Interesting workshop

I participated in an interesting workshop by DEGW, a "strategic consultancy" firm that has evidently been hired by the University to contribute to the design of renovations for the library. It's interesting the things that the University has money for, like high-priced consultants. I have to admit, however, that these consultants are good. Really good. Better than any I've seen at the University so far.

They gave a wonderfully nuanced presentation that laid out the kinds of things that University should be preparing itself for, including project-based learning, large scale simulations, gaming, and other cool stuff. I've been pushing this kind of stuff for a long time, but it's like the rest of the world is starting to catch up. Very encouraging. I would love to see more of this stuff happening on our campus.

I did raise one particular concern: a bunch of their presentation focused on giant corporate solutions. They showed a Cisco "telepresence" solution. When I spoke, I pointed out that I believed the University needed to invest in open-source, grassroots solutions that provided open APIs that we could tie into and adapt for our purpose: buying big corporate packages means we're just deskilled drones acting as consumers of technology, which is not the way to do anything at the cutting edge.

Eventually, we divided into small groups to describe scenarios of how we envisioned the next generation learning environments. In my group, we described the participatory virus simulation proposal I had written. It would be a good fit for exactly the kinds of things we were talking about.

I notice that the DEGW website has a horrible constantly changing graphic on it. The Research Affairs Committee in our department has decided that the Biology Department needs some of those. Personally, I find pages like that completely unusable. I have to close the window instantly -- or hold my hand over the motion until I can find something to click on. Ugh. But my opinion that doesn't count for much against the wishes of the "real" faculty. They've decided that continuous distractions will somehow make people more interested in content in the page.