Tuesday, February 13, 2007

University of Aberdeen


Today we had a delegation of the University of Aberdeen, being a guest of the University Twente Innovation Lab. Their main interest was in the entrepreneurial activities that our university exploits both in research as in education. Within the visiting program I was asked to present something about the Wireless Campus and the consequences for organisation and education. In general I always like to tell something about my work to visitors from outside the university. Dissemination is an important part of my work I believe.
Beforehand, I was not very well aware of the expectations that the delegation would have. Of course it's possible to identify entrepreneurial aspects in the Wireless Campus project (starting from the building of the infrastructure) to the way we organise our project-based education, often with private companies being important stakeholders in a project. I was the last presentation in the program, which is always a challenge. It turned out to be a very interesting session, highly interactive. It was nice to see that the Wireless Campus of the University of Twente is still a great example of innovation.

2 comments:

Marcel de Leeuwe said...

Hi Stanley,

Can you tell a little bit more about the concept? Why is it innovative, is it also innovative from a didactical point of view or is the stress more on the technical aspects?

Stanley Portier said...

It's surely innovative from a didactical point of view. In the past we used to have traditional face-to-face lectures (2x45 min), then separate workgroups and also separate computer sessions. Now we have multifunctional lecture rooms in which face-to-face activities are combined with assignments that students have to do on their laptops, e.g. using Maple TA for quick diagnostic testing.