Laptops: Engagement Machines/Call and Response Machines

I would like to propose two ways to look at laptops: as an engagement machine and a 'call and response' machine.

An engagement machine is a device that attracts and holds your attention, often making you loose track of time as you become involved in paying attention to details and themes. One of the most common such machines is a book. The phrase 'lost in a good book' indicates the nature of the experience a person can have reading. Laptops cause that same phenomenon, even more easily than a book. I would suggest that, put in front of an open laptop, many if not most or even all people will begin to 'fiddle' with it. Soon they are 'lost' in it. I recently watched my brother, who is not a scientist, open a National Geographic site on their Genome project. Within minutes he was surfing through the site, just looking at visuals and spot reading. Then he asked himself a question about the process of determining how the Y gene functions in males' genetic history. Soon he was involved in page after page as he reformulated the question based on information he received from visuals and text. He didn't quit for nearly 30 minutes while he pressed for an answer to his question.

While one anecdote hardly stands for the entire population, I would submit that the experience described above is common. Think of the time comparative shopping for airline tickets, reading reviews of cameras to determine which one to purchase and from whom, looking up medical issues such as pink eye or cancer. During those moments the machine takes us over and engages us with the content it reveals to us, or allows us to construct.

This key feature is important for teachers who have laptops in the classroom. The machine will cause engagement. People will find pathways in it which they will explore, whether those pathways be iming, email, shopping, solitaire, gaming, or search for answers or data upon which to construct knowledge. The goal then is to manage the machine. If we manage the machine, we manage the engagement. Part of teaching with laptops it seems to me is to facilitate the student machine interface so that we channel the freeflowing engagement that the machine not only allows but encourages. The strategies of that facilitation are key topics that we need to put into our shared discourse as quickly as possible.

The laptop is also a call and response machine. 'Call and response,' of course, is a term derived from activities in spiritual music, a strategy stemming from our African-American heritage. However, it is easy to see a class as a call and response locale. For 56 years in education this strategy has been a constant in my life. The teacher 'calls' a question and the students respond with the answers. The goal in the class, as in the church, is to engage the congregation such that caller and responders join in a celebration of awareness. But in classes all too often the response is limited to a few people. For instance in an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (November 28, 2005, A1, A6) Assistant Professor Scott McLeod says, ""The dilemma [in a regular class] is that you throw out a question and you hear from two or three students.'" In other words he uses the call strategy but like many teachers has less than satisfactory response.

The laptop, and other technologies, can facilitate call and response. The Star Tribune article ("At U, raising your hand in class goes high tech") discusses the use of 'clickers' in lecture classes. These clickers are hand-held devices that students use to respond to questions. The professor poses the question and students respond by clicking. The professor's computer is hooked to a system that records all the answers. Within seconds the professor can determine whether students are understanding the material. The benefits of this approach are apparent to Associate Professor Donald Liu who says, "' By using the system to quiz them, focus them and get them to engage in cooperative learning, I am able to bring them back.'"

In other words Liu uses technology to facilitate call and response: "'Now you can pose a questions and see what everyone thinks. They all participate.'" The University of Minnesota, however, says that they will eventually replace the clickers with laptops because laptops in a wireless environment can communicate more readily than clickers.

This call and response strategy is one method of managing the engagement capability of the laptop in class and is also an example of technology not only facilitating but enhancing a traditional, deeply held educational value.

The shift that laptops cause in a classroom

I am struck by two things in terms of technology and the classroom: the role of notebooks and the meaning of affecting learning.

In terms of notebooks I think we are dealing with one of those ‘media shift’ experiences. We are using the new media to fill the same role as the old media in the same situation. Bates and Poole (2003)set a helpful parameter: ”...in the early stages of new media, formats from older media tend to be carried over, then gradually replaced by new formats that exploit better the new media” (268). This principle can be applied, instructively, to lectures. In them the time-honored (and in this case, old) medium or technology is the notebook. Students arrive with a such a book, and a pen; instructors expect students to have one and use it; rooms are set up to accommodate people who have to sit and write in order to use this technology; stores like Fleet Farm sell hundreds of them each year. This technology is thoroughly imbedded in our vision of what it means to be in a ‘learning space.’ The words of the professor go into the book. The book goes out of the class and is the basis for study and learning when the professor is not there. “Get the notes” is a key reason why anyone comes to class, and is often the thing that a person desires if he or she misses class.

