U Michigan’s North Quad Complex: A Media Cathedral

The North Quad Residential Complex at the University of Michigan is the ideal place for a conference on Computers and Writing. I’ll do my part to fetishize the awesome people-focused technology in this place.
Low-tech but innovative table wedges. Six make a tight circle; more make an expanding donut.
A flatscreen computer monitor, next to an LED tickertape that runs up the wall.
Monitors hanging on walls make an instant gallery space, for student work or campus announcements.
Old-school whiteboards, a reconfigurable table, and a monitor. (This room also had street-level windows.)
The "Benedek Family Media Gateway" is an impressive illustration of ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous learning.
Everywhere, monitors streamed images from the conference -- slides uploaded by presenters, snapshots, Twitter streams, etc.
The lower level is a bit out of the way; more contemplative, but not isolated.
These monitors were everywhere.
Beneath each monitor, a panel of pluggy goodness.
Many of the monitors were labeled like paintings in a museum; this one had a 2d barcode.
A team from Seton Hill University (Laura Patterson, Christine Cusick, and I) gave a workshop on teaching writing with iPads. I also participated in the panel, Making Writing Socially Engaging: Asking Why New Media Draws Us In. Rather than liveblogging, I tried livetweeting (something that is only practical when the venue has free WiFi… hint hint, 4Cs), and found the experience thrilling — especially the massively multiplayer livetwitting of “Is Blogging Dead?” Kudos to Mark Sample, who archived the Computers and Writing 2011 #cwcon tweets for us who were too in-the-moment to think about such things.

Post was last modified on 27 May 2011 2:13 pm

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Dennis G. Jerz

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