Classics professor Richard Martin discusses the reality of teaching in Wallenberg

What happens when students explore ancient texts using digital whiteboards, flexible furniture, wireless laptops, and lightweight whiteboards?   The advanced technology classrooms in Stanford's Wallenberg Hall provide faculty and students with tools that encourage collaboration, involve remote guest speakers and provide multiple ways of learning. As more classes are held here, researchers at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) are working with Stanford faculty to identify where new technologies and pedagogies intersect to help guide the design of future classrooms on campuses worldwide.

The following conversation between Classics Professor Richard Martin and Academic Technology Specialist Dan Gilbert describes Professor Martin's experiences teaching in Wallenberg Hall. During the Spring Quarter of 2003, he taught the Poetry of Horace to undergraduates in Wallenberg's experimental classroom; in the fall of 2003, he taught Greek Prose Composition to Classics graduate students.   Mr. Gilbert works with faculty to combine experimental technologies and pedagogies in the Wallenberg Hall classrooms.

Dan Gilbert, Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL):

From the point of view of a learning space designer, I was very excited about how you and your students used the two digital whiteboards (Websters (TM)) to share and compare works. Because these screens used rear projection and a pen-like stylus, students were able to write directly on the texts without projectors shining in their eyes and with the classroom lights on.   We've talked quite a bit about the impact that having the text a class is working on displayed publicly - you've described it as a 'democratization' process.   Can you describe a typical lesson you led using this model?

Richard Martin, Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor, Chair of Classics, Stanford University:

It was a model, I have to say, that evolved as we began to use the screens and the classroom space. What became the typical--and most productive--mode would work like this: I would display a text of the poem in the original Latin on one screen. This would become the arena (to use a Roman word) for translation. In turn--sometimes in teams--the students, who had for homework read the poem and tried to work out its meaning, would come up, stylus in hand, and "perform" their understanding. By that I mean, they would translate live, pointing out to me and other students the syntactical connections between subject and verb, what words went with what, and so on, as they translated. And all this could be highlighted --even using different stylus marker colors. So at the end of a few minutes, the class as a whole had a clearly visible "map" or 3-D image of the inner workings of the Horatian ode. We could debate the fine points of translation, of image, of meaning all sharing the same digital whiteboard.

One thing I still would like to experiment with more is use of the second screen. Sometimes we used the dual screens for competing versions of the same material--homework assignments (which students emailed ahead of time); two "professional" translations of the same Ode, etc. But more often in our class it was an excellent but more passive "reference" shelf while the first screen was a "desktop" for the digitized, open and public book of poems. Is this a waste of one screen? How do you think we could learn from other courses, especially modern languages, here?

DG:   I would agree that the second screen was often passive, but I don't think of it as being wasted. Actually, I thought having a reference shelf was useful in this course where you were trying to add as much context as possible to the material.   As students raised questions about translations and other works, you, or sometimes the students, were able to navigate directly to a pertinent text that helped frame the discussion.

In Wallenberg Hall, modern language instructors have used the tools to enhance context, analyze structure, and simulate real-life scenarios.    For example, a German instructor plays news clips from German television on one screen and uses the other screen to selectively reveal new vocabulary and structures from the clips that she has prepared in advance. For your course, perhaps you could use still images from the ancient world on one screen and then selectively reveal vocabulary on the second screen.   I also think it would be worthwhile to brainstorm on how audio clips could be used in your course.   While listening and pronunciation are less important in an ancient language than a modern language, using audio might engage students differently than solely examining text.

In your course, you gave your students an opportunity to interact directly with a leading expert on Horace's poetry using the in-room videoconference system.   You were one of the first people in Wallenberg Hall to do a videoconference in class; what do you think the benefits were for your students? How did that class compare with how you have taught the material in more traditional classrooms?

RPM: That class was a real highpoint for me, and I think, for students. The key factor was that the videoconference with Prof. Lowell Edmunds at Rutgers was fully integrated in terms of the students' preparation beforehand and the subject matter of the discussion. By that I mean that we could have just set up a virtual visit with any Latinist whom I happened to know. In this case, however, I had required students to read a particular poem (Horace Odes 1.9). Also, they had read--and really absorbed and talked about previously--a chapter from Lowell's excellent book From a Sabine Jar . The book is an in-depth study of this very poem, putting it through several sorts of interpretive readings, based on a variety of approaches. It is high-end, sophisticated literary criticism applied to Classics. So it was important that students had read this carefully and already come up with questions about the reading before the day of the videoconference.

