Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 20

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the 20th and final episode of the Academic Technology podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth the former manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group. Today's episode includes an interview with Bob Smith and Eric Grant of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (otherwise known as SCIL) about Wallenberg Hall's resources for teaching and learning with technology.

Bob Smith is SCIL's Director of Technology Services and Eric Grant was their Academic Technology Specialist.

I just want to thank you both for letting us use your Studio. This is a fantastic space. So I just want to ask you some questions about what you do here at Wallenberg Hall and the first question is what is SCIL?

Bob: SCIL is the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. It's an organization that grew out of an organization that had been started by the Faculty Senate and the President and Provost's Office back in the late 90's which was the Stanford Learning Lab. Stanford Learning Lab's agenda was how can we look at technological tools to gain an advantage in classrooms at Stanford University. And that's distinct from people using technology to provide distance learning and those sorts of applications. Lots of people doing it. It's a terrific and valid thing to do but Stanford is a residential university. So when you come to Stanford you come TO Stanford and so they were interested in how can we use those tools in the classroom to benefit the university? In 2002 Stanford Learning Lab kind of sunsetted and it turned into the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning which is an independent laboratory on the Stanford campus and it went from being a fully funded operation from the President and Provost's Office to being a self-funded operation. We still provide a service to Stanford University. We're still interested in doing the work of how does technology benefit the university in our classrooms and we operate five classrooms for faculty to experiment with exactly those questions. But in addition there's other research going and that research extends to work with the folks from the School of Education. Some collaboration with the University of Washington around Cognitive Psych and the neuroscience of learning so there's quite a wide range of activities going on there.

Kimberly: That's great.

Eric: As Bob mentioned, the original research project and the original research undertakings of formal classroom space and informal classroom space are still alive and well and that's what I do is manage that as a research project. Although at this point, it's more operational after five years of ongoing classes.

Bob: And that having been said, there's a resurgence in the research side of things. Helen Chen who was one of the researchers at the Learning Lab is working again which is great. And so we finished two pilot studies in winter quarter and spring quarter of this year observing some experimental classes that were going on and trying to do instruments to do evaluations of those classes in some kind of meaningful way. Because there's always the issue of if you're going to do some kind of innovation in the classroom, how do you tell if it was worth doing it or not? And the creation of the instruments that allow you to assess that. It's one thing if it's something you can measure with a stopwatch or yardstick but if you're trying to do something that's this kind of strange social phenomenon going on in the classroom then you need to have a little more sophisticated set of tools. Creating those tools is one of the projects that we're working on now.

Kimberly: Yeah, that's very important because there's so much that going on here and without being able to measure it and actually seeing what the outcomes are. It's interesting. I've worked with a couple instructors who have been teaching in these spaces and you've been great, Eric, in providing support and guidance as well as far as using them.

So who is your main audience? You talked about research and you talked about pedagogy.

Bob: I think the main audience is Stanford faculty. That's who we spend our time with. That's who we directly engage with on a regular basis. I think our secondary audience are people who are doing higher education just about anywhere. Because the things that are developed here, the pedagogies that are developed here, the uses of the tools that are developed here are things that have, we hope, utility in the wild in the world at large outside Stanford. And we've seen some indications that that is the case. We've had a wonderful experience with a community college down in Salinas which if you visit their library in their new classroom building it looks remarkably like the first floor of Wallenberg Hall. If you go to Apple Computer's Conference Center, it looks like Room 128. We've gotten up to 127 they've got the next one over. We just came back from a visit to Sweden doing some outreach work with some of the universities there. Some of our colleagues work at Uppsala University and Uppsala opened back in the 1460s so they've been around for a while but they have a building project in process now where they say explicitly in the brief on the project that what they're looking to do is build a building that is parallel to and can interact with Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. And that, that is really exciting when you have a university that is that old and is that steeped in tradition saying we're building a major new building on campus specifically to match this place that's in Palo Alto is pretty exciting.

Kimberly: And the opportunities for collaboration and research...that's immense.

