At the U, the latest high-tech gizmos are more than 21st-century fads—they’re pathways to new teaching and learning.
By Kermit Pattison
Adventures arrive fresh from the Arctic to thousands of K-12 classrooms across the world thanks to GoNorth!, an adventure learning program that has reached 3,000 schools, including 900 in Minnesota.
Aaron Doering, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the U’s College of Education and Human Development, is the educational director of Go North! Every spring he joins a dogsled expedition to an arctic region, using podcasts, video, and other online technology to bring the experience into classrooms around the world.
“Students are truly able to see and experience it,” says Doering. “They’re so motivated by it because it’s this narrative story that’s unfolding.”
GoNorth! educators and researchers have trekked across Alaska, Russia, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The program provides a free curriculum synchronized with the journey. Lessons are brought to life with trail reports, daily audio, photos, videos, and even a blog ostensibly written by a husky. The dogsleds carry laptops, Palm Pilots, digital cameras, high definition video recorders, and solar panels to keep it all running.
The mission also is powered by philanthropy: The Best Buy Foundation supports the program, and Doering holds the newly created Bonnie Westby Huebner Endowed Chair in Education and Technology, made possible by a $2 million gift from alumnus Dan Huebner.
New Dimensions in Education
Susy Ziegler can take her students for a walk in the woods—without leaving the classroom. An assistant professor of geography in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), Ziegler uses a GeoWall—a projection system that utilizes polarized light to create right eye and left eye images. Wearing special glasses, viewers are able to perceive depth, or 3-D, on the GeoWall.
“Instead of taking 500 students from my biogeography class out into the field, which is logistically difficult, we bring the field to the classroom,” says Ziegler. “We can show them a trip and it looks as if they are walking through an old growth forest.” Students in an introductory urban studies course also used the GeoWall to take a virtual walking tour of the Twin Cities.
Elsewhere in CLA, assistant professor of art Ali Momeni is using projection technology to transform public spaces into huge showcases for student art.
The Art on Wheels project was born in Momeni’s collaborative arts class. The class built tricycles designed to carry three projectors along with a sound system and generator. When combined, the projectors can create a panoramic image 400 feet wide and 150 feet high.
“They are their own venue,” says Momeni. “We don’t go to galleries and ask for space. We just go and project on spaces that are unclaimed. It’s a way of claiming public spaces and bringing student work into the community.”
“Every Student Has a Front Row Seat”
The School of Dentistry recently opened a $9.5 million state-of-the-art simulation clinic where students work on lifelike mannequins to master the techniques they will ultimately use in practice.
The 11,200-square-foot clinic was funded in large part through private gifts, and includes 100 patient simulators with realistic shoulders, heads, teeth, and dental tools. Students hone manual dexterity and eye-hand coordination.
“The unmatched benefits of this patient simulation technology allow students to learn faster and better,” says Judith Buchanan, associate dean of academic affairs for the dental school.
Teachers now demonstrate from a central station, while each student watches on a personal monitor. The clinic also has 20 advanced stations equipped with on-screen textbooks, patient histories and x-rays for more than 100 clinical procedures, cameras, and LED tracked drills. True virtual reality, minus the toothache.
Kermit Pattison is a writer based in St. Paul.
This story originally appeared in the summer 2008 issue of Legacy, a quarterly magazine for U of M donors and friends published by the University of Minnesota Foundation. 
