Incubating Next-Gen.Edu

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The 21st Century Classroom

Incubating Next-Gen.Edu

6/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

THE TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED spaces in SCU's new Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library are dramatically different from almost every other classroom on campus.

The rooms are configured for "a lot of power and networking," says Danielson. "We wanted them to be able to accommodate a great variety of potential applications--even if we don't know right now what those applications are going to be four years from now. That's the whole idea." He admits that while some "experiments" will be highly successful, the school expects many of them will fail. But, "We'll gain experience and roll out [the successful experiments] more broadly across campus," says Danielson. Maybe what they're incubating, he concedes, is the idea that a campus needs more such experimental spaces. "Three isn't many," he points out, "but it's an awful lot more than zero."

Class-size, but different. Beyond the small experimentation spaces, the new center includes three classrooms that were deliberately designed to be "different from any other rooms at the university," says Danielson. One of the rooms is configured as a multimedia lab, where students are seated in front of Mac Pro computers with 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays in "pods" of four. Each pod also has a 40-inch NEC Multeos M40-AV LCD, which can be controlled by any student in that pod. The professor can push out images to any or all of the LCD projectors from the control podium, a Computer Comforts Universal Lectern 1, or else a student can do so. "There is no attention wall in this class," says Danielson, meaning that the traditional classroom setup--in which a faculty member stands at the "front" of the room with all students' eyes facing forward--has been avoided (a common design principle for incubator spaces).

The other two rooms, one designed to accommodate 32 individuals, the other for 48 people, are intended to be flexible in that they can be set up so that the class faces one wall, or can be divided into units of four or eight individuals working together. Although these spaces will be used primarily by Danielson's staff for information literacy instruction, they're also available to faculty for class use and utilization of the room's special services, up to a few times each term.

A grid of power and data boxes concealed under the floors (accessible by picking up a piece of carpeting that camouflages the box) allows the room configuration to be changed in about 30 minutes, but that's not fast enough for Danielson, who sees electric power as the limiting factor. "You can't ‘broadcast' power, or make power wireless. That's what we really wanted; to be completely untethered." In order to reconfigure the room, he says, "You pull up the lid to the floor box, you unplug the power and data connections, and you roll your equipment someplace else and plug it into another floor box."

Beg, borrow, or steal. Danielson's staff has decided to limit possible configurations in these rooms, because they need to be able to "plug people in" quickly. The idea of having a limited number of configurations was borrowed from the Stanford University (CA) School of Medicine; in fact, many other ideas for the learning commons also were inspired by other institutions. The concept of the small, highly configurable labs, for instance, came from Cox Hall at Emory University (GA). A congressional grant enabled Danielson to send out teams of two or three shared-services individuals to visit other schools' new or extensively remodeled media centers and classrooms. In total, the teams comprised of 20 people altogether visited more than 20 campuses.