Laptops: I asked students to bring their laptops with them to class. Almost everyone had one. The few who didn’t had them on order but hadn’t yet received them. Over time, three or four of the sixteen got out of the habit of bringing theirs to class, but the rest constituted a pretty good yield in my view, and enabled some interesting learning opportunities.

One was what I’d expected (and hoped for): instant research journeys, and use of the class wiki for notes and other materials. It was a great day when we used the Internet to discover the explanation for “black Irish” that made sense of Jimmy Rabbitt’s insistence that Dubliners were “black and proud.” When the student at the end of the table found the resource and read it aloud, the entire class was charged with the discovery. That kind of serendipitous inquiry-fest is exactly what ubiquitous computing and connectivity should enable in classrooms–but it takes being alert to the possibilities.

I should have expected the other use, but I didn’t: students used their laptops to play for the class the music they were analyzing. Early in the class, I had played my own musical examples on CDs I owned or compilations I had burned. Of course I had my laptop with me as well, but it didn’t occur to me to use it to play music for the class. I play my music on my stereo, on CDs and on vinyl, and I also play my music on my iPod. I don’t use my laptop as a giant iPod–when I listen to music on my laptop, it’s streaming from Pandora or something like that. But these students really do use their laptops in a convergent manner: it’s a media center as well as a computer and an Internet device. Lesson learned. Next time I’ll assemble my examples on the laptop and play it back from there. No more boomboxes.

Play by play: I adapted an exercise from my earlier “Stranded” writing workshop and spent one day playing three songs for the class. For each, I asked them to narrate, as precisely as they could, what they were hearing, and to take that narration down in notes on their computers (on this day, we were in a lab, for better music playback and so everyone would have access to a machine). The results were fascinating. I asked them to send their notes to me so I could post them on the wiki. I didn’t get them posted. Why? Because there were multiple steps to get from Word format to MediaWiki format, and I hadn’t yet found the web service that did the quick-and-easy translation. My good intentions were then overtaken by events. Moral of the story: I should have had the students post their notes to the wiki. Good learning for them, low-threshold and brief requirement as well, and it will get done. I will be watching in the spring for ways to keep myself from being the bottleneck, even when it’s a last-minute inspiration I’m acting on.

The Final Project: In the preparation for the final project, begun in earnest about 2/3 of the way through the course, the students got bogged down in their discussions. No action items or organization emerged from those brainstorming sessions. I then intervened, more so than at any other time in the process, to get them organized and outline some basic project management steps to get and keep the ball rolling. The intervention was just what they needed, and things never got seriously off-track again. The intervention was not as much as they wanted, though: the students were very keen to have me tell them what the final project should look like, what they should do, what I was looking for, etc. I specified very precisely what I wanted–in the abstract. I refused to specify anything about the concrete form their project would take. A couple of students were unhappy with what they perceived as a lack of direction. I kept telling them the qualities the project must exhibit, the criteria it had to satisfy–but I simply would not tell them what kind of a thing it had to be, other than that it had to be a website. The result was better than I expected, and in some respects better than I had hoped. It was creative, funny, and showed (to me, anyway) a considerable amount of sophistication and understanding of the course materials. I was proud of their work, and they should be too. If the project was lacking something, it was probably ambition. It succeeded very well, but it didn’t aim quite as high as it might have, at least in terms of grappling with the harder questions in the course.

One more fascinating part of the final project, something that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stepped back a bit, was the way certain leaders emerged. The person who had real web-design chops did a fine job of pulling everything together, and he got a lot of praise and gratitude from his peers. Ditto the person who was a born project manager, a leader who kept everyone on task and focused, and enjoyed that part of her talents. While not everyone bought in to the process as fully as they should have, it was a real treat to see the captains emerge, and indeed heartwarming to see how people responded to their leadership.

If you’re curious, take a look at the blog-aggregation site. There are some fascinating posts from each stage of the semester. Reading them over now, I see how far some of the students traveled from beginning to end–and how much this music came to mean to them as we traveled together. And every now and then, I’m sure I heard that pure and easy note, playing so free like a breath rippling by….