As you recall, at the time we were finishing the discussion class, I had mused at the end, "Wouldn't it be great if we could just ask Lowell what he was thinking when he said that." And that is when we got the notion---on your initiative as I remember--to do the conference. When the conference was set up, it was soon after the discussion--another factor, keeping it fresh--and students had terrific questions, primed by their earlier work.

The second major aspect that made this a success was the real-time "layering" effect made possible by the two screens. On one, Lowell was speaking directly to us. As is natural in any scholarly discussion, names, ideas, references started coming up rapidly. Normally, a student might jot down an unfamiliar term ("hermeneutics" in this case ) or name (Gadamer, in this case). But with the wired room we had in Wallenberg, and the wireless laptops, as soon as Lowell mentioned these items, I did a quick search and popped up on the other screen the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summary of hermeneutics, and then a picture and brief bio of Gadamer. It was akin to overlaying or even providing subtitles --but all in real time. The really striking part--for me, as a Homerist--was that through this new technology we were replicating an ancient form of annotation, where scholars in antiquity and the middle ages systematically wrote notes in the margins of their scrolls and parchment manuscripts of ancient poetry. We had transformed this into what I could call a "virtual running commentary". And I'm sure it had far greater impact than the random note a student might have made (and later forgotten to follow up) about what was said in class.

So this was one example of a total-immersion model of pedagogy using texts, images, and live voices. And it was also a great way to let students see the real social underpinnings of a discipline--that books and articles are written by real people, that their views get into their teachers' thinking, and that they--the students--have a place in the conversation.

Can you imagine a fully coordinated, sequenced way to make use of the videoconferences and have a worldwide net of scholars and classes all working through a given topic, say within one quarter? I wonder if this has been done in humanities? How else can we build on that model?  

DG: I could imagine a scenario where three colleagues at three locations all offer the same or similar courses for a small number of students, say 12-15, and then share findings with each other.   At each site, each professor teaches as he or she is accustomed to with an existing curriculum.   The difference would be that each class takes on the responsibility for presenting a single topic in depth to the other sites - a whole class project that each professor can guide. Near the end of the term, the three sites join via 3-way videoconference for an interactive session (or sessions) where each site presents its work to the other two.   In the last class, students discuss and write how the three topics fit together and reflect on the effectiveness of this activity.

So in your Poetry of Horace class, you could take one of the Odes and have students work around certain topics concerning the context of the Ode itself.   Perhaps one team could be responsible for researching the physical space where the Ode was performed and the audience.   Another group might be responsible for making an argument about why specific words or structures were used in a particular ode.   Prior to the videoconference, your students could design a class presentation that highlights how each their work fits together.   Meanwhile, your colleagues at other schools could lead similar projects on other texts of the same poet that you would discuss in your course.   Perhaps early in the quarter, you could check in with each other with some questions prepared in advance so that students at each of the sites could get to know each other and the professors could establish clear expectations.

My hunch is that 3 sites is probably the right number for such a course.   Three is a small enough number for the students and faculty to build relationships with each other.   Three gives a stronger basis of comparison without going overboard.   Logistically and technically, coordinating three sites is still manageable, more than 3 and the effort to produce the class might exceed the increased benefit anyone would get from it.   Since research is often tied to a community from outside of Stanford, this could be a vehicle to tie teaching together with that same community.

As you know, one of the purposes of Wallenberg Hall is to test how well new tools lend themselves to a variety of pedagogies.   It is our hope that we can identify some useful tools and new practices that can be used across Stanford and exported to higher education institutions around the world.   Are there any specific elements of the room's design that you think should be replicated in other spaces? What could your department add easily to some of its learning spaces? What do you think other institutions could take away from your experiences here?

RPM: I think the main goal should be establishing learning communities through the most creative use of learning spaces and technological tools.   I am convinced that this really gets students to do their best work--not that I want to throw out good old-fashioned lonely study in one's room late at night. But a class is for gathering not segregating.

In this regard, the videoconferencing capability is, an excellent way to get small numbers of people, at several far-flung universities, working on the same set of issues or texts. I like the scenario you sketch, in which individual classes develop their own personalities and projects as a class, then bring these into contact with a few others (and I agree--3 is just about right). That way, you replicate the sort of collaboration that scholars naturally have now, but you also share it with the true audience, the next generation of students.

