The rapid advance of technology has enabled students to use powerful technology both inside and outside of the classroom. A major issue facing higher education is whether students truly know how to use this technology, can our learning spaces support it, and can it be integrated with other technologies to extend students' capabilities?This paper focuses on the how Winona State University went about improving learning spaces on campus. It includes six major sections. First, the development of the e-Warrior: Digital Life and Learning Program and Technology Master Plan provided the foundation. Second, quantifying the quality of classroom spaces on campus through the development of an online database and a campus report card provided a common point of reference. Third, faculty members engaged in the design of new learning spaces on campus to align design with pedagogy. Fourth, new technologies supported the online delivery of what used to be classroom lecture, paving the way for classroom flipping. Fifth, the intersection between formal and informal learning spaces played a role in instruction. Sixth, WSU developed two new flipped classrooms; the Math Achievement Center and Visual Media Studio. The Math Achievement Center and Visual Media Studio are collaborative classrooms designed by faculty that demonstrate the potential of mobile computing integration. Finally, recommendations for improving learning spaces found on any campus are offered.This paper provides a replicable roadmap for developing collaborative technology learning environments and highlights the many successes and challenges you may experience along the way.

With the number of students owning smart phones increasing to over fifty percent in 2010 at Winona State University, Information Technology Services collaborated with University Marketing and Communications to develop Winona State Mobile http://www.winona.edu/it/winonastatemobile.asp. This paper details the initial development efforts to the mobile development strategy that allowed for Winona State Mobile to be accessed from most mobile devices, and prepare the way for future mobile development efforts.The initial WSU Mobile application was developed with the following features: campus map, WSU bus tracker, virtual tour, WSU news, Faculty and staff directory, and the academic calendar. During the construction of this first application the programming team changed the development strategy along the way, resulting in our most recent version being quite different than the initial release. In addition, while working on an update to WSU Mobile, the mobile development team was also working with the Winona Historical Society on a virtual walking tour of some historical buildings in downtown Winona. Both of these efforts have helped shape the way we approach mobile development. This paper will provide an account of these development efforts, reasons for the change in strategy, and a demonstration the end products. Finally, this paper will discuss our most recent effort, which will be available in the summer 2012: The Winona State University Augmented Reality Tree Tour.We are confident that our current applications have been very successful based on qualitative as well as quantitative data. We have had well over 50,000 hits on WSU Mobile since October 2011. The bus-tracking application alone has had almost 30,000 hits during that same time frame. Our team would like to share the knowledge we've gained with other institutions looking to increase their visibility among prospective students, and provide pertinent information to current students in a medium that is easily and quickly accessible to them.

Growing interest in visualization and stereography has prompted the Center for Instruction, Research, and Technology at Indiana State University (ISU) to expand visualization resources available to faculty and students. Beginning in the spring of 2006, ISU built four new active learning spaces equipped to handle various faculty members' visualization needs. The "Science Room" is a 20-seat, multi-disciplinary visualization classroom, equipped with stereoscopic projectors, an 11-foot, 16:9 format polarized screen, viewing glasses, and a powerful workstation. Faculty throughout all colleges with stereoscopic instructional material may schedule the room for entire semesters or on a per-class/as-needed basis. Normal Hall, room 121, was remodeled to become a multidisciplinary visualization laboratory. Researchers now have access to both active and passive stereoscopic systems. One of the systems in Normal Hall is capable of displaying HR (high definition/high resolution) objects on a 14-foot large format screen. Included in the laboratory is a three-dimensional laser scanner capable of creating digital representations of objects in their natural environments. This scanner has recently been used by faculty to create digital three dimensional representations of clay pots recovered from an archeological dig. In addition, a powerful rendering cluster combining supercomputing and visualization technologies is in place to simultaneously process 3-D graphics, imaging, and video data in real time. The rendering cluster enables faculty to tackle the most demanding visual computing challenges. Visualization applications are available for many disciplines including science, art, business, and engineering. This presentation and paper will focus on the process of building these new learning spaces and marketing them to faculty on the ISU campus.

Mission, vision, and objectives statements are standard items created for most information technology units. Alignment of these with both the overall University mission and individual staff performance goals is often weak or lacking. Building upon the work of Kohrman and Trinkle [1], objectives for Indiana State University's Instructional and Research Technology Services (IRTS) were written as facilitating activities and built to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aggressive but attainable, Rewarding, and Time-bound). In addition, these activities were mapped to the University's mission as well as specific individual performance goals.In the spring of 2004 the staff of IRTS held a one day retreat to develop activities that included benchmarks and metrics to determine organizational and individual success. These facilitating activities were captured into a document which included who was doing the work, who was responsible for work completion and success, how the activity was to be measured, what types of data would be collected, the benchmarks for success, and a timeline for completion.Each quarter of the academic year, the unit reflected on the progress toward year-end benchmarks and made adjustments of resources to ensure timely completion of facilitating activities. As IRTS moves into its second full year, the initial process of developing facilitating activities has helped guide the direction and growth of the unit. It has also aided in quantification of the unit's work and staff accountability which is documented in the Office of Information Technology's 2005 Technology Profile.

Winona State University utilized the Lean principles of process improvement (five high-level values principles to eliminate wasteful steps within a process) to enhance the project intake process for IT. Prior to 2009, Winona State's IT Department struggled with the successful completion of projects and decided to take a unique approach to resolving the issue. This approach allowed a core team of individuals to spend a focused amount of time documenting and discussing the current process, researching best practices, and brain storming ideas for a new and improved process. At the end of the four-day Kaizen event, a new process was proposed and presented to a larger group of stakeholders for feedback and approval. After multiple revisions to the initial proposal, the new process was implemented in August of 2009.The process that now currently exists for IT project requests is documented on Winona State's website, http://www.winona.edu/it/itsprojects.asp. It allows for project owners and community members to make their requests online and includes automated communication back to them notifying them as to the status of their request. An IT project team reviews requests on a weekly basis, approves, denies or defers the requests, and assigns a project lead to communicate back with the requester. All approved, deferred and completed projects are tracked and displayed to campus via a project dashboard.The new process centralizes the documentation of all project requests and their statuses. This allows for more thorough research of requests to ensure alignment with the Campus Technology Master Plan. It promotes better communication between the IT units and allows for realistic expectations to be set to the WSU community. The return on investment has been great as we've shown an increase in the number of significant IT projects completed, as well as an increase in customer and stakeholder satisfaction.