SCUP Annual International Conference

The IT roundtable had a few dozen attendees from education, architecture and design. Although some were interested in the educational and pedagogical aspects of classroom IT, most were building new spaces or retrofitting existing spaces and wanted to discuss the best practices. Nonetheless, most of the conversation was on education and not specifically on construction or IT gadgets and software.

In summary, the roundtable focused on concepts and practices that used technology and not on the technologies specifically. The group discussed mass input devices, small team collaboration, large-scale collaboration, flexible spaces, gathering information in real time, simulation as means of creating reality, one-on-one interaction in person and at a distance, high resolution interactions, and probably most importantly, aligning the IT decisions with the desired academic outcomes.

Specific comments included:

• Students and faculty are technologically literate (to varying degrees), so now is a good time to examine our academic outcomes and change the way we deliver programs. 
  
• The technology adoption process seems to be more successful when the provost’s office is leading the initiative rather than business or IT.
  
• New collaboration environments (i.e. labs and classrooms) are moving toward multi-screen and 3-D technologies. Several people noted that these technologies are already here, and it is just a matter of time until they are available widely at a reasonable price.
  
• There was not a definitive answer for “What is really good IT?” A good classroom meets the educational objectives of the institution, has flexibility for the future but is not so overdesigned as to make the room hard to configure or use.
  
• What your institution sees as important is an individual discussion, that is, are you trying to get students to show up or do better on exams or are you trying to meet a goal like creative writing across the curriculum? These lead to different IT solutions.
  
• There was some discussion on the current trends and tools, and the group recognized that these tools will be different in a year or two, or maybe tomorrow. Examples were the wii and DS (http://www.nintendo.com/), Second Life (http://secondlife.com/), various consumer electronics and educational technology shows, Xbox LIVE (http://www.xbox.com), and finally, different bits and piece of virtual reality tools and equipment.
  
• There was some disagreement to the degree that we should build technologies to respond to student communication needs or adapt technology to faculty needs for teaching. One of the driving factors is that student needs (or desires) change so rapidly, while faculty needs evolve more slowly. Regardless, the focus should be on how the technology is adapted to, and how it changes, the human interactions.
  
• We need to selectively leverage the technology that is already in the hands of the student, the most recent example being the use of podcasts in education. 
  
• The use of real-time information in the classroom was discussed from the perspective of the “Google jockey” and collaboration software. Specifically, the Google jockey is a student that is assigned to Google (verb) terms and concepts in front of the class during the lecture. It was noted that there is some very good collaboration software called TeamSpot and ClassSpot (http://tidebreak.com/).

This group meets again on Wednesday morning at breakfast.

Labels: AV, classroom technology, education