When the laptop replaces the notebook, a new medium (or technology) replaces the old. At first, as we are seeing, everyone simply uses the new one in the same way they used the old one. In this case the the old form is that students type notes into the computer as they sit in class. The idea is that every thing else will stay the same—so the teacher talks, the students listen in rows, etc. However the computer changes the possibilities because it is interactive. Students, of course, have already figured that out, though in a curious way they are using the laptop to do an old job. They, or some of them, are screwing around. In the 'notebook' class screwing around meant doodling, daydreaming, passing notes. In the 'laptop' class it means solitaire, im, email, and games. The computer allows them to do the old thing in a new efficient way that gives them more opportunities. In effect they are beginning to invent a new form, one that is interactive, to use with the new medium.

The interactivity changes the dynamic. The students have found new formats that exploit better the new media. Faculty must find new formats also. Bates and Poole suggest some of those formats, all of which upset the old status quo of sitting in rows, listening and writing. They suggest that new formats include project work, problem-based learning, creating multimedia projects, and access to resources not otherwise available in the classroom (269). They also suggest that “By providing self-controlled activities, student time on task can be increased” (269).

The upshot of this new situation is that we have to help (or allow) teachers to work with these new formats. The implications are large. These formats tend to eliminate the speaker/listener dynamic, replacing it with a set up problems/facilitate dynamic. That change is enormous in terms of time and energy to create the new forms, and acceptance of the new forms as a valid way to conduct a class. (And ultimately how we build our buildings and assign and carry out our duties). I think that this area is where we need to create awareness but also support. What would Stout be like if there were no large lectures? What do we need in order to change from the notebook to the laptop dynamic?

The second item relates to the first. How is learning different when the dynamic changes? The answer depends on the meaning of learning. If learning means the ability to answer correctly on tests items that were spoken out loud in class, then the new dynamic is not good. The laptop allows too many people to pay too little attention. There is no reason, in that dynamic to have an 11 hundred dollar piece of technology when you can accomplish the same end better with a one dollar pen and a 2.59 notebook. I would like to suggest that the very new format that (some) students have found is the key to the new dynamic—they are engaged with their machine and its contents, not with the speaker. Can we convert the machine to represent the speaker and her/his learning and expertise? If we can then the student can engage with the machine and learning. Thus what the machine can do is increase student engagement in the learning process. Recently the trend has been to attribute engagement in learning as one of the key activities in mastery of a subject. The NSSE survey, now widely used, measures the degree of engagement of students in a university. Finding out that degree is important. George Kuh, explaining the conceptual framework of NSSE explains the importance of that engagement:

“The implication for estimating
collegiate quality is clear. Those institutions
that more fully engage their students in the
variety of activities that contribute to valued
outcomes of college can claim to be of higher
quality compared with other colleges and
universities where students are less engaged” (http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/conceptual_framework_2003.pdf).

The claim is clear—more focused engagement on learning raises the quality of the collegiate experience, presumably for the students, faculty, and institution as a whole.

Thus I can return to the role of the laptop as a change agent in the learning process that suggests, just by its presence, that new formats must be found. Those formats have been articulated in educational literature for a number of years. Our goal then is to identify those formats and all the ‘cultural context’ that those formats interact with. For instance, how does introducing problem-based learning into a class change what the teacher and students do in the room and even what kind of room they are (or wish they were)in? Or to turn all this around, what new roles and activities must a teacher, and the students, assume in order to no longer lecture to a large class?

I am not sure, after I articulate this philosophical base, of the next step. I believe that changing the large (40 plus) lecture is the key to changing the culture, but it is clear that to accomplish that change all of us in the learning project must articulate what we need, both physically (software, hardware, room configuration) and ‘culturally’ (role we want to play in the class, role our department and students want us to play in the class, time and energy to deal with the demanding changes required by the new role).

Granted the continuum I have outlined here, I suspect that we will find faculty spread over the entire distance. Our needs analysis then must ask questions that elicit a sense of the immediate need and of the potential need.

Bates, A.W. (2003). Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-BAss.

Kuh,G. The National Survey of Student Engagement:Conceptual Framework and Overview of Psychometric Properties. National Survey of Student Engagement. Retrieved November 4, 2005, from http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/conceptual_framework_2003.pdf