Thinking About Space, Revisited
Early in October, I wrote a blog post called "Thinking about Space," which was more or less a wishlist for a Dream Teaching Space for our CCR collaboration here at Stanford. Well, several months later, we're really not much closer to realizing that dream, but we have begun to stabilize a very successful model for using the space that's available to us right now.
Our videoconferences all take place in Wallenberg Hall,where we reserve a separate space for each student group to work in during video conferences. For most video conferences, we opt for 5 groups -- though we've had as many as 9 groups as a time, which means spreading students across three different floors in the building (quite a workout for those of us in Tech Support here!). Here are some of the space arrangements we use to accommodate our groups:
Assigned Classroom: One group is always stationed in their assigned Wallenberg Classroom, in this case, room 125. The students work on a collaboration station using a PWR computer and plasma screen.
We've used this space a lot in the past -- in fact, last year, we would station two groups in this same space,
a practice that we've discontinued largely because of noise issues - students found that having multiple groups in that same room made it too loud for them to be able to concentrate effectively on their collaborative tasks. The nice thing about this room is that it is relatively stable -- though we've had some software conflicted issues that seem to be resolved. The room itself is relatively big, and students just use one quarter of it; the screen is in a good position and is large enough for students to have a greater sense of technological transparency.
