The Dreamery: A learning space for technology

When I have the good fortune to visit a college or university to give a talk or lead a workshop, I'll often ask my hosts if there are any interesting learning spaces I can see while I'm on campus. I'm fascinated by the design of classrooms and other learning spaces and how the physical affordances of a space can affect teaching and learning. I've taken photos of some of the learning spaces I've visited over the years, and I've shared those photos online in a Flickr album called Learning Spaces. It's kind of a mood board for classroom design.

Last week I gave a talk at the Pennsylvania State University, better known as Penn State, and when I asked my hosts at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence if I could see some fun learning spaces, they directed me to a couple of spaces managed by Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) group. One was called the Dreamery, after Penn State's famous creamery. It featured the usual affordances of an active learning classroom--a polycentric layout, tables and white boards for student collaboration, monitors around the room for laptop projection--as well a few less standard elements.

For instance, the Dreamery has a set of virtual reality (VR) headsets ready for student use. The TLT group has been working with instructors in a variety of disciplines to explore the use of VR in teaching and learning, and these instructors will often bring their classes to the Dreamery for VR-based activities. Ryan Wetzel, manager of creative learning initiatives and one of my hosts, said that one advantage of all the moveable furniture in the classroom is that it makes it easy to move the furniture out of the way for students using VR headsets!

The VR kits at the Dreamery are the Quest 2 headsets from Meta. If you've seen a friend or family member using VR in the last year, it was probably one of these headsets. You can run VR apps on a Quest 2 without being tethered to a computer. That, plus the relatively low prices of these headsets and a growing body of VR software and applications, has helped make VR a much more practical tool for teaching and research than it was a few years ago. See, for instance, this VR panel I put together for the Vanderbilt University Digital Commons last year for a few interesting applications.

I was impressed at Penn State's investment in VR, not only in purchasing enough hardware for whole classes to use but also in providing the technical and pedagogical support that faculty need to get started in this area. It's a great approach to helping faculty figure out teaching uses of a technology that seems to have applicability across so many disciplines.

Frankly, if ChatGPT and other AI tools hadn't hit the scene in late 2022, I think 2023 would have been the year of VR in higher education. But we are living in an age of artificial intelligence, and the TLT folks at Penn State are exploring those technologies with faculty and students as well. Right now they have an exhibit of sorts in the Dreamery, a projection of a collection of AI-generated art contributed by visitors to the Dreamery. Ryan and his TLT colleagues are using this exhibit to help faculty and students think critically about generative AI tools, from the nuances of prompt engineering to the ethics of intellectual property. These are important conversations, and I appreciate that the Dreamery fosters them in such an engaging manner.

Speaking of critical conversations about technology, the TLT folks showed me another tool they use to spark those conversations. It's a game of sorts called What the Deck. They found that when asking students to reflect critically about their own relationships with technology, students clam up and don't want to share. What the Deck consists of three decks of cards: characters, technologies, and action cards. Students draw a card from each deck, creating a combination that sets them up for reflection, as described on the What the Deck website:

I love this approach to getting students outside of their own heads as a way to explore a topic deeply. It reminds me of the role-playing that occurs in the RePlay Health simulation from the Tiltfactor game design lab. That game involves talking about healthcare policy, and the roles that students are assigned in the game make it easier for students to think about how different policies affect different people, without having to disclose anything too personal about their own healthcare experiences.

What the Deck exists as physical decks of cards (thanks, Ryan, for my copy!) but you can also play the game online with your students.

Thanks again to my colleagues at Penn State for hosting me last week and showing me around campus!

Generative AI in Computer Science with Brett Becker

Since November 2022, higher education has been trying to wrap its collective mind around the advent of AI text generators like ChatGPT. For those of us who teach courses where we might ask students to respond to a prompt by writing a short essay, ChatGPT and similar tools certainly seem to provide students a way out of doing that writing themselves.

However, our colleagues who teach computer science and computer programming often ask their students to write computer code in respond to a prompt. As it turns out, there are a number of generative AI tools that pre-date ChatGPT that can pretty much answer any coding question you might ask a student in a first- or second-semester programming class.

This means that computer science education has had a bit more time to figure out how to respond to new AI tools that can short circuit the learning process for their students. In this week's episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast, I talk with Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in the School of Computer Science. He has co-authored at least two papers on the use of AI code generation tools in computer science education, and he is deep in these discussions in his field.

In our conversation, Brett explores how new AI tools are leading computer science educators to rethink their learning goals, their assessments, and how they teach their students the ethics of computer programming. There are a lot of lessons here for educators in other fields figuring out what to do with AI tools!

​You can listen to our conversation here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.
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