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Virtual Tattoos in Learning Spaces
10/6/2004
We also remarked at how often one has no sense in a classroom of where that classroom even is. It just seems counterintuitive that one can be sitting in a large lecture hall at the University of Michigan, for example, and nowhere in the room is there even a label that says that you are in Angell Hall, on the campus of the University of Michigan, in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The space should be comfortable. The technology should be transparent.
I'll combine these two here. When I go into many modern, flexible classrooms, it so often feels like I am on stage. (I'm used to being on stage, so that d'esn't bother me, but I wonder about how some students might feel.) There are bare walls, a bare floor, small furniture that is clearly more designed to reduce cost, increase flexibility, and reduce maintenance--rather than for my comfort. And the technology is everywhere: rack lighting, like stage lighting, overhead; technology-filled faculty control stations, video cameras hanging from walls and the ceiling and aimed all around.
The audiovisual experts at the workshop, including SCUP member Mark Valenti of The Sextant Group, assured us that the information technologies and the audiovisual technologies are converging, and that one of the new key design elements for both is to build them into the space seamlessly, so that they are there but they do not themselves become key visual elements of the physical space. That's good.
The space should accommodate what students bring with them.
There's some basic common sense to this principle. For example, you simply need more space per student in a classroom at the University of Minnesota--where in January students are going to come in wearing coats, hats, and gloves (maybe snowsh'es), in addition to huge backpacks--than you do on the campus of the University of South Florida.
But students bring other things with them, too. In addition to their expectations regarding the technology that your school will make available to them in the classroom, they bring their own technology: cell phones, PDAs, laptops, iPods, key fob storage devices, and a whole lot more. Much of that stuff, no matter how we old fogies hate to acknowledge it, plays an important role in their learning routines. If we give them no wireless, no power to plug things in to, no desktop space to lay them out on--then we are not accommodating what they bring with them!
How about some technology aimed at accommodating all of the above? This is fantasy, but it's fun. Do not get turned off, for the moment, by the privacy implications--there are ways around that. Imagine that:
· Each piece of furniture in the room has its own unique RFID tag; · Each student is carrying their own unique RFID tag which allows them to be identified by some kind of virtual tattoo, logo, or favorite quotation of the moment--their choice. (Much like the current craze for creative "away" messages in IM systems.); and · Invisible technology in the room collects that information and allows it to be sorted and collated in real time, and displayed as desired.
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