In the old world, I used to love taking my students to the computer lab. Heck, at least this was one place where you could find more than 2 computers in one room. Try out that crazy Google thing. And even if it was generally used for basic research and low-level presentations, it was a step into the future. Sort of.
Seems relatively archane now that I turn over the idea of what a 'computer lab' represents in terms of gazing into the 'future of learning'. Especially when you consider what is in the typical cell phone that each K-12 kid brings to school (yes, admin-types, they bring'em even if you aren't seeing them...but that's for another day). Even more so when you imagine how colleges and universities are beginning to re-define how teaching is done!
Over at The Chronicle, higher education types are batting around the "do we really need a computer lab on campus?" question...and I'm thrilled to hear it!
During our first Brown Bag chat yesterday, the guest, Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information-technology services and chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University, was asked what he thought would be the future of computer labs on campus. He wrote:
“I don’t know if you’ve seen or visited Case’s Weatherhead School of Management. It is a Frank Geary building. It was the first building to support our switched gigabit network and the first building to open up with pervasive wireless. But because it was designed in the days before wireless, it was also built with computer labs.
Fast forward 6 years and today there is only 1 lab left in the building and three other spaces have been converted to alternate space use allowing the Management School to attend to other priorities. At the same time, every student at Weatherhead has a wireless notebook. Literally hundreds of simultaneous users on the network. Most are using wireless in work groups or video conferencing with friends ‘back home’ (wherever that might be). I still see some RJ45 blue connections to the gig networks in the halls but most of the blinding speed stuff is left to the formal learning spaces and faculty offices and research facilities. That is some of our experience here at Case.
My sense is that we (IT leaders) need to work with our professional colleagues in campus planning and work together to re-think space utilization both on the campus as well as, to reference an earlier comment I made, to finding ways to support mobile and telecommuting to support life style choices and hopefully contributing to quality of life both to work and study at our unviersities.”
The full transcript of the discussion is available on our Web site. Join us each Thursday at noon, U.S. Eastern time, for a live discussion with a newsmaker from the academic world.
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Not exactly on topic, but David Brin had a piece in Salon http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/(you have to click through an add to read it)
"Why Johnny Can't Code" decries that kids can't play with Basic anymore. My first reaction was: "So what?" But on reflection Brin's point that it's important for kids to learn about how things work on a fundamental level. I was also charmed by how his son found an old computer on EBay to tinker with.
Computer labs are passe. But people won't out-grow the need to tinker--hands on to live.
School gardens are an example of spaces to tinker in. And science laboratories are too at their best. Talk to scientists or doctors and they'll tell you that learning how to use equipment was hard to learn and very important.
I don't really have a thought about what school designs for spaces for using computers. I do think that connectivity is important. But Brin makes an interesting point about the need to tinker directly with simple machines. At some level schools probably need spaces to do that. It's not just with computers, and to say schools need places with sawdust on the floor is exactly wrong when it comes to computers. But perhaps the old ideas of school laboratories still have some meaning and kids should be able to tinker on hardware and very basic programming. Maybe I'm simply worried that new school designs will be so clean we'll forget that kids need to get their hands dirty sometimes.
Posted by: John Powers | September 15, 2006 at 03:08 PM
As I was reading your article, I was wondering if there were ever pen/pencil labs. Sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
Posted by: Andrew Pass | September 15, 2006 at 03:19 PM