GUEST COLUMN / By MARY M. DALTON  November 13, 1997
 When Laptops Are Required, 
 How Does Campus Life Change?

 WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. In addition to the apprehensions college freshmen
 always face adjusting to dorm life, different food and having to take
 responsibility for their own learning Ñ first-year students at Wake Forest
 University now find they've become subjects in a massive experiment for integrating
 technology into the classroom and the larger campus community. 

 This year's freshman class is the second group to
 start its college career at Wake Forest under a
 broad-based initiative called the undergraduate
 plan, originally known as the Plan for the Class
 of 2000. While the plan contains about three
 dozen features  including the hiring of 40 new
 faculty members and the introduction of special
 first-year seminars for incoming students  the
 element that has received the most publicity is
 the requirement that each student be assigned an
 IBM ThinkPad when he or she enters the
 university. 

 This year freshmen and sophomores also
 received a Lexmark color printer. The
 computers, which are dispersed to faculty as well
 as students on a two-year rotation, come loaded
 with Windows 95, Microsoft Office 97, Netscape
 Navigator, Lotus Notes and a special Wake
 Forest Template. Students take ownership of
 their second computer upon graduating. 

 "The touchstone of Wake Forest's approach to
 learning is personalized, individualized,
 customized dialog Ñ among collaborating
 students, between a student and a faculty
 member, faculty to faculty," said the university's
 provost, David G. Brown. "If we are to
 empower each individual student to communicate
 frequently with professors, to access customized
 reading lists, to collaborate with colleague
 learners on campus and at distant locations, we
 must provide the tools to do so. The computer is
 such a tool." 

 Keeping the lines of communication open
 between professors and students is central to the
 undergraduate plan and one of several
 concerns voiced by early critics of the Plan for
 the Class of 2000. Danielle Deaver, a senior from
 Folsom, Pa., who is editor in chief of the campus
 newspaper, Old Gold and Black, says that the undergraduate plan has divided the
 school into computer haves and have-nots without really benefiting those students who
 have them. 

 "I honestly don't believe the students need these ThinkPads," Deaver said. "I've
 never seen anyone carry one of them into a class or into the newspaper office. I'm also
 concerned that the $3,000 raise in tuition is decreasing the socioeconomic diversity on
 campus." 

 While the faculty voted more than two years ago to endorse a revised Plan for the Class
 of 2000 that provided additional financial aid to compensate for the tuition hike,
 professors also had problems with the emphasis on computers. Many voiced concerns
 that a wired campus would diminish the sense of community at Wake Forest and
 decrease personal contacts between faculty and students. 

 With the plan in place and more computers in student hands each year, the dissent that
 survives seems to have been replaced by ambivalence about the role technology will
 assume in the classroom and in interactions between faculty and students outside the
 classroom. 

 In the film studies courses I teach, for example, I have found that integrating computers
 is an uneven process at best, and I'm still trying to figure out how to meet specialized
 software needs for my seminar in screenwriting. As part of its Computer Enhanced
 Learning Initiative, the university has produced several programs to assist faculty in
 embracing computer technology. It has also placed academic computing specialists in
 each instructional building to answer discipline-specific questions and to help solve
 problems. 

 Even so, the process will be incomplete until all students have computers and faculty
 are able to find time to sort through instructional applications that use computers to
 expand learning opportunities. 

 Faculty research teams in the Department of Communication
 have undertaken a five-year technology assessment study to
 measure the changes in the community during the
 implementation of the undergraduate plan. 

 The study was launched in 1995 during the pilot program of the
 technology plan in which 100 student volunteers used
 ThinkPads. By taking baseline assessments about campus culture at Wake Forest
 before the technology plan was introduced, then following up in successive years
 through its complete implementation, researchers hope this study will reveal ways in
 which computerization changes interaction an communication among academic
 communities. 

 Not surprisingly, preliminary results indicate attitude differences not only between
 faculty and students but between the groups of students who came in under the
 undergraduate plan and those who did not. 

 Generally, incoming students are very positive about the plan, although they exhibit a
 wide range of perceptions of their own levels of competency with the computers and in
 their desire to use them as research and communication tools instead of merely as word
 processors. 

