Modern Classroom Design Happens With You or Without You. What’s Your Preference?

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Modern Classroom Design Happens With You or Without You. What’s Your Preference?

2/25/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Publish the plan. Don't just devise a plan and file it away, you need to publish it and spend a little effort ensuring that the pertinent departments are aware of it. Or at least ensure that it's publicly available where it will be found even with a minimal amount of research.

Link the plan. Make sure your plan references and is referenced by the campus plan, the master plan, the academic plan, and the institution's strategic plan. Just as you want the folks who do those plans to know of your plan, your plan needs to be aware of theirs. If it is, then it can be part of an integral network of such plans, and that reduces the chances of your being left out.

Be prepared with relationships. Build a relationship at a management level between IT and physical facilities and the campus planner. At a large institution, someone in IT should follow all physical planning issues, whether that means joining a planning committee, browsing through an extensive facilities Web site on a weekly basis, or taking a planner to lunch. You should make it clear that there are knowledgeable IT staffers available as advisory liaisons for pertinent projects.

Be prepared with collateral knowledge. Architectural awareness is probably not part of your current skill set. Ensure that you have knowledgeable IT staffers on hand by occasionally sending staff to pertinent exhibitions and trade shows - not just the strictly IT-related ones, but those which feature participation by contractors and architects who will be displaying and talking about their pervious work with installations involving heavy information technology. There are experienced and knowledgeable firms out there, lots of them in fact, but you need to know who they are and what they know.

Being proactive about this is important for the functionality of the space and the institution's mission. It's also important to your job in direct ways. In many, many ways, IT infrastructure - even without "smart" classrooms - is analogous to physical infrastructure.

We use the word infrastructure for good reason. Even if planners plan a great classroom (without you) and designers design a great classroom (without you), and contractors build a great classroom (without you), five years later you're going to be standing there (without them) maintaining and supporting that space and the technology in it.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Modern Classroom Design Happens With You or Without You. What’s Your Preference?," Campus Technology, 2/25/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=38367

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