Bob: The opportunities there are really fun too. I mean with the Swedes there's a really interesting phenomenon going on in that after World War II, Sweden started emphasizing the learning of English for all the kids going through grade school. And Sweden is a comparatively small country, it's about six million, seven million people so it's roughly the size of the metropolitan San Francisco Bay area. The thing that's extraordinary though is it is an old European country. It is very much in the European mindset and yet you've got this enormous population from a culture very different from that of the United States that speak perfect English. And so it allows us to create these scenarios where we can have students in a class engaging with students and faculty from Sweden. There is no language barrier which just makes the cultural barrier shine all the brighter and they find those edges of experience where things don't quite line up. It's very obvious that that's happened and that's been a really interesting and exciting area for us to play around in the last few quarters.

Kimberly: Yeah. So what types of services do you offer here in Wallenberg Hall?

Bob: We operate five classrooms and our model for the use of those classrooms is that anyone who is interested in using these spaces basically puts down an indication of interest on a website, there's a form on the website they can fill out. We evaluate those relative to what is the idea of the person what are they actually trying to experiment with? Do they need these spaces to do that with? Have they worked here before? A variety of other parameters for evaluation but when they come here we ask them to teach the same course they've always taught but change one thing about the course. And that's for a couple reasons. One is, of course, from a scientific perspective it's easiest to evaluate an experiment where you change one parameter at a time. But there's also another reason and that's the reason that if we don't explicitly say that that's our expectation, we've had a couple situations where faculty have come in and assumed that as a requirement for them teaching here they had to use every whistle and bell in the room and that's not our intent at all. That's kind of akin to saying that well if you're going to use the chemistry lab, you've got to turn on all the Bunsen burners and get all the test tubes dirty or you're not really getting it going. In return for the faculty coming here and agreeing to teach the same class that they've always taught with one thing being different we will provide very intensive support for them in the classroom both in planning the course out, planning activities out, providing information about what other faculty have done in other classes that might translate well to their subject area and that level of support goes to the point where if they are concerned about any issues of using the technology or the technology possibly failing on them in the classroom, we will have one of us sitting in the classroom for every day of their class for that first quarter if that's what they want.
It's been our experience up till now that after about two or three weeks they want you to kind of go away.

Eric: Yes. I find that after a few weeks it's best to do a little fade away and let them get a feel for what they're doing on their own after they've had the support, after they feel secure and then check in again at the end of the quarter to make sure that they are still happy and still doing things in the way that they want.

Bob: In addition to that, and that's the classroom model, there's also other ways that those facilities can be used and right now we're using one way the facilities can be used. We like to think of Wallenberg Hall as being a little bit unusual on campus in that it has a bunch of engineers on staff who have a lot of different skills. And so if a department or organization on campus is interested in doing something new...they want to do something around video, they want to do something around complex presentations, they want to do something around audio recording or whatever, we'd love to have them come here and we'd love to work with them to make that happen. And that has the potential of being a tremendous advantage for organizations and departments in their learning curve as they adopt new technologies. Rather than saying, OK we want to try something with video, let's go buy a video camera, let's go buy a video editing system, let's go learn how to use all this stuff that huge learning curve, that huge front-loaded learning curve we can say kind of ease them in to that by allowing them to leverage our facilities, leverage our expertise and decide the things they want so they can make a much more informed and efficient decision about how they want to proceed. If someone's got something cool on campus, we'd love for them to bring it here.

Eric: Related to that idea, is we usually emphasize the learning activity over the technology as well. So we ask people to come in and either with their own idea or gather ideas from our collective expertise and history. Come up with the activity you want to do, come up with the learning goal first, then we'll figure the technology that will work best.

Kimberly: And how far in advance do you recommend faculty contact you before coming to teach here at Wallenberg?

Bob: Well, it's been the case over the last few years that that people have contacted us as much as a year in advance. We love the contact, that's one part, planning ahead is great we love folks that are willing to do that. What's more important is actually contacting us and coming here and playing with the toys ahead of time. Planning on the ground what they're actually going to do. It's one thing to create the reservation, it's another to come here and get immersed in the tools that they're going to be using. So the sooner we can get folks to do that and the more time we can spend with them before their class starts the better.
Kimberly: And what do you think is the most innovative course that was taught here?

Eric: There have been all different levels of complexity of technology which does not necessarily indicate innovation in pedagogy. So for example one of our most complex technologically and interesting pedagogically classes is Dr. Renate Fruchter of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. She teaches a Architecture, Engineering and Construction class between eight different universities all conducting their classroom activities in real time through video conferencing, Voice Over IP, various communication technologies and then conducting meetings outside of class time with whatever mix they choose. She models the technologies for them, she introduces the architecture and engineering concepts to them and she also brings in a lot of industry experts and mentors for them to work with and gives them real projects. So it's a great mix of pedagogy and instructional techniques plus a great mix of technology. One of our more complicated classes.

