Brainstorming
Part One: Pose a general assignment to the students to get them thinking about the essay at hand. For instance, one might ask them to comment on the effectiveness of the Broken Windows Theory in Gladwell's essay in relation to a particular place with which they are familiar. You could either write the prompt out using the classroom teacher function in the lab, put it on the board, or pass it out on small sheets of paper, but give them something written rather than just shouted oral directions. (The labs do not have the best acoustics, and there are too many distractions for them to concentrate on oral assignments.) The more vague you are about the kind of situation you are asking them to envision, the more varied their responses will be—i.e., sloppiness in personal hygiene, dirtiness of public buildings, broken down cars left in parking lots—dare we hope it—poor grammar or spelling on a paper!] Have them write for 10-15 minutes without stopping to revise or read over. Ideally, this short writing assignment will have them immediately begin to evaluate the relevance of the theory beyond the example (New York City Subways) given in the Gladwell essay, and it may highlight for them why they react to the essay as they do. Walk around surreptitiously reading over shoulders to identify three or four passages that may lead to good discussion. After the intensive writing session is over, ask if those people would e-mail their passages to you for use in the next class. Alternatively, they could be used as forum postings to generate online discussion between classes.

Part Two: If time allows after the initial writing session, you could have students switch terminals and read each other's work. The reader then has 10-15 minutes to write in response to the first writer. If you have even more time, have the initial writer then respond to the reader, or a third person comment on the first and second writers' texts. The benefit of this is that by the time they leave class, they have already started to put their thoughts in writing and they have identified and captured their instinctive reactions to another writer's ideas. At the end of the session they can e-mail the document to all the writers involved for future reference.