From our Jan/Feb '14 issue: They’ve still got the stacks, and you can still find a few dusty shelves of card catalogs if you know where to look. But for today’s Penn State students and faculty, the library is at once a buzzing social gathering place and the high-tech hub of campus learning.
It’s 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, and the coolest spot on campus is already packed. Students fill every seat in the space, where the design manages to be both minimalist and cozy. They gather in packs of two or three, chatting or working on group projects, while others work alone, earbuds in place, their attention alternating from computer monitor to smartphone screens. Notebooks, midmorning snacks, and travel mugs full of caffeine cover the tabletops. Wall-mounted flat-screen TVs show muted highlights of last night’s games.
If you’d been blindfolded when you entered the building, you might think you’d been led to a newly renovated stretch of the HUB, or maybe the world’s snazziest dorm lounge. But then, the dozens of computer stations would imply otherwise, as would the staffers in color-coded T-shirts on hand to help fix a jammed printer, solve an iffy wireless connection, or explain the finer points of iMovie or PowerPoint.
There’s even someone who can help you find a book.
Yes, you’re in the library, but unless you graduated in the past few years, it’s not the library you know. This particular space is the Tombros and McWhirter Knowledge Commons, the bustling, tech-friendly, student-centered place-to-be at Pattee and Paterno Libraries. Since it opened in early 2012, the Knowledge Commons has been an ever-more-popular draw for students looking to see and be seen while they hit the books, research papers, or produce multimedia projects. For more and more students, it’s the shared (and very social) space where the work of a college education—in all its 21st century forms—gets done.
The library as the heart of learning on campus is hardly a new idea, of course; the library as the place to eat lunch and get your iPhone fixed while you put together that video project for class, well, that’s a whole new world.
“I think there’s been a traditional emphasis on collections—that we’re all about ‘stuff,’” says Joe Fennewald, who oversees the Knowledge Commons. “That emphasis has expanded to realizing that what students need is not always ‘stuff,’ and that that stuff has changed. So it’s about service, and also looking at our buildings differently—providing spaces for students to be creative, to be working and thinking about assignments, and to assist them in that.”
The change has been driven by technology. The Knowledge Commons is in part a giant computer lab, and its staff will not only help solve your tech problems, they’ll lend you an iPad and guide you through producing a podcast or video for class. More than changing the way students work and learn, the new library is changing how they’re taught. Says Fennewald, “We have faculty who haven’t been in the building in years, until we opened the Knowledge Commons and they started hearing about it from students. What we’re doing here has changed their ideas of how libraries can be used.”
Of course—and in spite of those wall-mounted HDTVs and the sight of students chatting on their phones while they chew sandwiches over their keyboards—it’s still a library. For all this welcome emphasis on customer service, collaborative learning, and useful technology, isn’t something lost when the priority is no longer quiet rooms full of silent students soaking up knowledge amid the miles and miles of books? For Fennewald, who sees both the anecdotal evidence and the skyrocketing usage numbers (a record 2.1 million visitors last year), the truth is simple: “This space draws students to the library. It’s creating a buzz, and they want to be here.”
For a guided tour, read on.
Joe Fennewald began his career as a social worker, and in more than two decades since he switched to being a librarian, he’s never lost the desire to help people. That’s a vital skill in a 21st-century university library—and particularly at Penn State’s Knowledge Commons, which Fennewald calls the “one-stop shop” for virtually any question a student, faculty member, or visiting alumnus might have.
This commitment is literally written on the walls. “Ask an Expert,” reads the sign in front of the Knowledge Commons’ help desk in West Pattee, located a 10-second walk from the information technology service desk, and just around the corner from the Media Commons help center. That’s not to mention the wall-mounted monitors showing the exact number and location of computer work stations available at any given time, and the various tutoring opportunities available in the commons, which is open “24/5”—essentially closed overnight only on weekends. As Fennewald says, “We haven’t found the need to be open after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.”
At the heart of it all are nearly 150 student staffers, divided among three staffs (see below), on whom Fennewald can’t heap enough praise. “They work with everyone from retired faculty to students, and they handle it wonderfully,” he says. Where the support staff used to be almost exclusively information-technology or engineering majors, they’re now a broad mix of majors—everything from econ to French lit. What they all have in common: “They grew up with the technology,” Fennewald says, “and they like to fix things and help people.”
PURPLE TEAM
Tech tutors specializing in software-related issues, from creating tables in Excel to jazzing up a PowerPoint. They’re in high demand, especially among faculty members.
BLUE TEAM
Hardware consultants. If there’s a printer jam or a crashed PC (and not just in the Knowledge Commons, but anywhere in the library), they’re on it. On hand most days from 8 a.m. to midnight.
GREEN TEAM
Help Desk staff. They’ll handle virtually any problem on a laptop, iPad, iPhone, you name it. They help users get wireless access, find viruses, and even replace broken glass on laptops.
