Wallenberg Blog

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)

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.