Saeed Husain
Chief Copy Editor
New computers have been set up in the computer lab in the Collaborative Research Environment (CoRE) at The College of Wooster, along with two 3-D printers. These new devices were part of an effort by the office of Educational Technology and CoRE staff to think strategically about the kind of resources they wanted to be available for students at the College.
Jacob Heil, digital scholarship librarian and director of CoRE, and Jon Breitenbucher, director of Educational Technology, said that they wanted the new technology to allow the CoRE space to be used in new ways.
“A lot of the times what you would see is students using the computers to print, but that’s not really what they’re for,” said Breitenbucher. “Our idea is that they’re for publication creation or for alternative, artistic expression. So we really wanna message that this place is for doing more creative kinds of things.”
According to Heil, bringing in the 3-D printers shows how the CoRE specifically was designed to have more dynamic work done.
“I think there is a bubbling maker-culture here at the College. It’s a matter of tapping into it and figuring out how we can further facilitate it; 3-D printers are the tip of that,” Heil said.
For Breitenbucher, students could not only potentially use the new technology for class assignments, but also just to try and learn new things.
“We want the physics student who needs to print a model for his assignment to be able to do that, we want the archaeology student who needs to print out an artifact for her assignment to do that, but we also want that inquisitive student who just wants to give it a shot to walk by, and try it. So we’ll build opportunities for people to do that with workshops, but also just having that stuff out there […] that’s what we’re really after, for people to just sit down and try something,” Breitenbucher said.
Outlining what kind of students will benefit the most from the new additions to CoRE, which is entering its seventh year at the College this January, Heil said, “It’s just the student that wants to walk by, thinks a thing is cool, can sit down and in 15 minutes learn three new technologies, and have something to take home.”