ENG 103 is the accelerated, one-semester version of first-year composition. As such, the course is designed to give students practice in the research and writing skills necessary to produce effective academic writing, including persuasive writing and research papers. Through the use of the tablet PCs in class, students will complete in-class invention exercises that will allow them to develop ideas for and plan longer writing projects. Additionally, they will easily share their in-class free-writing with classmates by uploading their texts to shared spaces in Blackboard or online spaces such as Google.docs. Using the tablet PCs, students will also maintain writing journals on blog sites and comment on each other’s postings during class as well as add to their own journals as in-class brainstorming or free-writing activities.

Regarding the research aspects of the course, students will use their tablet PCs to locate academic research sources, such as journal articles, and learn to catalog their sources and take effective notes from those sources on their tablet PCs. The organization of their research sources and notes on their tablet PCs will simultaneously help them to develop essential file management skills that would be useful in any context. Working with the tablet PCs in and outside of class, students can create and edit bibliographic citations and learn to use freely available electronic citation tools like bibme (http://www.bibme.org/) or Son of Citation Machine (http://citationmachine.net/) to check their citations and transform them into various formats.

The use of tablet PCs in ENG 103 promises to increase the amount and quality of student’s writing and research practices by providing them with the tools they need to produce text and organize research resources in a central electronic environment. In a learning community format, this course could easily focus writing assignments around the topics, issues, and subject matter of any number of disciplines, providing students with a specific content area around which to develop writing projects.