary work. But if there is a fundamental change underway in how young people think and process the world (that’s still arguable, I know, but research is pointing in that direction and it’s the working assumption in my neighborhood at least) don’t the changes in pedagogy required in response go well beyond just technology? What more fundamental changes do you see as needed to teach to this new wired world?

So to agree with you (and the article’s theorists) and to take things a step further, laptops in class do threaten to magnify and intensify human beings’ resistance to effort and to formation, but as far as I’m concerned, banning them merely holds off the negative for a moment, while co-opting them stands to educate a larger integrated reality for my students.

BTW, thanks for jumping ship and coming over to CHB. I hope a goodly number of HLW readers do likewise.