The stereotypical view of the current generation of college students is that they embrace new forms of technology and thus should welcome new technology in the classroom. However, an exploratory study of journalism students at the Pennsylvania State University suggests that not all students are comfortable with the new technology and welcome its various applications and that accessibility is still a problem for some. In-class writing assignments are always done on the computers in our newswriting lab. The lab contains 18 terminals linked to a file server used by the instructor.
Students can thus access one another's stories and work collaboratively.
The server the only machine in the lab with a modem and thus access to e-mail. Instructors are free to use whatever word-processing software they want, with Microsoft Word 5.0 and Word Perfect 5.1 the two favorites. Another member of the journalism faculty and I use the computers to their fullest. That is, we have created virtually paperless classrooms. Stories are turned in to a file server and we copy them onto diskettes for later recall on our office or home computers, there to be evaluated and then returned via diskette to the file server.