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College Campus Of The Future Focuses On Technology And Flexibility

By Dr. Marciene Mattleman

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Think of a college campus - classrooms, libraries, faculty offices - no more! In a design for Cornell-Tech, a partnership between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute, everything is dedicated to innovation, breaking with the past.

To be located on Manhattan's Roosevelt Island, the collaboration won a design competition for $2 billion from the Bloomberg administration, for 2,000 students, 280 professors and 2 million square feet.

There will be large, uninterrupted space, office zones, huddle space, and no data centers which dominate other IT operations, when industry, like Google, can do it better. And why buy technology when flexibility is the goal?

Heating, ventilation, lighting and safety systems will be automated on a common network. And while some of the first steps came close to failure, the exciting environment described in The Chronicle of Higher Education will be unlike any institution ever created by higher education. But will teaching change?

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