Anthropology course tests out the lessons of Wallenberg in a traditional classroom

Claudia Engel is comfortable teaching her cultural anthropology courses in Wallenberg Hall’s Advanced Resource Classrooms. She is adept at switching from multiple projected web pages to student contributions beamed up on adjacent screens, to marking text and saving it to the Webcam, or engaging in a lively videoconference with another anthropology expert residing halfway around the world. But taking the lessons about best teaching and learning practices that she and her colleagues have garnered in Wallenberg, and transporting them to other, low-tech classrooms, is what drives and preserves innovation, say those involved in one aspect of the project last fall.

“It was never the intent of the designers of Wallenberg Hall to build five classrooms that were complete and isolated in and of themselves,” said Bob Smith, Director of Technology for the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, which provides technical and advisory support to all those teaching in Wallenberg Hall. “The intent was to build a laboratory for people to come and try new things they wanted to do.

“The thing that comes to mind is America’s Test Kitchens. No one on that show ever says, ‘Oh, we don’t have any Allspice, we have to go the store,’ it’s all there in their big, super-well-stocked kitchen. That is what our classrooms are intended to be: powerful tools, lots of access, lots of goodies to be invoked and combined in interesting ways. Not every kitchen needs to be a test kitchen, though, and not every classroom should be like one in Wallenberg Hall. We want to encourage people who teach here to take the lessons to other settings.”

And that is exactly what Academic Technology Specialist Claudia Engel has done with her five-unit cultural anthropology course, “ Virtual Communities.” The course explores ethnographic methods and the field of cultural studies from a new perspective by posing the question: How can an ethnographic project that involves new online technologies be approached, theoretically as well as practically?

Engel drew on her experience assisting Professor John Rick in his class “Models and Imaging in Archaeological Computing” and Professor Joanna Mountain’s “Genetic Structure of Populations” both in Wallenberg Hall, as well as co-teaching “Introduction to Cultural Studies” with Professor Paulla Ebron, in making the move to a traditional classroom on the quad.

"It is almost impossible to imagine this class without the flexibility Wallenberg's learning spaces provide", says Engel. "All the anthropology faculty I have worked with in Wallenberg are sold on this environment for their teaching, and we need to make this more widely accessible. So one of our main objectives was to see what we were up against in trying to overcome the limitations of traditional classrooms."

To duplicate the multiple high definition screens operated by remote mouse available in Wallenberg classrooms, Engle and Smith set up regular projector screens on tripods and relied on a system called “iROS”, or “Interactive Room Operating System” developed by Computer Science Professor Terry Winograd’s HCI researchers in collaboration with the SCIL technology team. The classroom system consists of the instructor’s laptop, which is connected to one of the projectors, and a Mac Mini connected to another projector. The software allowed Engel to manipulate information projected on the screens and for the students to push web sites to the screens as well.

"Despite the multiple systems, lot of wires, and other components that needed to be put in place before every class the technology worked without a glitch", Engel said. "In fact, students stated they found technology transparently integrated into the class. Most importantly, our experiences will help to provide a set of best practices for other instructors."

“It’s a first step,” smiles Smith. “We didn’t want to build an ivory tower, but rather laboratories so we could determine what forms of technology have the most utility and the most meaningful applications. In cooperation with faculty we can and will move the best tools beyond Wallenberg Hall.”

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