Late to the laptop party
Okay, I know many will say that I have come very late to this party, but I am considering asking students to bring laptops to some library instruction sections this semester.
I am a bit embarrassed to admit that our library’s classroom does not have individual computers for students to try searching hands-on.
I am not sure whether I am embarrassed to reveal that for quite some time I had considered this to be entirely a good thing. My argument was that if students’ attention was necessarily corralled on the screen at the front of the room, they would be more likely to receive? (absorb? learn???) what was being demonstrated there.
To my unequivocal embarrassment, I find that I am now not even convinced that this last is true. I’m feeling sheepish because I have just waggishly named this blog and put the finishing touches on a manifesto declaring that we in academe should be careful not to jump on speeding technological bandwagons.
(I also might as well confess right now that feeling sheepish is not a new emotion for me. I’m the woman who warns you to be careful with that hamburger and then slops her own ketchup and mustard all over herself a mere nanosecond later. At least I can laugh about it. Yes?)
In any case, since a laptop is not required for students at my university, there will be a number of participants in any research strategy session who will have to be provided with equipment. I have some very practical questions about how much teaching time it will take to distribute laptops and to be sure they are securely and cleanly connected to our network. (We do have wireless in the library.)
Pedagogically, my questions have to do with maintaining a balance between show-and-tell and experiential learning. In other words, how long do you keep ‘em focused on what you’re doing before you let them play around?
Recently Steve Greenlaw and I tried a role-play in his class in which we hoped to model the experience of a reference interview and the iterative nature of searching. These were lofty goals . . . and important. Alas, all went to Hades in a handbasket in terms of modeling when Steve said to the class (who all had laptops), “Why don’t you search for your subject along with us?” At that point, all I could offer was, “And I’ll roam around the classroom so you can ask questions if you get stuck.”
The big handwringer here is that there is really so little time and so much to learn when it comes to research strategies and information fluency. More about that later.
February 13th, 2007 at 2:14 am
I’ve brought extra laptops into classes twice now to do hands-on (yet directed) searching on topics. I’ve had them split into pairs to work on one person’s topic briefly and then the other’s. We start with the library catalog and move to other sources (JSTOR, American History and Life) if there’s time. It’s amazing to the students how their peers can think of useful keywords and angles to approach someone else’s topics. And it all happens in a (chaotically) supervised manner. [Plus there are all these shared nuggets of faster searching/computing methods that emerge when a class of fifteen is working together (albeit on 7-8 different topics at any given time).]
April 25th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
[...] so I’ve been trying something new. I can’t do it in research classes because of the laptop problem. But instead of hogging the computer during an individual research appointment in my office, [...]