Page 69 - spaces4learning, Fall 2024

microphones in our classrooms, we’re doing camera tracking—
presets that follow the beams of the mic. Some of the faculty
still like to use whiteboards, and some of our classrooms have
a whiteboard on all four walls, so we have to make sure we’re
capturing what they’re doing on whiteboards.
We also have a major push to begin a science-focused educa-
tion here and to start building a student body that’s going to feed
into our professional schools. Our lab spaces are getting ready to
get a huge overhaul, and we’re trying to integrate more flexibility
there. So I get to grasp what I’m going to do to be able to give an
equable HyFlex experience for a lab student—that one’s going to
be fairly difficult, but I’m up for a good challenge.
Lisle Waldron: The fun thing for me, coming from an
out-of-the-U.S. experience, is that all of my faculty go to the
same conferences as everybody else’s faculty. And then they
come back to me and want everything that they’ve seen other
faculty have, but I have to do that on a budget that is seven
times smaller. Our exchange rate is seven to one. I have to rely
on the same beamforming microphones as everyone else—but I
have to literally do one-seventh of them. How we prioritize that
is one of the big questions for me.
CHAT GPT
S4L: What’s the role of technology in
classroom design choices?
Christopher Dechter: I’m going to throw cold water
on people right now: The role of technology in classroom design
is actually pretty minimal. I don’t want to be misunderstood
that technology is not needed. I’m just saying most spaces are
over-built and don’t need all the stuff they have in there.
I’m doing everything I can to get rid of stuff in my class-
rooms. I don’t need entire racks full of stuff. I don’t need data
all over the room. I don’t need seven cameras and 12 projectors.
None of that is useful—it has limited utility—and it gets in
between the instructors and the students and their content.
Everything that I can do in a modern classroom space, I can
fit inside the lectern itself and it’s invisible. I’ll be brutally hon-
est: The people who go in to teach and learn in those spaces
every day do not care about how fancy your microphones are,
how many cameras you have, or any of that stuff.
Murphy: We use a lot of technology in the stuff that I do, but
I’m pretty simplistic in that you get one or two displays and I try
to make it as close as possible to a one-button touch for faculty.
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