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Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
1/20/2005
When you think of what college classrooms might look like a few years into the future, you probably tend to focus on technology. We imagine wireless devices all around, the absolute latest interactive technologies, lots of sound and color, and instant information access from every seat.
But what happens when we talk with real educators who are actually working on building tomorrow’s classrooms? While technology is important, for many of them, it’s not the focus. What excites these education visionaries isn’t necessarily hardware gizmos, hot software, or fatter bandwidth, although those are important. What energizes them is what happens between and among students and teachers, both inside the classroom and out—and how individuals and small groups can use technology to enhance that.
At the University of Washington, a professor is watching what happens in the classroom when faculty can mark up PowerPoint slides in front of the group and share student work on the fly. An assistant provost at the University of Florida is figuring out new ways of ensuring face-to-face contact in his school’s distance learning programs—whether delivery is around the state or across oceans. A community relations officer for Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS believes her school’s future success lies in the input it receives from the local business community. And a planner working out of the University of Michigan envisions a day when partnering among schools will be the norm rather than the anomaly.
Although each story helps define the classroom of tomorrow, each has at its foundation an individual or a small team working out the details. And each focuses ultimately on personal interactions and the learning process—the technology is merely an enabler.
University of Washington: Archiving Interactions
Richard Anderson, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the campus of tomorrow will still be recognizable. “I believe the traditional face-to-face classroom has tremendous staying power... Fifty years from now, the classroom is going to look quite a bit like it looks today.” He bases that on his belief that a big part of education involves instructor and student discussion and interaction—most of it taking place verbally.
Yet, that hasn’t stopped Anderson from envisioning a new form for those discussions and interactions.
He has spent about three years developing and applying Classroom Presenter, a presentation tool built on some of the facilities of ConferenceXP, a distributed classroom platform created by Microsoft. Classroom Presenter, which enhances PowerPoint, has two types of uses. “One is strictly as a presentation system, where it’s allowing instructors to incorporate electronic ink on top of PowerPoint,” says Anderson. Teachers can spontaneously write on the slides and have the notes appear on the screen. “This is important in giving instructors additional flexibility in explaining topics—to write out equations, do quick sketches, write out examples,” he explains.
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