Too smart a board for its own good

This morning I taught my second class in the Freddie Mercury room (I can't help hearing "He's just a poor boy from a poor family" whenever I set foot in there, thank you Bo Rhap), and once again was flummoxed by the high tech display board. This time I typed up prompts on the laptop for in-class writing and reading in advance, but then when it came time to display them--sometimes nothing happened. The projector would poll the available devices and wouldn't find "Computer 1." Then eventually it'd come up--but after a rhythm-destroying gap.

So I ponder this example of a teaching technology that perhaps solves a problem while creating many others. I suppose what makes it strange is that, at least at Davis, these projection systems are piggybacked onto either whiteboards (in computer classrooms, to avoid chalk-dust) or conventional chalkboards, with the result that instructors always have a low-tech back-up plan (something I preached when I was Coordinator for Computer Assisted Instruction, back in the day).

The screen is also much smaller than a conventional board, meaning that in practice one has to either erase or tile / mask previous screens, instead of shifting to a different part of a board, or pulling down a windowshade board, or whatever. Yet in a writing class or even a lit class, I often would return to what I had written earlier in the class session, making connections and elaborations in an iterative process that mirrors the actual writing process (of re-vision, seeing again). This is much more difficult with these electronic touch-boards--or if they do facilitate it, the documentation is either missing or too turbid to be useful.

I suppose such a board is perfect for the mode of "teaching" that I loathe the most: PowerPoint presentations, with their short bulleted lists, their tendency to oversimplify, and their hostility to subordinated and complex layered answers to real questions. Ah, progress.