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Table of Contents of Teaching/Learning
Activities and Spaces
One of
the hallmarks of the smart classroom in a distributed learning
environment is the degree to which the walls can be lowered,
maintaining a degree of privacy for academic dialogue while
enabling students and faculty to engage in activities with, or
even in, the world outside. Creating this kind of
classroom requires physical, virtual and often organizational
structures on a larger scale than a single classroom.
Physical/virtual: MIT's Department of Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering recently renovated a building to
support an approach to engineering education called
Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate
(CDIO) that's intended to help undergraduates grasp the full
cycle of engineering activity.
These slides give a
sense of the variety of physical facilities but only hint at how
networking enables students to use resources and people outside
the Institute as they work and learn.
Virtual/physical:
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), for example, sends teams
of faculty and students to off-campus sites (most of them
outside the United States) to work on projects for an academic
quarter. These sites (e.g.,
Venice, Italy) provide engaging engineering problems for
student teams.
The
American Council on Education's AT&T Awards Program has
spotlighted some other examples where technology has lowered
classroom walls to help internationalize the curriculum.
-Steve Ehrmann, The TLT Group; updated Oct. 31,
2004
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