Wallenberg Blog

I recently returned from running a designing learning spaces workshop for faculty and administrators at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The purpose was to share our experiences from Stanford and also some of our processes of supporting innovations in teaching and learning.

Two themes came out of our discussion.about engaging faculty in thinking about space We have talked quite a bit about these internally here at Wallenberg Hall; it was rewarding to have them validated from a community on the other side of the world.

* Challenge faculty to make a single change in their teaching; By changing one thing, it is clearer to measure impact, offers lower risks, and becomes a proposition that students can buy into.

* Focus on 'What should my students be doing' instead of 'what tools should they be using' If students should be listening then the space should support student listening. If they should be working together to solve complex problems then the environment should support collaboration.

Many other points were raised throughout this conversation. My thanks to professors Taira Nakajima and Takashi Mitsuishi for organizing this event.

Dan Gilbert facilitates workshop on Designing Learning Spaces with Tohoku University Faculty, October 2007

On Monday, November 5th, 16 people from the 4th floor gathered to officially kick off the Wallenberg Hall Brown Bag Lunch Series and hear an informal talk given by Lars Botin, visiting scholar at SCIL. Lars is a researcher and teacher at Aalborg University in Denmark, who currently is visiting Stanford on an Elite Research Scholarship that he received from the Danish Ministry of Science, Development and Innovation. His primary research lies within the field of art and technology; and how the two can come together as we try to design information technologies that opens up intelligences that go beyond science and cognition.

Some of the provocative examples Lars shared with the group included:
The Cloaca, an art installation that simulates the human digestive system: http://www.cloaca.be/

The "One Trees Project" by Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/onetrees/

The Supergas Project, Danish artist collective Superflex's efforts to develop an ecologically sustainable energy source for poor, isolated farming families in Third World countries:
http://www.arken.dk/view.asp?ID=1817
http://www.superflex.net/tools/supergas/

More about the Wallenberg Hall Brown Bag Lunch Series
All occupants of Wallenberg Hall are invited to join a monthly brown bag series on the first Monday of each month on the 4th floor. The goal of these lunches is to encourage cross-fertilization of projects and experiences, foster interdisciplinary knowledge building, and to build a community among those of us who "live" in Wallenberg Hall. The format of these brown bags is very informal and will loosely consist of a half hour presentation on any topic to be followed by questions and a brief discussion.

Our next Brown Bag will take place on Monday, December 3, 2007 and will feature Chris Thomsen of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) at Stanford University.

Electronic learning portfolios or "ePortfolios" have long been a research focus of SCIL and experimented with in courses taught in Wallenberg Hall. This article explores the implications of social software for ePortfolios and includes an interview with SCIL researcher, Helen L. Chen.

John K. Waters, "ePortfolios Meet Social Software," Campus Technology, 10/1/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=50618

Sandy Klausner, CoreTalk Corp.
Media X Autumn Lecture Series - Monday, December 3, 2007
4:00-5:00 Wallenberg Learning Theatre, Stanford University

The Cubicon Platform: a radically simplified network architecture enabling true semantic functionality for managing complexities of a universal medium to facilitate data, information and knowledge exchange. Current research efforts towards ambient intelligence, next generation Internet, Web 3.0 / semantic web efforts are going in the right directions to support semantic desktop, Wiki and mobile applications, but have a long way to go. Enter Cubicon.

Klausner will publicly disclose the results of twenty years of seminal work in semantic computing, based upon a novel iconic language that created the prerequisite framework to enable the realization of the “Semantic Net”. The key notions are not restricted to the current web standards but to semantic technologies that can be applied on top of the Web. This overlay separates knowledge context from underlying content & related behavior artifacts ­ a representation that both people and machines can interpret. Klausner will convey how this groundbreaking technology tackles issues of performance, productivity, interoperability, agility, robustness, security and mobility.

Klausner founded Automated Intelligence Corporation that developed the LOGIC ONE that is now Honeywell’s mainline distributed building automation technology. He first applied this bit-exact iconic notation to blueprint all dimensions of this advanced control system. See www.coretalk.net

Attendance is open, subject to availability. The Wallenberg Learning Theatre, Room 124, is located on the first floor of Wallenberg Hall in the Stanford Main Quad.

We're constantly looking for ways to share the experiences that take place in Wallenberg Hall, and an invitation to speak at a conference in Linköping, Sweden next week has provided the impetus to drive forward on something we've been meaning to do for a long time: interview our faculty about their teaching.

So far, I've spoken with just a few of our rockstar faculty, folks who continue to thrill and surprise us by doing things in the classroom that we don't expect, often with great learning results. It's been interesting: so far, a couple of themes are coming out in just about every conversation.

First, all of them are committed to students taking responsibility for their learning: they don't expect that lecturing from the front of the room is necessarily a good approach for their classes.

Second, there seems to be a wide tendency to "de-center authority", encouraging students to own aspects of the classroom practices and activities.

Beyond the near goal of presenting some clips from these interviews at the conference (they gave me the title "Innovations in Learning - Experiences from Wallenberg Hall, Stanford," so I figured the easiest way to approach that would be for the faculty to speak for themselves... well, maybe not the easiest, but I hope the most compelling), I hope to combine sections of these interviews in various ways for web pages, reports and local presentations.

Stay tuned for more developments!