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Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms

1/20/2005

By Dian Schaffhauser

Johnson County Community College: Flexibility for Evolving Needs

Susan Lindahl, college and community relations officer for Johnson County Community College in high-tech hotbed Overland Park, KS, is helping oversee development of literal “classrooms of tomorrow.” In December 2004, the school held a “virtual groundbreaking” in which the college president, board of trustees, and major donors pointed lasers at a giant egg, out of which emerged robots, which started breaking ground for the new buildings.

What d'es the classroom of tomorrow look like? It is defined by its flexibility. The Regnier Center for Technology and Business will contain 150,000 square feet of classrooms, offices and labs, as well as an art museum. It was designed based on input from a consortium of community leaders, who were asked, according to Lindahl, “What will be important to you 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road?”

From there, a committee of school and business participants made site visits to the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, Virginia Tech, Bellevue Community College, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their mission was to ask, “What do you have now? What do you wish you’d put in? What do you see in the future?”

The result: “Each of the classrooms that we’re putting in will be multi-purpose,” says Lindahl. “We’re working with a technology consultant, so we have covered the most advanced technology available—so that we include wireless capabilities and also every other potential emerging technology.”

Behind the Scenes: More Hours in IT’s Future

The IT staff will be housed in the new structure, offering a “kind of walk-up helpdesk, open seven days a week,” she says. The school hopes to “expand the college’s position as a community resource, by being open more hours, by providing learning environments in MDI music, 3D animation, motion graphics, a wet lab for bio tech and bioinformatics courses, by being a national training site for emerging technologies.”

Lindahl says a key to building the campus of tomorrow is collaboration: a “private/public partnership.” How better to envision the synergy between technology and the arts, bio sciences and the community?

University of Michigan: The Rule of Emotions

Building the classroom of tomorrow is something that Phyllis Grummon thinks about every single day as Director of Planning and Education for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), affiliated with the School of Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her particular area of interest is change and change management and social capital in organizations. When she considers the future, it might be six months away, and it might be 20 years off. She says technology won’t be the driving factor in change, emotions will.

“Probably since fire, it’s a continual balancing act between advances in technology—loosely spoken—and the realities of [the] hardwiring in our brains,” she says. “The more we learn about how the brain is structured and how learning occurs, the more we realize that emotions are critical. The effects of change on any organization are pretty readily predictable—because of that old brain that we have that really triggers our emotional reactions to what appears to what appears to be a neutral statement.”



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