 Thank you. I'm Lauren McAllister, Digital Resources Curator. And I'm Matt Hart. I'm the webmaster and Digital Fabrication Coordinator. We're from the Milton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. And the school consists of three sections, architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning. We have about 500 students, about 30 faculty members, and seven accredited programs from undergraduate through doctoral levels. Our disciplines are both creative and rigorous in their nature and they focus on issues related to the built and natural environment. So today we'll be describing the architectural studio as a learning environment, giving you hands-on experience by conducting the fastest studio ever. I think we're actually in power point. So each of our three disciplines in varying ways implements the studio model of education. The studio is inherently about openness. This is a photograph of our design studios. Physically it's a very open space where you see everything that goes on. It promotes both formal and informal communication and as well as around the clock access. It is also very reconfigurable and customizable for each individual studio. It's also defined as a group of people. So students, instructors, and critics who are engaged in an open discussion around problems. The studio is initiated by and formulated around problems, but not specifically about solving problems. It's about engaging in a process that produces solutions, designs, plans, or other creative responses. So the studio is also a highly critical environment where reasoning and argument and dialogue between the participants and the instructor play a very important role. Students will often work across disciplinary boundaries and integrate ideas and approaches found from other disciplines. Students engage with instructors and peers in an open dialogue giving students the opportunity to learn as much from peer interaction as from each other and instructor feedback. Students have the opportunity to propose their own solutions to complex problems and this encourages student voice. The studio operates through the integration of knowledge with skills and provides experiential learning opportunities that allow students to try and retry their ideas on paper but also in real spatial terms. And the student is creating a model out of toilet paper. What are the various things you do? So technology in this sort of environment is provided both by the school as well as by the individual students. Within the studio environment you'll find computers, printers, network infrastructure. You'll also find a lot of personal devices. You'll find some advanced personal fabrication tools like crickets and maker bots and things. Many of these technologies are not explicitly instructed in the curriculum. They're picked up either individually by each student or instructed by their peers. These technologies enable students to choose from a variety of responses to any given problem. So at any point they may be working on pencil drawings, computer renderings, building full-scale installations that take up 20 feet of space that we make in videos. And this kind of work with a range of media is woven throughout their experiences in our studio. So as a result of that, one component of the KSA support for studios is what we're calling the KSA community site. This is the first of two Drupal-based websites we're presenting here today. We created this platform. It exists outside of the university's desire to learn based on LMS. And we did so in order to provide open content, support that wide range of media that we were talking about in the last few slides, and to create a level of visibility for individuals and groups within our school. So the community platform, which you can get to at the URL on the top of the screen if you have a device, it can host resources for groups. For studios, like what we're going to try here, these groups are created as nearly empty channels, which are then filled through the course of the term by the participants in that studio. The site follows a blogging model where students and participants are able to add posts and add them into any number of groups to which they belong on the platform. Posts are then searchable, editable, taggable, commentable, according to the student's desires. Each post can also be assigned a level of visibility, so any individual post can be shared only with my classmates in a specific group. It can be shared with anybody who's authenticated at the university, or it can be published out and pushed out to the wider world. And because the posts follow the students, their relationship to that content continues beyond their enrollment in any given course. They take all their content with them, so they can reuse it, they can refer to it even after graduation, kind of persists for as long as we can keep the server up. We've created such a group for this studio, and that's where if you're going to that URL on the top of the screen, that's where they're going to land. So what is the studio process? Studios typically meet three times a week for four hours for each session, and each session provides an opportunity for engagement with instructors and peers. Students also work intensively between sessions in the studio. They stay up all night, they work around the clock. Every instructor will lead his or her studio differently, but typically each uses the following basic process. So there's an initial design prompt or problems set forward. Students engage in precedent research and investigate the site. They begin sketching possible solutions, and after several iterations there's a midterm review. Students then run through several more iterations of their design, extending it to more detailed proposals as they work, and some studios will follow a winnowing model where larger groups of students work on progressively fewer projects. The studio concludes then with a final review with external critics, and it is held in a public forum. After the studio, students compile documentation of their proposals with the best work submitted to the school for use in its archives, and I take care of that. As a way of illustrating this environment and the platforms we've developed to support it, we're going to lead everyone through a brief studio experience. So this is where the participation point will start to begin. Our studio's design prompt for this next few minutes is to design a monument to open education. Usually studios follow a narrative, so our narrative is as follows. After more than a decade of work and advocacy, the open education movement has succeeded in convincing the Department of Education of the importance of openness. The department has decided to therefore fund the construction of a monument to open education. In recognition of the importance of this topic, the secretaries decided to locate this monument near Constitution Pond on the north side of the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. In order to ensure that this monument accurately captures our goals and aspirations for our community, the secretaries commissioned a competition to solicit proposals for this project. So that's what we're going to be doing here for the next 20 minutes. It's coming up with our ideas for what we would do with the monument to open education. One aspect of this is, given the fact that we have a very large pool just north of the reflecting pool, you get to pick where exactly you want to put this. So that's what we're going to be doing. So our challenge is going to be to respond to this incredible opportunity. So once the studio, if we were for real doing this for the next 10 weeks, once the studio has been given the design confidence set up with community, students would then need to do a bit of precedent research. So precedence, as we use it, can be defined fairly broadly. Any inspirational design that will help inform your response to a given problem is not necessarily only monuments. It can be anything you find meaningful. The KSA Digital Library is a resource that I maintain. It is another Drupal site that we launched in 2010 that supports the studio environment and other aspects of our school's curriculum. It was designed to meet the needs of our programs, provide inspiration for students, serve as a repository for student work, and aid in our outreach to professional scholars and students near and far. So there are both public and private collections in our library. For those with computers, you can go to the library at the URL on the top of the screen. That will take you directly to a Monuments and Memorials collection that we've created for your inspiration today. We've brought our approach to open education to the Digital Library by focusing on small bits of reusable content that can help learners in many contexts. We also advocate for the use of Creative Commons licensing whenever possible and open content whenever we can. The assets in the repository have been contributed by students, faculty, staff, professional organizations outside the school, and it consists of images, videos, and documents that describe or provide a learning opportunity for students in the three disciplines in our school. I should interject. The Digital Library currently has about 36,000 individual assets in it, about half of which are open to the public, and we're trying to increase that percentage. So if you're not looking at the site if you don't have a device, here are some images that we've taken out of the Digital Library that we think you might find inspirational as you think what you ought to do with this monument project. In thinking about these and other monuments or meaningful places you've been to, the things we invite you to consider are the experiences you've had with places like these, how did they make you feel, or the structure, how big were they in relationship to your size, were they big, small, what were they made out of, what kind of a place was it that you were located at. So while you're reflecting and thinking about some of what you want to do, let's talk about the site. Usually in a studio, the studio members at the beginning of the term will divide up responsibility for creating an intercommunal site model. Depending on the location they may also visit the site if it's cool or interesting or close. The site model, which is one of our better examples, it communicates the scale, topography, density, and character of the project's location. Building this model is also, frankly, it's an opportunity for students to practice the craft of modeling. And it's a way where they don't know the word but what the design is, they just have to build it and focus on the craft. So while the first few steps of this process are sort of research-based, students in this space will begin testing their own responses to the design prompt. So sketch modeling is what we would like you to do today. It's a quick expression of your ideas. And you have paper and a marker. If you don't, Aaron will provide you with paper and a marker. Please take three to five quick sketches of what your monument to open education might look like. While you're sketching, while you're kind of doodling around, I'd like to talk a little bit about sketching and its role in the process and specifically its relationship to what we've built. Historically, students have filled sketchbooks with these kinds of drawings which we're asking you to do as they explore alternatives and refine their proposals. This is the stack of sketchbooks I did when I went through undergraduate and graduate school. They're great tools. They absolutely have a role in this kind of process. But the problem is at the end, the output is difficult to build on and share because you've got hundreds and hundreds of pages open. So in building the community platform, we try to create a common platform for expression where individuals and groups can share their work more easily. We were particularly inspired in the beginning of this process by a student who started using Flickr to share his work with friends who had already graduated from other schools because he wanted to receive some extra feedback about the projects that he was working on. Our goal was to try to enable more of these exchanges via a kind of common platform that the whole school could use. We decided not to use a third-party platform like Flickr because we wanted the resource that could grow with the school's activity and that we could customize to meet the needs of all of the students in our school. We're called a kind of variety of media that our students are working with. Any kind of third-party platform we didn't think would really give us the flexibility that we needed. Why are we asking for three to five sketches? Because student is about generating ideas and students are taught to generate a lot of them. This slide shows two diagrams used by Microsoft's Bill Buxton in a presentation at IIT in 2008. Key Credits Alistair Hamilton was saying that for any given question a good designer should have five plausible solutions. Having multiple options makes it possible to discuss the merits of each idea without it becoming personal. So it would be difficult to criticize your work without criticizing you if there is only one approach to that problem. So we're going to let you take... Does everyone have three to five sketches? Raise your hand. Who's done? Okay, two seconds. So while you're kind of drawing the thing that we're leading up to is where you would be in the process is called the mid-review. The mid-review is an opportunity. It's about halfway through the term to pause and get feedback on your designs often with external critics. People who may not have a relationship to the university. These reviews are performed not in the studio where it's kind of your space that's kind of private. They're very public. These are at the center hall of our building where everybody walks by to get their coffee shop and see what's going on. This is also an opportunity for everybody in the studio to kind of step back and gauge how they're doing and get ideas about where I am in terms of everybody else and where the instructor can assess the studio as a whole in its progress. So at this point, I'm going to feel like you had barely any time to draw, but it's time for our mid-review. So we're going to ask that you turn to the folks next to you, ideally groups of three or so, and take a minute to share what some of your ideas are. Ideally, we have about one minute for each person to talk, so this is really super tight. I apologize for that. There's never enough time in the studio. But make friends, and the idea is that you should have groups of three. Out of this process, the idea is that you will select one scheme that the group of three of you will work on for the rest of the session. So don't... There's never enough time to do everything we want to do. So at this point, unfortunately, we're going to have to move on from the mid-review process and start talking about the second phase of what we're going to try to do. So by this point, hopefully, you've had a chance to discuss your ideas and maybe pick the idea that you're going to try to work on for the second phase of this. The last, that second phase, is going to be to do... What we're asking you to do is to basically do a drawing of your group's proposal along with a model, using the Play-Doh and Pipe-Peters and anything else you may happen to have with you. So we'll be working across different media groups. So the paper that Erin is handing out is your foundation for your Play-Doh. That's going to be your model surface. And each group should have one model and one sketch. Please put your names somewhere around the drawing so that we know who to credit. And this can be done. Here are some samples from a studio that we did at Ohio State University a few weeks ago. And look, people using Play-Doh and Pipe-Peters... They did it in about this much longer. We did it. And Matt and I did it last night. There's ours. It can be done in half an hour. Okay.