Faculty Directions, Fall 2003 - A Former Luddite* Reflects on His First Laptop Courses

Bill Stanton
Department of English

My first year experiences teaching in the English 101-102 sequence with a laptop approach gave me an overall sense of satisfaction with the program. That sense of satisfaction is directly related to

• a significant improvement on my student evaluations (which were already pretty high),
• a glowing evaluation from my department evaluator and chair and
• a feeling that I wasn't falling even further behind in my lifelong struggle with the technological revolution.

I think the key to my success can be directly related to the goals that I set. Elisa Sparks, the ETS/OTEI laptop faculty fellow, cautioned us in an end of the summer workshop to incorporate just a few aspects of laptop instruction into our courses if we hadn't done it before. During my first three years teaching at Clemson, I had become impressed with The Great Ideas text, compiled by Donna Winchell in fall 1999. This text of essays represented to me the epitome of challenging readings for our incoming freshmen. I was disappointed when it was discontinued the following year. But, through the wonder of laptop technology and the Internet, my students and I could bring all of those classic essays by Plato, Machiavelli, Thoreau, etc. right into the technology enhanced classroom in a new and dynamic way. Needless to say, my students were challenged, and the quality of our discussions and the essays they wrote reflected that challenge.

In-class journaling and working with the major grammar Web sites on their laptops were two other activities that took up a lot of in-class time. Next year with the help of the laptop program graduate students, I hope to incorporate the creative potential of MyCLE into the mix and really leave my Luddite fear and loathing of technology behind me once and for all.

(*) The Luddites were a group of individuals in England who were committed to derailing the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. They went as far as blowing up factories in their extreme efforts to get in the way of technological advances. Modern Luddites look to writers like George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) for their philosophical underpinnings.