There are other elements built into the Wallenberg design that are perhaps less tech-heavy but equally good at encouraging learning as teams, or group work. Our Horace class showed how useful the Huddleboards(TM) (portable lightweight whiteboards) are -- the flexible, almost fun nature of the medium, let students go off in corners and work in pairs, then display their work, even have a sort of public performance of it.   Best of all, with work on poetry, you could get a sequential reading of a whole poem simply by assigning one stanza per board per group, then hanging these up in order--or even out of order, to provoke questions about whether the poem in fact had to be put together the way our poet had sequenced it.   Years ago teachers sent students to the blackboards for just this sort of work---but I think it's a huge difference to have the student start work outside the public eye so they don't freeze up in front of class as they write in full view. The instructor can circulate, advise students, catch some obvious errors before the boards get displayed, and so forth--unless one's pedagogy involves inducing shame, which it shouldn't.

Yet another design element that proved very congenial was pretty low-tech: the movable, lightweight chairs. Once again, it has to do with empowerment: if students can move easily, I find they naturally adapt the room to what is most comfortable, gives them optimal eye contact and distance, and helps them relate both to the instructor but also to other students (which sometimes makes them feel safer).   They are in control of room dynamics. It a minor detail with great psychological impact. In short, I'd love for our Department to be able to invest in a streamlined classroom supplied with the boards chairs and tables we had in Wallenberg. And I believe other institutions can easily adopt such elements, adding on technological enhancements in layers, as they make sense in combination with the space and courses at hand.

I wonder how easy it would be to make a sort of "grammar" of these elements. I mean, can you imagine someday compiling a sort of online user's guide to advanced classrooms, with sidebars on tips from actual users and plenty of design illustrations? (Sort of Architectural Digest for teachers.) Another idea would be to run a text-based conference and let the scholars --with plenty of advance warning--go to town for one day in one of the classrooms, using as many of the features as they want. These turn out to be perfect spaces for brainstorming when it comes to classes--do you think that might work for a group of (generally more staid) faculty, to turn themselves into a class and see what happens? I'd be interested, too, to get a sense of what you think the next steps might be in collaboration, using these resources--across the University or from one institution to another? And what about letting students design their own classes once they have a grasp of the resources?

DG: Developing a "grammar" for an advanced resource classroom is something we are engaged in right now, and we are not the only ones doing so.   Steve Ehrmann of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group has just started working on defining and describing smart classrooms in In What Ways Can Classrooms be "Smart"?   Next generation learning-space design is also an issue that the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative is exploring.   One of the exciting challenges is matching the grammar of pedagogies with the grammar of experimental spaces.   For example, which tools in an advanced classroom lend themselves well to small group work?

I am intrigued by the idea of running a small conference of text scholars in one of these spaces.   The Websters, the Huddleboards, the networked laptops, and the collaborative iSpace software (experimental software developed by Prof. Terry Winnograd and team) are all great tools for generating and sharing ideas.   I would hope that analyzing texts using different tools might lead to a new set of insights or developing new processes for analysis.   I think a critical piece of this conference would be making the rationale and expectations clear for everyone involved.   In the classes that we have had here, students seem to be most engaged with the course when they have a clear understanding of why it is being held in one of the Wallenberg rooms.

In the case of running a scholars' conference, I think a critical first step is identifying a group of colleagues who have already shown a willingness to experiment with research methods. Hopefully, this group would already be on board with the idea of wanting to do things that could not be done elsewhere.   Having this attitude also softens the blow when the technology doesn't meet expectations (namely, it crashes or works differently than expected).   After identifying colleagues, the next step might be to share with them some of the video of you teaching your Horace class to give them a sense of what is possible in a subject matter that they can immediately connect with.   Finally, I think it would be important to get them into the space itself and get working as soon as possible on the material and leverage the energy that we always seem to have on the first day.

In the Winter Quarter of 2004, a group of students designed a Shakespeare course that combined performance with designing a curriculum to teach Shakespeare to younger children.   I think one message we at SCIL need to communicate better that it is okay for students to use the technologies.   In focus groups and interviews students have said that "the stuff looks expensive" and "I'm not sure it is for us".   We need to reinforce that (a) these are technologies designed for work, not just presentation, and (b) it takes a lot of effort to break them.   My hope is that as students become more familiar with the building and its resources that they will become more confident initiating new uses of Wallenberg Hall.