The Tombros and McWhirter Knowledge Commons is a massive space, taking up most of the first floor of the Pattee and Paterno complex and including leisure reading spaces, study alcoves, multiple computer labs, and the 130-seat Foster Auditorium. But if this place has a Grand Central Terminal, it’s the bustling workspace on the western end of Pattee. At the center is a long cluster of 50 PC workstations, around which sit eight fully wired group-study rooms, which students are encouraged to reserve.
The little touches that make this place such a big draw? Those wall-mounted TVs fit into the spaces between the group-study rooms, which have glass walls—a touch that both makes the entire space feel more open and complements the Commons’ unspoken social component. There’s also a living wall of plants on the east end of the space, a subtle but welcome touch of green amid all that metal and plastic.
Boosted by the Knowledge Commons’ popularity, Pattee & Paterno saw a record 2,125,175 visitors in 2012-13.
INSTRUCTION ROOM
Sleek couches and bar chairs make this the coolest learning space on campus.
TV LOUNGES
Usually tuned to ESPN or the news—and always kept on mute.
GROUP STUDY ROOM
Equipped with huge monitors and room for
up to six students, the ideal spot for group projects. But students really love the glass walls, a reminder of the social draw of the space.
GREEN WALL
The “living” wall brings a hint of the organic world into a tech-centric workspace.
Group projects are a huge part of today’s undergraduate experience, and much of the Knowledge Commons’ space is dedicated to accommodating them. Each group-study room comes equipped with a large LED monitor that allows students to plug in their laptops and view their assignment as a team. Reservations are strongly recommended, and by late in the semester, they’re increasingly difficult to get.
Fennewald says the value of the glass-walled rooms is backed up by learning theory and faculty feedback—and echoed by anecdotal evidence. “The father of a prospective student, who worked for some huge corporation, said they had just remodeled their offices—everything was glass, much more communal,” Fennewald says. “Increasingly, this isn’t the workplace of the future, it’s the workplace of the present. We’re helping students prepare for that.”
Penn State’s Media Commons bills itself as “a university-wide initiative to enrich the teaching and learning experience through multimedia technology, classroom training, and direct support for students, faculty, and staff.” There are 25 MC locations in the university system—20 at commonwealth campuses, five at University Park—including the one tucked away in the rear of the Knowledge Commons space. No matter the class project, students can research, record, edit, and refine it here.
Need to create a podcast? Make an appointment for one of the three audio recording rooms. Video project? Reserve a time at the One Button Studio (see opposite page), a Penn State trademark that is the envy of institutions nationwide. There are post-production rooms to make everything perfect. And don’t worry about getting stuck on some unsolvable problem—per Media Commons policy, every student assigned a project there meets with a staffer first.
“We’re a consultative service, and we work closely with faculty, so we often know students’ assignments better than they do,” says Ryan Wetzel, the University Park coordinator for Media Commons. “We help students think through their projects, and we work with the other staff up here—if they’ve got something they need to look up in the middle of editing, we can walk them right around the corner to the reference librarian.”
Right away, the layout catches your eye: 40 desktop Macs atop four long tables, arrayed in an “X” in the middle of the room. A dozen whiteboards covering three of the four walls. Five dropdown screens that allow an instructor in the middle of the room to control a multimedia presentation with the touch of an iPad. The place just looks cool.
Cool, and useful. Ryan Wetzel says W140 is where faculty—many of whom have never incorporated next-level multimedia into their teaching—find out what technology is best suited to their classes, and how to use it. It’s also where students who are assigned projects using Media Commons will come through for instruction on how to make the most of that technology. “There’s a lot of talk about new-media literacy,” Wetzel says. “What they learn here is going to be very useful for them in their careers.”
Its beauty is in its simplicity: The One Button Studio allows a student or faculty member with no production knowledge and no more hardware than a flash drive to create professional-quality video with—literally—the push of a button. Created by the university’s Teaching & Learning with Technology team, the room is wired with an HD camera, a software-laden computer, studio lighting, and a green screen. Students use the studio to practice class presentations or record standups for their e-portfolios; instructors can create an introduction for an online course or a research presentation.
At press time, there were six One Button Studios operational in the university system—two at University Park, and one each at Abington, Altoona, Harrisburg, and Mont Alto. Given the level of interest—multimedia specialists from other institutions are regular visitors—the technology is likely to spread, and Penn State is happy to help: In November, the university released a free One Button Studio app, available on the iTunes store, that allows anyone with the proper hardware to create a studio of their own.
Yes, it’s really this easy:
1. Insert your USB flash drive in the port to begin. The studio lighting will turn on as well as the recording software.
2. When prompted, press the silver button to record …
3. … and press the silver button again when finished. The studio lighting will turn off and the recording software will close.
4. Remove your USB flash drive when the lights turn off.
In the One Button Studio’s first semester in operation, 561 students and faculty created 996 videos—a total of 41 hours of speeches, lectures, and presentations recorded.
