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TechTalks Event

The Smart Classroom: What Does It Look Like Today?

with guest expert Malcolm Brown

November 15, 2001

Audio
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Transcript

What's up with smart classrooms, intelligent lecture platforms, and so forth? What is a smart classroom? Do we even need classrooms at all? What are examples of state-of-the-art working "smart" classrooms? Should smart classrooms include computers for faculty or should faculty bring their own? How do students feel about them? Who pays for smart classrooms? Are there differences between big and small smart classooms?

Malcolm has recently gathered survey data from a number of institutions.

Guest Expert

Malcolm BrownMalcolm Brown is Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College, where he reorganized the User Services division of Computing Services into academic computing and consulting groups under the general label of Academic Computing. He has been chair of Dartmouth's Subcommittee on Classroom Development and Utilization since its inception in 1993. The Subcommittee has completed over twenty smart classroom renovation projects, overseen the development of a dozen new classrooms, and assisted with a recently completed in-depth study of Dartmouth's classroom utilization. He is conducting a survey of leading higher education institutions on the deployment of technology in classrooms. This survey includes research universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. This research will form the basis of the CREN Tech Talk.

Malcom's undergraduate work was done at at UC Santa Cruz, where he received degrees in philosophy and German literature. After spending two years studying philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, on a Fulbright scholarship, he began a doctoral program in German Studies at Stanford in 1979. He completed the program in 1985 with a dissertation on Nietzsche. He maintains the Nietzsche Chronicle, a Website on Nietzsche's life.

Co-Hosts

cohosts Howard Strauss (above, left), Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.

Judith Boettcher is the Executive Director of CREN.

Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.

Background & Resources

Some he shared with us are Rice University Classroom & Lab Information, Dartmouth's understated Equipped Classrooms, MultiMedia Classrooms from the University of Central Florida and from Penn State, Multimedia Technology Classrooms at University Park Campus. (See more like these, below.)

Here's an IBM case study of "the classroom of the future" at Kent State University.

Many schools have online listings and descriptions of their technology-enhanced classrooms: Ahead of the curve in many ways, what George Mason University has to share about its Electronic Classrooms is of interest. Comparing what these rooms have and how they are defined is interesting. Some others include:

An organization with a constituency that includes many people interested in the design, construction, and management of smart classooms is the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). Some of the sessions from its most recent annual, international conference focused on smart classrooms or related issues. Streaming audio as well as PDF of handouts and slide shows for many are available online: