I. Introduction
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After over a decade of teaching "HIS 102: World Civilization II,"the second half of two-semester required course in Salem State College's core curriculum, I decided to fundamentally redesign the course and document my experiences. The motivation for such a dramatic redesign was threefold:

• The course, even though it received excellent student reviews, was becoming stale and boring to teach. During the fall 2007 semester, I found lecturing and discussing the readings predictable and felt distanced from the interests, capabilities and expectations of first-year students.
• As the college's Faculty Coordinator for Instructional Technology, I had helped implement a laptop requirement for all students and pioneered the idea of "laptop intensive" courses. Yet, I was not regularly using laptops in the classroom and there was a growing academic and college-wide debate whether laptops were a distraction to teaching and learning in the classroom.
• The move toward assessment was in full swing and we were being asked to explicitly assess our instructional goals and objectives. I learned about "backwards design" from our new Instructional Designer, Marc Boots-Ebenfield in the Center for Teaching Innovation. I thought I would experiment with this new process on a course I was familiar with and had taught regularly since I began teaching.

The challenge, therefore was to redesign the course based on both backwards design and good assessment practices while simultaneously integrating laptop and wireless technologies throughout the course. The backwards design for the course was uncontroversial. However, the idea of integrating laptops, even making them a central component to the course, was very controversial. According to a 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “The Fight for Classroom Attention: Professor vs. Laptop, some professors now find themselves vying for students' attention against Internet-enabled student laptops.* In some cases, professors have started banning laptops in the classroom arguing that the temptation to surf the Web, stream media, IM friends or check email distracts students from class lectures, discussion and participation. Others have disabled Internet access or limited the use of laptops to specific days or time. In either case, the effective use of laptops in the college classroom and sound pedagogical principles supporting their use has emerged as a controversial issue and challenge for higher education.

This Web site is an attempt to document the experience of fundamentally redesigning a course. Since I began in in November 2006 as I prepared the course for the spring 2007 semester and I am writing now as the course just ended in May 2007, it is meant to be a work in progress. Any observations or conclusion are tentative at best. Finally, it is meant to share with other faculty both visitors on the WWW and in different conferences that I will be attending and presenting at this coming summer and year. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. You can email me directly at cmauriello@salemstate.edu.

Endnotes

*Jeffrey R. Young, “The Fight for Classroom Attention: Professor vs. Laptop,” Chronicle of Higher Education Volume 52, Issue 39, ( June 2, 2006 ), A27. Web Version: http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i39/39a02701.htm

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