She moved chairs into the hall and for several years double booked a traditional classroom so it would be available for discussions. Writing Professor Pamela Gay offers encouragement and support as freshman Rodney Riggs works on a writing project in the collaboratory. Over the years, Gay took her concerns to various campus committees and to Wolf in the computing center, who helped her find appropriate software and investigate options in use at other universities. With the opening of the new Academic Complex, the University last year identified space in the basement for the new classroom. The result, according to those who use it, is a room that not only doesn't interfere with learning, but enhances it.
Students can effortlessly move from electronic connections to personal ones.
In Gay's basic writing class, students can be found in small groups sitting on benches looking at hard copy, while others are clustered in chairs working at their computers or working at the white board. It's a learning center that is more natural and less institutional. It is a more natural reflection of the way people work and talk, a more natural coming and going that allows maximum collaboration and flexibility. Kathryn Kish Sklar, distinguished professor of history, who is using the room this fall, agrees that the collaboratory has transformed her teaching of a senior seminar on women and social movements in the United States from 1830 to 1930. As part of the course, students identify and analyze historical documents related to social movements and transfer them to the Web.