An iPad Christmas in September

The first meeting of our “Reading (w/) the Digital Human” created the excited chaos of a large-family Christmas morning. Instead of 4 year-olds with dolls and trains, we had 14 college age students tearing into iPad packages, leaving plastic wrap, cardboard, and Important Product Information Guides scattered around the room.

On our second day, now with working iPads, we found that a class of college students assembling in a room with new toys only want to talk about their new toys. Some people were confused and frustrated by the “magical” device, while others had already embraced the magic.

From a pedagogical perspective, what was interesting was how much the students were engaged. Granted, receiving the coolest new gadget that has appeared in nearly a decade (since Apple’s iPod) will pretty much guarantee student engagement.

To get into the class, students had to blog during the previous semester about their interests in the intersections between technology and reading and writing. So with 14 students primed for discussion this semester, we knew that talking about the how technology changes the experiences of reading, writing, of being human, wouldn’t be a problem. However, it was.

Being the first class with animated iPads, students didn’t want to discuss the implications of the devices; they wanted iPad show and tell. Everyone was talking about apps, finding apps, what are apps, apps for that app, etc. They had totally immersed themselves, not as scholars with a certain amount of rhetorical distance between themselves and their object of study, but as consumers. And herein lies Apple’s genius. Much like all other Apple products, the excitement the device creates in the early stages of interaction seems to be a closed loop—the students were not looking at what the device could really do but simply looking at the device. If the iPad is truly magical, initially, its magic seems to be that it hypnotizes its user, much in the same way television does—it doesn’t matter what’s on, as long as the TV is on. The question for us, as teachers, will be “can we productively harness that chaotic energy or will we be cleaning up torn, discarded wrapping paper and packaging all semester?”

Teaching with the iPad

The first two days of class have yielded interesting results. The fervor of the new device has not died; indeed, the students seem all too eager to discuss what is "cool" to do with/on the iPads. Curiously, a lot of these cool things are simulacra of activities we are already familiar with: highlighting, taking notes, using a grocery list to shop for food, identifying overheard songs, and so on.

To be totally honest, I found the second day of class to be vaguely nauseating: the hype factor around the smorgasbord of "apps" that promise a sort of personalized utopia, if that is not an oxymoron. However, later that day I noticed one of my students in another class taking notes on her iPad—and I was actually pleased with the appearance, the affect of knowledge-absorption emanating from the little titled screen in front of her, positioned next to a traditional paper book.

Next week we will begin to discuss Robert Darnton's The Case for Books, and I am eager to see how we shift from the object-as-text, to a text-as-text: how easy or difficult it will be to track the medial layers of Darnton's arguments as they unfold on our screens.