Bob: That's a great example too because it has what I was just talking about of trying things out here first and then taking them elsewhere. Renate had been doing that course and she brought it here and she's taken it to a new level here. What's been interesting over the last couple of years is the Civil and Environmental Engineering group has been designing a new building over on the other side of campus and they have created a space in that building that is explicitly designed to do the things that Renate likes to do in class, to do things that John Haymaker, who's also taught here, likes to do in class and they've been kind enough to allow us to participate in the design of those spaces both in the early conceptual phases and now as we're getting down towards 10 weeks to completion trying to rattle off some of the final details before things kind of get too late. So it's really in that it follows both models. It follows both the come here and try interesting thing in the classroom but it's also come here and try things you want to do yourself and then go build the facility. We've been able to prototype things here for them that they've then gone off and incorporated into the design of the new facility.

Kimberly: Yeah, that's very exciting to see what you've been doing here actually expand and also just the real world components behind what you're doing. That technology has been something that's been used in the business place as well.

Eric: We've also had a number of classes from more of the Arts and Drama area. They not so intensive technologically but really make use of the flexibility of our spaces. Patricia Ryan runs an improv class and she brings her students who are of all ages in and she just uses the fact that the space can be reconfigured in about five seconds. There's also the Philosophical Stages course that uses drama and philosophy to teach the moral lessons of the classical periods of human development. So it is a course that uses the great works of great philosophers, has all the students assume those roles, act out those roles, conduct debate in that style, all to teach people logic and reasoning and philosophy.

Bob: And that's an interesting course. The students in that class are from high school.

Kimberly: Oh.

Bob: And in the last few years, they've prototyped a couple times here and they've done kind of one section each summer. This year they're really rolling and they had quite a significant advanced sign up for the class. And I think they're running three sections this year. Yeah, three different sections of the class. So it's something that's converging as time goes on. It's a very interesting activity.

Kimberly: Hmmmm. So are there generally more types of disciplines that you support here or what's best suited for teaching at Wallenberg?

Bob: It's really not discipline-specific. When we were designing the spaces we were looking at a series of interviews that Dan Gilbert was doing with five members of the faculty in five quite different subject areas. And the goal was to try to outline what kinds of activities they would like to perform in a facilitated classroom. And then bring those activities back, kind of average them, net them out and try to find the tools that would support all of those activities at sort of an 85%, 95% percent level rather than building something that supports this one particular activity and this one particular curriculum 100%. And so the rooms are really generalist spaces they've got a large display, they've got a variety of recording technologies they've got lots of whiteboard space, lots of flexible tools in the room, the furniture is flexible. And so we have literally every school in the university has been represented here. For the longest time the hold out had been the Law School because they were in semester mode and the rest of the university is in quarter mode but this last fall, I believe...

Eric: Yes

Bob: The Law School had their first class here in Wallenberg Hall and that's the last one that wasn't represented. Word of mouth is definitely part of how that spreads. I mean we haven't gone out and said to the university and taken out big ads in the Stanford Daily saying hey come teach here. We're actually to the point where we're going to start doing that...not big ads but we're going to start talking to schools individually about have you taught here, has your faculty been aware of this, who might want to come and play in this space? To move it beyond the original community of folks who worked here. So that's one thing. With regard to what schools get the most benefit out of these spaces, it really depends on the faculty member. But it is possible to say that language instruction seems to have a pretty significant benefit because of the way languages tend to be taught now with the use of a lot of media and the quick changeover of multiple activities in the course of a single class these rooms are very well suited for that.

We worked with Joseph Kautz on the redesign of the Language Laboratory up in Meyer Library. So those spaces have some of the characteristics of Wallenberg Hall classrooms as well.

Kimberly: I supported one of the Chinese language instructors and you guys did a great job, thank you especially Bob for all the help recording the video that was...

Bob: Lots of fun.

