I am currently attending the international conference “CollaboTech 2016” being held in Kanazawa, and to my surprise, the venue is the “Shiinoki Cultural Complex.” What a coincidence… there is a classroom here that I helped design. I never imagined that a day would come when I would visit it as a user.

At the time, the University of Tokyo’s KALS was pioneering “active learning classrooms” among Japanese national universities, attracting attention nationwide. Through my involvement in Professor Yamauchi’s industry-academia collaboration project, I was able to hear about the situation, albeit indirectly. Because of that connection, I was also involved in the learning commons at the Kanazawa University library. I recall that this classroom at the Shiinoki Cultural Complex started even before the university library’s learning commons. If I remember correctly, due to my involvement with the University Consortium Ishikawa, I was in charge of designing the classroom space for the project to repurpose the former prefectural government building.

Memories of reading about the University of Tokyo case study and previous research, while also struggling with budget constraints, came flooding back. The budget was, as always, a headache. As someone researching Educational Technology, I wanted to do more than just make it “easy to do group work and talk”; I wanted to incorporate a design based on a theory or teaching method. I decided to make it easy to implement class designs that involve repeated group reorganization, such as the Knowledge-Constructive Jigsaw Method. In addition to introducing multiple screens and desks that are easy to rearrange for group work—which were being adopted in many active learning classrooms at the time, including at the University of Tokyo—I also thought of providing chairs in eight (or was it nine?) colors to make it easier to organize groups by color.

I have no idea if it is being used that way now (I would like to hope so, but since it requires a solid class design, there probably aren’t many people who go that far). However, personally, this is the starting point for the various university library-related projects I am involved in now, and there is something deeply moving about attending an international conference here.

Well then, time to get to work.