| Paths and Practices
Classroom Configuration --Diane C. Boehm, Saginaw Valley State University Several of our labs are being reconfigured--how much depends mostly on space limitations. I like pods or clusters. My refrain has been that we need labs with sufficient flexibility to accommodate three class activities:
Classroom Configuration --George Otte, Baruch College/CUNY There are, I know now, whole books devoted to this. I have learned from being in other classroom labs that what I have long worked in (we have 4 networked labs in English, all with the same basic set-up) is one of the least preferable configurations: multiple rows of terminals facing each other. What's more, our labs have pillars running through them (as large rooms on the top floor of an 18-floor building in midtown Manhattan), so there is no place to stand where you can easily be seen by everyone. And students have trouble seeing the faces of anyone else but the students they are flanked by. I don't really feel constrained or bothered by such features. I tend to work in the situations I find myself in, experiencing what others might consider disadvantages as "enabling constraints." The problem of lacking a focal point for the instructor (as opposed to, say, the horseshoe configuration) I consider a non-problem: automatic decentering. And the difficulty students have of connecting with each other by any means other than their computer-mediated communication is, obviously, a non-problem from another perspective: I really don't want F2F chat anyway. (next entry)
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