Eric: I'd like to add that because we've had some of this clustering, it's given us an opportunity to create communities. One of our side missions is to help create communities of learners. On the one hand we get these clusters of instructors from the same department who come in and they spread by word of mouth that hey Wallenberg Hall is a wonderful place to teach and they compare notes and they talk about teaching strategies. On the other hand, we have such a great diverse group of instructors that we have the ability to bring them all together from all different parts of the university to talk to each other and learn what each other are doing and see what kind of practices might work better for them, talk to each other about what they're trying to do. It's been a wonderful opportunity and it's been terrific to introduce two people who might have otherwise not ever interacted and say you two have a lot in common you should talk about this great learning activity that you were doing. Also related to that, another side mission we have is trying to migrate some of these ideas out of Wallenberg Hall so along with all the construction and design advice and guidance we attempt to offer to some of the new construction projects at other universities, here at Stanford, corporations that come by and visit, we also try to do that on a more microscale. So for example, Claudia Engel, who's an instructor with the Cultural and Social Anthropology Department on campus, she's a big fan of our rooms. She taught a few classes here. She's assisted other instructors in CASA in teaching here. One quarter we decided to try an experiment where we migrated her out. We picked the best technologies and the best practices that had been working for her we tried to inexpensively reproduce back in her home environment back in CASA building. It was a fun experiment, we got a lot of data out of it. That's something we're trying to do for other instructors on campus. Figure out how to inexpensively reproduce the best practices they come away with from Wallenberg Hall back in their home environment. We've had some success with it.

Kimberly: I've spoken with a few instructors who have taught here in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and also in Languages and it really does change their experience and it's not just the instructors, it's the students as well.

Bob: When we first opened Wallenberg Hall I think my favorite quote about the place was from I think a Freshman walking through and this was early in winter quarter and was kind of the first quarter that we had everything lit up so it was winter quarter 2003 and some kid with a backpack is walking through and is saying to his buddies Wow I wonder what you have to major in to take all your classes here.

The other thing I'd like to comment on and reinforce is something that Eric was saying. There is a lot of technology in Wallenberg Hall but that needs to be seen in the context of our own biases. And our biases in that regard is the most important technology of all is pedagogy and what goes on in classrooms is not a series of executions of programs. What it really is is a complex social relationship that is taking place between the faculty member and a group of students who want to learn. To the extent that a technology can facilitate that sort of interaction we're all in favor of it and we want to provide it in the best possible way. If it doesn't directly support that social interaction, then we're not interested in playing, that's not a constructive thing to do. The human magic, the spark between teacher and student is the thing we're really interested in seeing take place in our learning spaces.

Kimberly: And I've been really impressed, especially in the Chinese language classes that I've observed here essentially the fact that the students support each other if they're doing presentations and they know it's being recorded that adds a little bit to the nervousness factor but really it comes out as something that they can show their parents other students and then it's that snapshot in time of their progress and I think it's really important to be able to do these things seamlessly. Because if the camera is mounted rather than having somebody follow them around it makes it more of a seamless experience for them.

Bob: It goes away. It blends into the background

Kimberly: Yeah. So after talking about all these great services that you offer and all the wonderful support how do people contact you for more information?

Bob: Easiest way is through our website: wallenberg.stanford.edu and on that site on the left hand side you'll see some navigation stuff and one of the things is Teaching at Wallenberg Hall. You click on that, you'll find the instructions on how to contact us about reserving a space for an event or for a class for a quarter.
Kimberly: Right because you guys do make your space available beyond just use for classes.

Bob: Absolutely. We have a lot of videoconferencing capability here. We are probably the go to site on Stanford campus if you're scheduling a videoconference. ITSS got out of the business a few years ago. So we provide videoconference facilities to a wide variety of folks. And that ranges from faculty search using iChat tools with groups, we've done Polycom-based corporate type videoconferencing. We have online collaboration tools that are pretty sophisticated and being used in a lot of classes now. Starting in the middle of September, we'll be doing high definition videoconferencing on a global scale. We have an event taking place in September with the Mozilla folks, the Mozilla organization where they're creating a 24 hour global meeting of all of their software contributors and we're going to be the American site for that matched by a Japanese site and the UK somewhere.

Kimberly: Wow! That's very exciting.

Bob: Yeah. It's fun.

Kimberly: Well, thanks so much for talking with me today...especially for giving me the opportunity to record in this space with you.

Bob: Any time.

Eric: Our pleasure.

Bob: Thanks

Kimberly: Thanks.

Well, that's it for the Academic Technology Podcast series. Thanks for listening. We will be launching a new series called the Academic Technology report in early 2008. More information will be available at ats.stanford.edu in January 2008.