About 20 faculty members clustered around lit-up monitors in Rolfe 2118 on Monday as several instructors presented about different technologies designed to improve education.
The event, called “Speed Dating with Technology for Faculty,” is part of a weeklong series of events to celebrate the opening of the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities’ new learning lab.
The Center for Digital Humanities provides technical support for research and instruction, mainly for faculty in the humanities department. Its new lab is intended to provide a space for team-based research and teaching and is equipped with necessary technological features, said Annelie Rugg, the director and humanities chief information officer at the Center for Digital Humanities.
“By being in the space and experiencing how it can be used in small demo stations, it becomes much more apparent how the lab can be used individually and as a class,” Rugg said.
The new lab includes 10 tables each, which hold a shared monitor and can accommodate five people, so the space can serve larger class sizes than many other campus labs, Rugg said.
Its technological features include an audio-visual system and a projection system.
“The biggest enhancement is not so much in the technology but in the bigger ability of the room, which is designed not just for lecture courses but also for group collaborative work and teamwork,” Rugg said.
Individual students and faculty can drop in and use the lab, but it is simultaneously designed for team collaboration and created for North Campus class use, she said.
“The lab is a physical ‘home base’ for people to come together, for students and faculty to work elbow to elbow at the tables,” Rugg added.
The center’s old lab was previously located in the basement of LuValle Commons, but Rugg said she pushed to find a new location in a humanities academic building because of space constraints and concerns about visibility to students and faculty.
UCLA’s instructional enhancement initiative fee and state money funded the new lab’s construction, which commenced in spring 2012 and cost about $200,000, said Michael Samojlik, the Center for Digital Humanities language and instructional labs coordinator.
Among those at Monday’s event was Elaine Sullivan, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
She said she was interested in using an available program called LastPass, which provides a storage system for all an individual’s passwords.
“The lab is a huge improvement (from the its previous location) in its entire set-up,” she said. “This works better for collaborative projects.”
Marissa Lopez, an assistant professor in the English department, said she planned to use an online polling tool, which was discussed at Monday’s event, to help students interact with course materials.
“It’s hard to get students to respond sometimes. This tool will remind them that discussion and creation is a part of knowledge,” Lopez said.
The center’s staff plans to add other technological features to the lab such as video-conference and lecture-capture abilities, but Rugg said the center has also reserved funds to implement technological improvements suggested by students and faculty, Rugg said.
“We purposefully didn’t add much high-end capability because we want to hear from people what they want us to put in,” she added. “The infrastructure is ready. (Additional technology) should be plug-and-play once installed.”