Wallenberg Blog

On Friday April 25, 2008, graduate students in architecture working with Professor Lars Botin from Aalborg University Denmark 'met' with graduate students in education working with Dan Gilbert for an inter-disciplinary, globally collaborative session on designing learning in public places. This event was a direct result from the relationship that Dan and Lars built while Lars was a visiting scholar in Wallenberg Hall in the summer and fall of 2007.

The core issue that students in Denmark and California discussed was learning in public places such as town squares, parks, and other public places. Together, students discussed strategies for how to make compelling cases for learning experiences in public places and ideas on how to keep the learner at the center of the design of any public space.

We connected using Polycom Viewstation videoconferencing devices on both sides. In more and more cases, however, global collaborators are using 'desktop' tools such as Skype, iChat, and Marratech to facilitate global collaboration from their own laptops at no or extremely low costs. One important implication is that cost is no longer a barrier for global collaboration - to carry this out, faculty, staff, and students should think about whom they know around the world and how their partners' input might support learning. With a clear rationale and a willing partner, the technology logistics can come together relatively quickly.

On Monday April 7, SCIL Director of Technologies Bob Smith shared a 'Wallenberg Hall User Guide' for staff, faculty and students that work in the building. Since the building's reopening in 2002, a wide variety of groups have come through the space and the institutional knowledge of how to take advantage of the resources here has come and gone with some of them. This talk was designed to introduce our newest occupants to the history and affordances of this space and introduce some of the building's newer collaboration tools to a wider audience.

Bob discussed the growing numbers of activities that have some element of distance collaboration and some of the tools we have to support these emerging processes. In particular we are able to support videoconferences using Polycom Viewstations - internet based devices dedicated to videoconferencing. This works well for small groups on each side and can give a high quality video and audio experience. It requires the site on the other side to have similar technology.

An alternative remote collaboration system is Marratech, a software based system that runs directly on a personal computer requiring only a webcam and microphone. Marratech supports a shared workspace where remote collaborators can share slides, images, documents, whiteboard, and more. Teams in Wallenberg Hall can schedule Marratech sessions with Adelaide Dawes, building manager.

Ah, Spring Break at last.... the building is quiet, the campus is quiet, email and phones are quiet... NO they're NOT!! Spring Break does give me some relief from the hustle and bustle of an academic quarter, but it is also a time of intense activity. The first floor is being painted. Routine care and maintenance on the room technologies is taking place. Resources in the classrooms are being restocked. Calendars and card reader access for the next quarter are being updated. Faculty are finding their classrooms and getting room orientations from Dan Gilbert, our Academic Technology Specialist.

Tonight, we are hosting a dinner for SCANCOR, following a conference they are holding. The smell of dinner thankfully masks the smell of the paint drying. The Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater is being transformed into a dinner hall, with round tables and linens down to the floor. The movable tables from the room are stashed safely away in the side classrooms, and excess chairs are also stowed. That is the beauty of 'flexible furniture'. The lobby is set for the welcome reception, and is an ideal setting for the networking and socializing that is such an important aspect of conference events. Soon, the attendees will take their seats for dinner in the Theater. The lights are dimmed.

Tomorrow is another day... Friday.... just one full day away from the start of the Spring Quarter. The last chance for a final checklist of building technical and management issues. Spring Quarter is always an exciting session. The building is being very heavily used this quarter, with several challenging classes being hosted. We're going to be very busy......

I can't wait!!

As Director of Development and Dissemination for the Stanford CTEL/CLAD Program Online, Veronica Fern-McElarney has multiple responsibilities as teacher, project manager, and entrepreneur of the Stanford Online Cross-Cultural Language and Academic Development (CLAD) Program for California Teachers of English Learners. Working to expand the program from California to other states where growing numbers of K-12 English learners are affecting schools, Veronica works closely with Stanford faculty Kenji Hakuta and Guadalupe Valdes. In her February talk for the Wallenberg Hall Brown Bag Series, Veronica invited the audience to participate and experience firsthand some of the pedagogical techniques she uses to engage students.

At January's Wallenberg Hall Brown Bag Talk, SCIL Senior Research Scholar David Nordfors, Founder & Program Director, Innovation Journalism Program, coined the phrase "innovation journalism" in 2003 to describe journalism covering innovation where the process of innovation itself is the central concept, treating business, technology, politics etc. as nested components of a news story. David spoke at length about how the program has evolved since its inception and includes a well-respected fellowship program, annual conference and proceedings, and growing recognition and coverage nationally and internationally. For more on innovation journalism, check out the innovation journalism website at http://www.innovationjournalism.org/.

Chris Thomsen, Executive Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), and Vijoy Abraham, Academic Technology Specialist of IRiSS, gave an overview of IRiSS and the range of projects they are supporting and directing to a group of 17 at Wallenberg Hall's December Brown Bag lunch. From using pmwiki in Professor Michael Tomz's Correlates of War project to the trend data and customized analyses available from The Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, IRiSS is breaking new ground in a variety of forms of vertical and horizontal collaboration and the infrastructures needed to support innovations in social science research.

