Dave A. Berque is professor and chair of computer science at DePauw University. He has published more than twenty-five refereed papers and book chapters and has received several grants from the National Science Foundation. Laura M. Konkle is the president of DyKnow, a software company focused on educational technology. She has spent fifteen years in the high-tech industry, with the past six years targeting education technology. She has a B.S. in Finance and Accounting from the University of Arizona and is a certified public accountant. Rob H. Reed is the higher education segment manager in the personal systems group at Hewlett-Packard. He has thirteen years of experience in the fields of engineering and technology.
A wide variety of disciplines are embracing Tablet PCs and similar pen-based devices as tools for the radical enhancement of teaching and learning. Deployments of Tablet PCs have spanned the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels and have dealt with an amazingly diverse range of subject areas including nursing, veterinary science, geology, ethno-musicology, anthropology, landscape architecture, writing, mathematics, computer science, Japanese language, physics, engineering, art, economics, as well as others. Despite the diversity of content areas, many deployments have been similar in terms of the passion they have generated among students and teachers. This work, stemming from the Fourth Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education (WIPTE), will help the reader appreciate this passion.