Continuing with student usage, you have remarked that graduate students had a very different experience than undergraduates in the Wallenberg classroom. You have mentioned that graduate students seem to be less interested in collaboration and more interested in creating individual work.   Can you talk a little more about why you think this was the case? Had you noticed these kinds of differences between undergraduates and graduates before teaching in Wallenberg?   Were there other student attitudes that 'bubbled up' while you were in the space that surprised you?

RPM: Yes, it has been very interesting to me that the whole experience of trying out two courses, back to back, one undergraduate (Horace) and one graduate (Greek prose composition), has brought out much more openly than any other experiments I have conducted the differences between two kinds of learning--and two kinds of students. And I think this is perhaps one of the hidden advantages of using such a learning space: we learn about learning itself, in a very practical, subject-specific way.

To put it briefly, I found that undergraduates were more open to the idea of playing with all sorts of ways to encounter the material, while grad students were almost afraid to be seen having a good time. Perhaps it undercut the seriousness they had supposed must accompany preparation for professional life as a Classicist. It may also have skewed results that the grad students were all first years, brand new to the program and to Stanford.   The undergrads, however, were Juniors and Seniors mostly---used to the way Stanford offers a variety of learning paths, and maybe even self-selected--as students at a University that has great science and computing departments as well as technology--to be early-adopters.

At an even deeper level, this "divide" has made me think about the purpose of teaching students the two subjects involved. Horace I taught out of love for the poetry and that's the reason they took the course, I suspect. I wanted to use everything to make the experience of a Horatian Ode come alive and jump into the consciousness of students, despite the language and cultural barriers. On the other hand, Greek prose composition is assumed by all in the field to be a kind of basic training, drill camp preparation for learning all of the intricacies of the Greek language. No one alive really has to be able to translate, say, the Gettysburg Address into the Greek prose style of Thucydides (as this class did). But trying to do so is a crash course introduction to all sorts of other questions---what diction did Thucydides prefer, what are the forms of the subjunctive and optative one needs, what constructions appear in 5th century prose, and so on. Generations of Classicists have struggled with taking and teaching such courses.   Having used the Wallenberg room, I now suspect that certain learning tasks, such as form memorization, and sentence and discourse analysis, can be eased and made more interesting by use of the technology and space available.   Other tasks in this specific course, finding the Greek word for   "fourscore" for example, are better done as run-up homework preparation on an individual basis.  

In short, the course experience taught me much more clearly what works as a class activity and what one needs to assign beforehand.   Meanwhile, there is indeed an online English-to-Greek dictionary and we had it pegged to our course website, where it was used regularly by students for prose comp---so technology just worked at a different level in that course. Again, I'd stress that the Wallenberg experience was equal parts learning for students and learning for teachers.

DG: I think your last comment is a fitting end to this particular conversation.   A key point that I would like to close with is that in your courses the pedagogies drove the use of the technologies.   You and your students did not use the technologies because they were there; rather, the specific activity that you did was enhanced by their use.   The implication for new learning spaces is the importance of designing classrooms around the kinds of activities that instructors are likely to do or would want to do in the future.   Leading with the pedagogy also makes the rationale clear to the students of why you are in an advanced space in the first place: namely, we want to do something here that we can't do in a regular classroom.   When students understand that rationale and understand that the professor expects to do things differently, they are more likely to participate more in the learning experience.    Can you add a closing comment?

RM: All in all, as I look back on the two courses we've done together, what strikes me is the challenge. A new set of tools for doing any craft, I suppose, makes you rethink the craft itself. The learning space combined with the technology--and I think they are both related and valuable tools--made me and I think will make others rethink what it is to transmit and apply our knowledge of the ancient world. It also offers the promise, paradoxically, of making that distant world much closer to us, through the ability to unite image, sound, text, cultural information, in an integrated surrounding---sort of a virtual time machine.   And the trip back ultimately justifies the trip forward, if I can speak Delphically for a moment. I mean we can find through real immersion in that alien culture of Greek and Roman the seeds of invention, technological change, pedagogical method and social support that ultimately make a place like Wallenberg Hall possible.

Edmunds, Lowell. From a Sabine Jar: Reading Horace, Odes 1.9 , Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Back to News