Stanford Center on Innovations in Learning
Stig Hagström worked at Xerox Parc for more than fifteen years. He is now the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Wallenberg Hall, Stanford. The center was financed by Swedish financial giants Wallenberg, who have really found an interesting area to work with (and one that happily reflects very well on Sweden). The Center works with the question of how technology can be used to create better learning environments. Not - Hagström points out - with any type of overconfidence in technological solutions: teaching and learning will always first and foremost be human endeavours. But the Center is interested in trying to find solutions that will augment that endeavour and create new forms of learning.
One simple thing that Stanford has found is that small, seminar-like, learning is superior to all other forms. So they decided to have only that form. (Yes!). Large lectures became exceptions and the university decided to develop this as a model. The costs, of course, would be extreme. But the university started a fund-raising drive, and succeeded in raising enough money to shift to this model. An extremely impressive feat.
Hagström shows me the facilities at SCIL and the architecture - newly renovated - nicely complements the atmosphere of research and exeperiment that permeates the whole Center. There is even an artist in residence and her work is beautiful.