Schedule Problems Solved For Pizza "Digital Campus vs Digital Learning" A brainstorming session with hot new startup Reactivity FREE Pizza and drinks! When: Wednesday, March 4, 7-9pm Please RSVP to devnet-officers@cs.stanford.edu if you think you might attend. But feel free to show up at the last minute even if you don't :-) Where: Gates rooms 100, 104 and 159 Meet at the top of the stairs to the basement - outside of 100 & 104 What: Reactivity, Inc., a startlingly new startup (in business for less than 6 months now) founded by Stanford and Apple alums, would like to invite members of DevNet to an evening of really cool thinking about technology and markets. Reactivity's motto is that we're creating "The Future of Software Design", which is marketing-speak to explain that we're working hard to be the genesis of the next wave of innovative technology companies in Silicon Valley. Toward that end, twice a month we have company + outsider brainstorms, where we think and talk for a few hours on hot new technologies and market opportunities, and try to understand the directions that things are going. We've been talking with some of the DevNet officers for quite a while, and thought that it would be a great event to hold one of our brainstorms at Stanford with DevNet members, so would like to invite you to the brainstorm for next week, "Digital Campus vs Distance Learning"--we've put an abstract below. The details: we'll be getting together at 7pm on Wednesday, March 4th in Gates (put rooms here) and spending a few minutes talking about Reactivity and what we do/are, then spend an hour and a half or so breaking into groups and really trying to get a handle on the topic. Oh, and we'll have a lot of pizza, of course. So we hope you'll come by and participate--these have been extremely fun and valuable for us to do so far, and we always learn a lot. See you there! Abstract: In the high-tech industry, there's a quickly growing market segment that's focused on the field of Distance Learning--the idea that people should be able to get college or high school educations without actually being physically at a school (via the web, or teleconference, or whatever). It turns out that this is a huge market--one that's relevant to millions, maybe billions of people worldwide. All that work, though, is focused on something that's quite different than a school like Stanford provides--the Stanford experience offers quite a lot that's pretty difficult to get over a medium like the net, no matter how wizzy the next version of Java is. :-) The coming "Digital Campus" uses the idea that a physical university is still critical for certain types of learning--we're trying to understand the types and implications of technology in this setting. Consider a very near term example: North Carolina now requires that all students own laptops (in fact, they're leasing them in 2 year chunks to the students)--how does that change the assumptions you make as students? How does that change educator assumptions? Or a longer term example: smart dorms & classrooms. Folks have been talking for years about the "smart house" of the future. What possibilities do we see for these sorts of ideas applied to dorms, classrooms, eating clubs, etc? What we'd like to focus on for the brainstorm is to recognize that there's an impending split in higher education between these distance learners and traditional universities, and focus on how technology that's 3 to 5 to 10 years out will impact a place like Stanford. We think that this is an extremely rich space of possibilities that is largely unlooked at, so it should be a really fun thing to talk about. [back to event description] If you're new here and are confused, feel free to email the webmaster, and I'll answer your questions :-)

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