Tag Archives: high education

June 13, 2010, 9:43 pm

A glimpse into the future of the classroom: how the Steelcase node will change the way we teach

MONDAY

This week is NeoCon,
the big show in the furniture world. I really hope to make it out there someday
because I want to experience what’s new in the world of design. It would be
cool to check out Stride
Benching and the Vox
Monogram this year.

One new product that I am really excited about is the Steelcase
Node. I hinted about this back
in March but wasn’t able to reveal anything more at that time. Steelcase
has been really cool about it though and granted me an interview with Sean Corcorran, Director, Product Development & Marketing,
Education Solutions (and former IDEO guy.) They also gave me some prototypes and sketches that I can
share. I’m planning to do several posts this week about the node, but for now
let’s take a look at what it’s all about:

My initial reaction was that it
looked kinda cool, but so what. It has the tablet-like arm, which they refer…

April 25, 2010, 5:06 pm

Do You Sudoku? Challenging incoming students with a puzzle

By Brian Mathews

It’s about that time of year again. Orientation & Registration Season. Hundreds of kids (and their
parents) will be wandering around college campuses all across the country. Some
of them are still trying to decide where they should attend, while others have
made up their mind and are finding out more about their future school.

We had one of these last week at UCSB and it was pretty
wild. At GT they spaced things out across two days and separated the various
groupings: academic departments, clubs & organizations, and campus services.
Here they combine everything into one event and it had a carnival- like
atmosphere.

I wanted to share our approach in attempting to
engage this audience of incoming and/or potential students. I didn’t want us to
just tell them facts about library because it’s too early for that. If you read
the book (p. 123) I talk about timing and I still…

April 21, 2010, 12:25 pm

Building A User-Generated e-Reserve System: a glance into the archives of CourseHero (part 1)

By Brian Mathews

My
post “File Sharers Swap Scholarly Materials
Too”
has been the most read item on this blog. People seem to really like that theme
so I’ll explore it a bit more. Often when we talk about Open Access,
Institutional Repositories, the Publishing Crisis, or similar topics it tends
to be very esoteric. There is a lot of rhetoric, debate, and models that honestly
I think only accountants and lawyers can get excited about. I’m not so sure
that the average faculty member really cares about the economics of the
publishing industry or a court’s interpretation of fair use. We’ll save that
for another day.

What
I’m really interested in is how all this stuff applies to the world outside of
libraries. I found it fascinating that The
Pirate Bay had some (expensive) academic materials and not just Jay-Z
tracks or episodes of LOST. So, what if there was a site designed to collect
academic…