As the world becomes more connected, collaboration among researchers, students, and industry will continue to grow in dynamic and often unpredictable ways. Stong institutional and individual relationships will help all parties navigate and take advantage of these changing times.

Building on the partnership that Innovation Center Denmark has built wth Stanford University, I (Dan Gilbert from the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning) traveled to Denmark to meet with professors and students from Aalborg University, Danish Pedagogical University, and the Danish Royal Academy of Art and Architecture. This trip was possible because of the vision and support of Innovation Center Denmark Silicon Valley, an office of the Danish government charged with building connections between Denmark and Silicon Valley organizations.

In Aalborg, Professor Lars Botin and I conducted two distinct activities. First, three researchers from Stanford joined a symposium via videoconference on exciting developments in Project Based Learning (PBL); second, we agreed to pilot a globally collaborative student project in April 2008. In this project, students from Aalborg’s Architecture and planning departments will work with Stanford graduate students in education to design public spaces that support learning.

In Copenhagen, I met with students and researchers at Learning Lab Denmark of the Danish Pedagogical University to exchange ideas and identify potential contacts at Stanford for future collaboration. I also met with graduate students and faculty from the Royal Academy of Architecture and visited three spectacular schools that merged innovative design with innovative curriculum.

A successful outcome for this trip will be if we can develop project sin the next one to two years that connect the expertise we have in innovative learning practices with our partners' expertise in architecture and design. I am looking forward to some exciting conversations in these areas.

Over the last few years, Wallenberg Hall has happily hosted several rounds of job search interviews via video conference. When you think about it, this is actually an excellent way of sifting the job applications above the traditional paper sift. Think about it. You advertise an opening in your department. The applications roll in. People are distributed across the globe.

Your search committee reviews the paper applications, some of which can be easily discarded, while a good number look attractive on paper. Out of that pool, you want to select two or three for personal interview. Maybe you'd like to bring them to campus, introduce them to other faculty, take them to the Faculty Club for lunch, have them give a job talk to your department. But how do you trim down the applicant pool, so you can be pretty sure to be inviting the right people to campus? How do you make sure you do not spend good money on the wrong candidate?

Quite often, a round of telephone interviews may be the only way you can think of to narrow down the candidate pool. But that is still only half the picture (or maybe two thirds by now....).

If only you could meet these people in person. You may be lucky enough to have a conference coming up, where prospective candidates can be interviewed in person. However, that involves travel and usually several days away from Stanford for at least two or three faculty.

Consider interviewing a number by video conference first. After the first few minutes of self-consciousness, candidates settle into the interview just as if they were there in person. The 'impression' of the candidate visually, the body language, the facial expression, is all added information above that available over the telephone.

We have the technology.... Wallenberg can support IP based connections via H.323, and we also have a Marratech server to support a collaborative meeting. We can also facilitate webcam connections over iChat and AIM. The service is not free of charge, and we do expect at least five working days notice, but it can be a lot cheaper than the alternative.

With new laptops coming along armed with webcams, video connections are most definitely becoming almost a routine way to interact in this modern world.

This quotation is from Rhett Livengood, an Intel employee who participated in an office experiment where he gave up his cube to work in an area of unassigned tables and private rooms for confidential discussions. Cited in an article titled "Out of the Box -- Valley companies dump the cubicle in push for efficiency, teamwork" (12/3/07) from the San Jose Mercury News, this article and accompanying photos definitely prompt exploration of the question:

What are we learning about the impact of the Wallenberg Hall learning environment on group collaboration in face-to-face and distributed project-based courses? What are the implications for industry and the "future of the workplace"?

These privacy rooms at Cisco look similar to Wallenberg box cars (Link to photo, Gary Reyes, Mercury News)

As the fall quarter ends, student teams created presentations with added layers of context to demonstrate their work.

In Tanya Shashko's French class, students used one of the computers in class to give a high-level outline presentation. They complemented that presentation with specific examples that they drew from popular internet sites to demonstrate specific points. Having both the macro and micro view of a particular issue side-by-side was valuable for other students in the audience and also helped the instructor better assess how the presenting team was able to integrate several aspects of the content that was covered during the quarter.

In Russ Altman's Biomedical Informatics class, a student team used the three screens of the Peter Wallenberg Learning Tehater to show three different 'views' of their project that helps individuals build better family medical histories. While demonstrating their project the students could move seamlessly between the patient's view, the doctor's view, and a presentation that called out some specific points. After the presentation, the students said, "This was a much more challenging presentation to give but we feel like we could show more of our work in a shorter period of time."

When faculty and students ask about multiple screens I often say that 1+1 is more than 2; that is, the sum is greater than the parts because of the different kinds of learning activities that having multiple screens offer. With two side-by-side screens, presenters can compare materials, add context, analyze original and annotated documents. Using multiple screens requires more preparation certainly, but the benefits can quickly accrue to many.