Monthly Archives: February 2013

(What If…) Build a School in the Cloud

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Sugata Mitra has won the $1 million TED Prize for his wish to build a school in the cloud. The TED Prize is meant to “inspire dreamers to think bigger about what’s possible.” Sugata’s wish is inspiring indeed.

“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.”

Here is Sugata Mitra talking about his wish at TED.

With $1 million, it is now more than a wish. There is a plan and ways that anyone can help. As a part of the plan they are looking for some core technology assistance including “Cloud-based software design to manage laboratory school operations and education resources.”

SCSU might not be ready to dive into Sugata’s wish just yet, but what if we started with a smaller, more local concept? I am excited about the new ISELF building that will house fantastic equipment for our students to use for their studies.

What if… we made some of the equipment available via the internet? It could be used as a “Virtual Lab” by our own students. It could be used by nearby high schools. Or, let’s get crazy, the world. This concept is already being applied today. iLabCentral is a great example project supported by the National Science Foundation.

 

(What If…) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Awards

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Major leaders from the technology industry (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mail.ru) have joined together to create a not-for-profit corporation, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, that will offer 5 annual prizes of $3 million to breakthrough scientists. This is pretty darn cool as most big awards like this go to established scientists that have already completed their work. Often the awards come from large government or health organizations. Changing the model may have a huge impact on research.

What If… Information Technology Services teamed up with partners and created our own award to be given to new ambitious faculty using technology in the classroom? This would give us an opportunity to connect ITS with faculty, showcase great work being done, and encourage others to use technology in new ways. There are many schools out there doing this already: Brown University, California Community Colleges, Old Dominion University, Rochester Institute of Technology

Reference Articles
eWeek: Google’s Brin, Facebook’s Zuckerberg Help Fund $3 Million Science Awards
CNN: Tech titans create $3 million ‘Breakthrough Prize’ for scientists

 

Creative Friday – Tours

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First up was a virtual tour of the ISELF building.  You can look back to the previous ISELF Tour blog entry to get more info on that presentation.

Next, we met up with Sam Johnson who brought the team over to the UTVS & KVSC studios. Derrick Silvestri gave us a fun tour of UTVS where we were able to see the set used for the recent Trivia Weekend. Beam me up, Scotty! The UTVS studio was decked out as “the bridge” from Star Trek. We talked about the $4.8 million investment that will bring high definition to the TV studio. About $1 million will go to upgrade the cameras. Another big ticket item will be disk storage. Today the students use external computer hard drives. In the future they will have access to a considerable amount of fast storage area network.  We also learned that UTVS has a lot of great video equipment that mass communication students are able to check out.

Jo McMullen-Boyer led the group through the KVSC studios and the new Somali Radio. The Somali Radio was the outcome of a grant from the Minnesota Legacy Fund. They told us about the music collection and how it’s organized and rated. They are digitizing their collection, but keep the CD’s around with physical notes from the reviewers attached to the media.  The mixing studio in KVSC for Monday Night Live got a big makeover in 2011.

KVSC Offices

KVSC Broadcast Studio

Somali Radio

 

Then we followed Jared Podratz down to NHEC for a tour with Joe Meierhofer.

Beginning of NHEC Tour

NHEC Atrium Stairs

NHEC Atrium

NHEC View from Suites

NHEC Athletic Training Room. You can run the 100 yd dash in here!

Jeff in the NHEC Women’s Hockey Locker Room

I ran across this YouTube video of Alec Ausmus from UTVS getting his own tour from Joe Meierhofer that you may find interesting.

Images From the Tours:

Quiet

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This month CETL hosted a book talk on the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. They also posed several interesting questions to the faculty.

  1. Many of us include “participation” as part of a student’s grade, at which an extrovert usually excels. Can we “reframe” participation in a way that also allows an introvert to excel? How could we do that? What would it look like?
  2. Are group assignments “fair” to introverts? Why or why not? How do you balance individual versus group work?
  3. According to Cain, “Introverts need different kinds of instruction than extroverts.” What do you think of the “guidelines” to teachers found on pages 255-256?
  4. What did you think of Cain’s new version of groupthink? Is your own experience supported by the evidence that creativity and productivity is fostered by more time alone than working in groups? Is there a way to structure work to gain the benefits of both?

The ideas put forward by Susan Cain are a timely for consideration as we seek to develop new collaborative computing spaces on campus.

  1. How can we build new spaces for introverts?
  2. How should we design spaces to accommodate the broad range of work/study styles and needs?
  3. What elements contribute to learning spaces for introverts (i.e. lighting – amount, hue, lamp vs. natural; furniture – chair, desk; sound – white noise, music; visual surroundings – view, colors, artwork)?

If you are interested in an abbreviated version of Susan Cain’s thoughts, see her TED presentation titled “The power of introverts”.

