“Freshman Bobby Berg says he sought out UW-Stout this year because he knew he would be assigned a laptop computer. What he didn’t know is that most of his freshman classes aren’t structured around the computers as Berg initially thought. ‘We don’t use them hardly at all,’ Berg said.”

—UW-Stout students find laptops helpful, but some faults foundLeader Telegram)

UW Stout runs a cheesey advertisement on local TV showing streams of ones and zeros floating around the heads and into the school-provided computers of well-scrubbed happy college students. Truth in advertising? Yesterday my freshman comp students took their final exam in the computer room. (Full disclosure: Nearby UW-Stout has a larger technical writing program than UWEC; few students come to UWEC in order to be technical writers; rather, students who are here for other reasons find their way into the technical writing program at a late stage, and then rush rather frantically through it. When Stout started its laptop campaign, the number of tech writing majors and minors at UWEC dropped, suggesting that students who might otherwise have studied tech writing here ended up at Stout instead. More recently, our numbers are picking up, though.) (If the above link is dead, let me know — I’ve saved a copy.)