Facing the "Real" Through Cyberspace | Ikumi Waragai, Assistant to the Dean / Professor, Faculty of Policy Management
July 7, 2020
Seeing all my students' cheerful faces and hearing their voices in online classes makes me happy and relieved. It has become a complete part of my daily life. But after a class with many first-year students ended, I had a thought. The students who were just in class have never met each other face-to-face on campus. They have never had the experience of "kamoru" with someone during their lunch break, or of doing "zanryu.pdf" with their peers for an assignment.
Classrooms buzzing with energy; the pedestrian deck between Lambda (λ) Hall and Kappa (κ) Hall crowded with students and faculty during breaks; Theta (θ) Hall and Omega (Ω) Hall filled to capacity for events. Until last year, these were all common sights. This year, SFC celebrates its 30th anniversary. For these past 30 years, students, faculty, and staff have shared memories of time spent in the same physical space. The alumni who once spent their days on this campus probably feel the same way. I wonder if these shared memories will change significantly in the future.
This year, the Tanabata Festival was held online, and the virtual campus was overflowing with people. Now, we entrust our avatars to cyberspace and freely walk around the campus. In the Intensive German class, students attend from overseas, and in research groups, a graduate student living in Germany, eight hours behind, participates while rubbing their sleepy eyes. Everything happens in the cyberspace created by information networks. The SFC campus certainly exists and functions within cyberspace. However, the actual campus is deserted, and the classrooms and laboratories remain closed.
Since its establishment, SFC has been called a "Digital Campus" and a "24-Hour Campus," and has designed and implemented cyberspace as a research and educational environment. Cyberspace has always been an important space for activity on our campus. SFC was a place for education and research where real life on campus and the accompanying cyberspace were organically linked. The important position of cyberspace has not changed from before. However, I feel that the entire structure is changing.
When considering the framework for learning environment design, we have viewed learning inside the classroom as "formal learning" and learning outside the classroom as "informal learning," presenting the diverse linkage between the two as a connection between physical space and cyberspace. Now, that in-classroom learning has been completely swallowed by cyberspace, and the layers of formal and informal learning are drastically transforming. In the midst of this structural change, how will "shared experiences" be created? What does it mean for future students to inherit the "SFC experience" that students have shared across generations? And within that, how will the philosophy of SFC and the philosophy of Keio University be passed down? The fundamental idea behind the "Career Formation Committee," launched this year, is the creation of a space that connects former students nurtured at SFC with current students and current faculty and staff.
So, what is the "real" life that we will reclaim after this? I ponder this while facing the "real" that exists in cyberspace. --- Just now, I am pulled back to the reality of physical space by the touch of my companion, Marie, who is at my feet, demanding "Pay attention to me!" with her entire being, from the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail.