Typing Out Loud

I know of relatively few descriptions of innovative blended teaching coming from Art & Design programs. Examples may exist, but they are dwarfed by the case histories emerging from Liberal Arts or Business School courses. And then I stumbled upon this:
http://research.the-bac.edu/sva/index.htm - Sally Levine and Warren Wake’s 2000 presentation to the National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. They titled their presentation, Education of Artists, Hybrid Teaching: Design Studios in Virtual Space, and delivered it on October 20, 2000 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City – about 5 blocks away from where I live.

They begin their paper with an appreciation of hybrid teaching and an acknowledgement that it is poised to become the standard for future college education - the classroom remaining, however, the strategic site for teaching and learning. (Justifying this statement, they pull a 1998 quote from Saskia Sassen, the University of Chicago Professor of Sociology and globalization theorist: “there is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully (digitized industry,” that even “sectors that are highly digitized require strategic sites.”)

The description of their classes’ twice-a-week meeting is worth quoting in full:

The physical studio is a computer lab where the class members gather to share information, work on their designs, and present projects for periodic review. The Internet studio site includes an avatar-scaled review space for synchronous meetings - new this year - and a website for asynchronous communication. This latter site includes links to each student and faculty member’s email and website, a bulletin board, the course description and syllabus. The syllabus, distributed only on the website, provides online links to readings, eliminating the need for excessive copying or for placing readings on reserve in the school library. In addition the class website features links to relevant webpages and to other related information. By adding the online learning requirement to an advanced level design studio, the instructors “virtually” double the amount of student/teacher contact.”(my emphasis)

Levine and Wake break down the benefits of hybrid teaching for their studios courses between the practical and the theoretical. Practically, they are able to increase, in quantity and regularity, instructor and guest feedback which allows students to incorporate those feedbacks throughout their design processes. Deeper two-way peer-to-peer feedback is supported via public web pages, giving students opportunities to comment on, learn from, and be inspired by each others’ works. Additionally, the class bulletin board captures the discussion and feedback that is normally forgotten along the way of a traditional studio course, becoming a valuable resource for the students throughout the semester. In their particular design studio scenarios, the hybrid system embodies “the subject of the design studio” because it can accommodate both the representation of the eventual physical bricks and mortar space (in the classroom) and the virtual space that is composed of drawings and images. Theoretically, “the class embraced the parallel track investigation as a Platonic/Artistotelian debate. Cyberspace provides a location for design without compromise. Like the Great Pyramids of Giza, these spaces are built unconstrained by concerns for physical labor, expense of materials or size of construction. Conceptual works, like those of Ledoux and Boullée, can be realized in virtual space, and the visitors to those realizations may explore at their own pace, led by their own interests. Such pure architectural form and conceptualization is rare these days, and the opportunity to explore such forms as half of the complementary space points to an important opportunity arising through complementary virtual architecture.”

This is a five year old article. What might Levine and Wake be doing now?