Laptopers in an educational practice: Promoting the personal learning situation
Computers & Education
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It's 10:05am. Sixty students and their professor want to use network-dependent applications over a wireless network on their laptops. Forty students have file-sharing software active, thirty have spyware infested computers, and five have Nachi. Class started five minutes ago; what can you do? This scene, and many others, played out at Drew University, where students are all issued laptops upon entry. Our faculty use technology in innovative ways, but only if it is reliable and transparent to their class. With technology-enhanced classrooms spread across campus, how do we best leverage and support the infrastructure if student computers are problematic? How do we support faculty in their pedagogical uses of our laptop program? This year, Drew celebrates its 20th year distributing computers to students. In this paper, I will discuss the issues of supporting curricular computing in the classroom, specifically relating to laptop initiatives. This will include a review of the challenges we've encountered in helping faculty and students use these tools, as well as steps taken to overcome those challenges.