I'm no Luddite, but...

     Lang’s best argument for using technology in the college classroom was identifying the use of technology as an important and student-relevant technique for wise and principled teaching when utilized in the context of a solid grounding in learning theory.  My limited experience teaching in a college classroom includes only an undergraduate course that I organized as a seminar and that experience speaks to both the pros and cons of classroom technology use.  My pedagogy for the seminar included a belief that the circle discussion format was a critical piece for navigating the content - exploring the history of education in US schools through the lenses of racialized privilege and oppression.  Because the history of US education is also the history of racial privileging and oppression in this country, it is a particularly difficult course for students who benefit from white skin privilege and who have never been educated about that nor had the opportunity to consider our country’s history from that perspective.  I assert that, for most learners, if course content is both novel and challenging to previous beliefs or worldviews, opportunities to participate in psychologically safe and structured conversations are essential if the content is to be absorbed and/or understood.  Additionally, given the demographics of this region, in almost every instance the majority of learners in that course will be students who identify as racially white, thus I anticipate a high need for carefully constructed discussion opportunities.  I had imagined the use of technologies to be potentially disruptive of the kind of focus and listening that I wanted to establish in the classroom (the idea of wireless devices with “you’ve got mail” chimes and Instant Message beeps seemed untenable!).
     At the same time, when I developed the course, I did give some pause to consider the use of technology in the classroom and I did grieve a bit my own lack of savvy regarding its potential integration.  The ideas in the Lang and Davis chapters have given me the encouragement to re-think this.  Perhaps there could be a specified time when wireless devises were turned on and used to find resources on explicit topics?  I especially liked Davis’ idea of “putting students’ equipment to work” - including laptops and cell phones – for use in small groups.  This begins to recognize the very integral part such devices are playing in students’ lives.  Also, asking students to work together and share their equipment/results could take account of the possibility that some learners may not have such devices.  My primary question at this point is – how might I begin to get myself familiar with the operations of some of these newer devices?  I am no Luddite, but I am a grad student on a tiny budget!