 Perception, as the saying goes, is everything. The university's assistant vice president
 for information systems, Jay Dominick, recalls talking with one student who labeled
 herself a computer illiterate but who, in the next breath, started talking about her Web
 page. 

 "They're more at home with the technology than 90 percent of the staff and faculty
 but perceive themselves to be computer illiterate," Dominick said. 

 Most of the first- and second-year students I teach are certainly
 more at home with the technology than I am, but there are students
 who fall on either side of the norms. For example, Katrina Pence, a
 freshman from South Charleston, W.Va., who is enrolled in Film
 and Public Culture, a first-year seminar I team-teach, claims to be
 intimidated by computers. 

 "I can do word processing, but that's about it," Pence said.
 "I'm not really competent with the computer, and whenever I touch it, it messes up.
 Even though I don't like them, I understand that their use in our society is increasing,
 and I like the idea that we got a laptop at Wake Forest, because my parents wouldn't
 have been able to buy me a computer otherwise." 

 On the other end of the spectrum, Tim Schilling, a first-year student from High Point,
 N.C., is one of the lower-division students I advise. Schilling, who is also a member of
 the Wake Forest baseball team, had his own company in high school specializing in
 Web hosting, graphic design and site development. Schilling is self-taught. He got his
 first computer at age 10 and never looked back. 

 Such disparate backgrounds have forced the university to come up with innovative
 programs to answer a wide range of training needs and interest in technology. In
 addition to software training, the "Getting Started" CD-ROM and a number of
 conventional computer training sessions, two programs in particular involve students in
 their own teaching and research projects. 

 One program puts student "resident technology advisers," or RTAs, in the dorms that
 house students with ThinkPads. In return for the 15 hours a week these advisers are on
 call to help other students, the RTAs get a $3,000 annual tuition deferment and the
 newest available ThinkPad model. 

 Ben Strickland, a senior from Greensboro, N.C., who has just begun his second year as
 an RTA, said: "The general level is that they've used computers at school or even had
 a home computer but never really used it. At the extremes, there are a few students
 who are system administrators of their own sites and others who have either never
 touched a computer or havenÕt touched one since DOS. But, freshmen are picking this
 up very quickly. When they came here, they knew very little about ThinkPads, and
 now weÕre having very few problems." 

 A second program, known as STARS, pairs a student with a faculty member to develop
 course enhancements. 

 Wake Forest's director of technology outreach, Nancy Crouch, says of STARS:
 "These students are very interested and have a good vision for how instruction can be
 improved by the technology. They are very focused on how the technology can
 enhance their relationships with faculty instead of replace faculty." 

 Michael J. Hyde, a professor of communication ethics who is working on the
 longitudinal study, said the research was already suggesting significant cultural changes. 

 "The computer really changes what teaching is all about," Hyde said. "For one thing,
 office hours now are outdated. The students can get to you and, perhaps, expect that
 they will get to you and that you'll respond via the computer. The faculty member's
 central nervous system is now expanded with the computer; it's dispersed across social
 space more than ever before. The whole interpersonal climate between students and
 teachers is changing." 

 The author, Mary M. Dalton, Ph.D., teaches film studies in the Department of
 Communication at Wake Forest and produced the university's "Getting Started"
 CD-ROM. 

In the last 18 months representatives of more than 120 schools, including campuses in South Africa, Australia, Japan, Mexico and Canada, have visited Winston-Salem, N.C., to assess Wake Forest University's technology plan.

According to IBM, at least 28 universities and colleges are planning or already implementing some sort of technology program to put computers in the hands of every student.

Last month it was announced that Virginia Tech, which 14 years ago became the first university in the United States to require computers for engineering students, next fall will become the first public university in the United States to require computers of its entire freshmen class.

Getting Started

Students who paid their fall tuition by a specified date had their ThinkPads shipped to them at home over the summer. The computer came with a specially produced 'Getting Started' CD-ROM to introduce students to their new computers.

This is the first step in orientation, training and support, a process that accelerates when students move to campus. In addition to training, students have access to specially trained student advisers in their dorms and to a computer help line.