ISELF Tour

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Last week I was fortunate enough to join a few other members of the ITS team on a tour of the new ISELF building. Dean DeGroote was kind enough to be our tour guide showing us around and explaining the function of the various areas of the building. The key takeaways for me were that the building is very open, flexible, and ready to support the emerging science fields.

When we first entered the building we could see that there was a lot of windows and open spaces. Dean DeGroote pointed out many areas that he described as “informal gathering spaces” – particularly on the West end of the building. As we toured the Dean’s Reception Area, and the Senior Design Lab he explained that the layout was intentionally open, with casing on the exterior and the floor space was flexible and reconfigurable to support any number of activities and configurations. In the lab areas that meant that power, data, gas, fluids, etc. would be available overhead allowing for furniture and equipment to be movable. As a side note, the Dean’s Reception Area reminded me of a video on the “Workplace of the Future.”

While the current configuration of the rooms is flexible, so are the walls themselves. Most areas have walls that could be removed or reconfigured without great expense. Some rooms are deemed “unassigned” and can be renovated to accommodate future needs (i.e. a 2 year grant from the National Science Foundation). The ISELF building itself may be expanded on with another phase added to the West of the building. The loading dock was built large enough to serve the new addition removing the need for another loading dock to be added.

Dean DeGroote explained that the entire building is intended to be a space for research and lab work, not for offices and residency. The thought here is that professors will have their departmental space and office services hosted in other buildings. When it comes time for the faculty and students to work in the lab, they will be able to leverage the spaces in ISELF. After they are done with their lab work, they may collaborate informally in ISELF, but otherwise they will most likely return to their departmental areas back in other buildings on campus.

Earlier I had blogged about ISELF getting an X-ray diffractometer. Turns out, we got it! There are a lot of really cool spaces and equipment that we be available to our students and community once ISELF is complete. I am proud of the work Dean DeGroote and his team have done. And I am excited to see our students, faculty, and community make the most of this cutting edge resource. Added to the recent announcement of the $4.8 million enhancement to the UTVS TV studio, and the Presidents engagement in attracting the brightest students from all over the world, this sets SCSU and our community on an exhilarating trajectory.

I’ve built a quasi-virtual tour of ISELF on Prezi if you are interested in seeing more.

Creative Friday Recap

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First things first.  Please help us by filling out the following survey concerning this Creative Friday.  Even if you were not able to attend, we want to hear from you!

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And now onto the recap!

Arduino Demo

Josh Hjelmstad presented on the work he’s been doing with an Arduino and a gumball machine. Here is how Josh describes it.

“Arduino is an open-source, programmable, cost-effective hardware device that gives SCSU the ability to control our physical environment with code. The Arduino device is quickly expandable with over a thousand “shields” (plug-in modules) that allow you to interact with sensors (accelerometers, GPS, photo-receptors, voltage, temperature) and communicate with the world (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, high voltage circuits, servos).”

Potential Uses

  1. Quadrocopter
  2. Twitter/Foursquare controlled gumball machine
  3. Washing machine availability notifications via email or web site
  4. Computer lab workstation availability lights (blue/orange)
  5. Robotics

D2L Widget Demo

Greg Jorgensen presented on the widget he created for D2L. He explained that the idea came from a faculty member who had asked about allowing students to see their office hours. The widget connects to Adobe Connect and allows students to know if their professor is available to help. More information here: http://desire4community.com/course-home-page-widget-contest-most-useful/

Windows 8 Demo

Special thanks to Eric Dietz for stepping in to present while Kristen was out sick. Eric showed off the new UI features of Windows 8. A good reference site for the features Eric showed can be found here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/basics

 

User Feedback & Data Collection Discussion

I spoke for a short time on ideas to capture user feedback and get users involved as a part of early adopters in upcoming projects. We cut this conversation a bit short to spend more time on the Collaborative Space discussion. Here is a link to a concept blog site

Collaborative Space Discussion

Mark Kotcho showed off examples of collaborative classrooms at different institutions. He discussed the concept of Active Learning Classrooms (defined here), SCALE-UP design (defined here), and Flipped Classrooms (defined here).

Below are a list of sites that were referenced as examples of collaborative spaces.

University of Minnesota Customized Presentation System Projects
Fresno State Technology-Enhanced Reconfigurable Learning Spaces (TERLS)
North Carolina State University SCALE-UP
Berkley Active Learning Classrooms
McGill Active Learning Classrooms
Wilfrid Laurier University Active Learning Classrooms
City University London Learning Spaces
University of Southern Mississippi Think Center
University of Southern Mississippi Think Center on Facebook
Virginia Commonwealth University Multimedia Collaboration Room
Aston University Collaborative Learning Space
Northern Michigan University Active Learning Classroom
Campus Technology – Studio Classroom: Designing Collaborative Learning Spaces

And here is a series of videos showing collaborative spaces and furniture.