UIC NEWS
UIC physics professor David Hofman is one of eleven recipients of the 2010 Silver Circle Award, which recognizes the university’s best teachers, as selected by a committee of graduating seniors. This is Hofman’s second award.

Hofman, a high-energy nuclear physicist now working in Geneva, Switzerland, with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, doesn’t let distance get in the way of his teaching responsibilities. Using EVL’s large tiled display in its Cyber-Commons room, plus collaboration software called EVO that is popular among physicists, he continues to teach his students back in Chicago.

This is Hofman’s second semester using EVL’s Cyber-Commons room. Last semester, Hofman was in Chicago, but used EVO software running on his laptop to enable a colleague from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to participate in his class. Having a large group of students crowd around his laptop display was an annoyance. So, his department head, Henrik Aratyn, introduced him to EVL, thinking we could help solve his problem. EVL plugged Hofman’s laptop into its Cyber-Commons wall, making the laptop screen larger than life. His students could sit comfortably at their desks, easily interact with the remote person, or persons, and take notes.

When Hofman learned he was to receive the Silver Circle Award and that UIC NEWS was sending a photographer to take his picture of him teaching his Physics 594 class, he emailed his students to say, “…this is also an opportunity to showcase the cutting-edge facilities that EVL has created, to get some good publicity for Physics, and to show how different departments / groups can come together to really offer something unique.”

EVL couldn’t be more pleased!

Link to the complete UIC NEWS article

About EVL Cyber-Commons
Cyber-Commons is EVL’s term for a technology-enhanced meeting room that supports local and distance collaboration and promotes group-oriented problem solving. EVL makes its Cyber-Commons space accessible to student populations so it can better understand the role of high-performance and ubiquitous computing in future display-rich interactive classrooms. Several UIC computer science courses and a high-energy physics course are now taught in this space, as well as special one-week summer courses offered by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering. Link to more information.