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COMING TOGETHER: Assistant
director of student activities Carolina Garcia,
dean of students Greg Boardman, senior Nadiya
Figueroa, director of student activities Nanci
Howe and junior James Lin help inaugurate the
Blender.
Grant Hochstein/Stanford
Daily |
The scenario runs something
like this: actors from the performance group Short Curtains
will start to build a Lego structure. Which will catch
the attention of students working on the Stanford Foster
Care College Project. Who will wave across the lounge
to their friends from the Stanford Exchange Store.
E.A.S.E.—Enhancing Awareness for Successful Education—members
will look up from the curriculum project they’re
reviewing for inner-city kids in Oakland, and students
from the ASSU Book Service will also be drawn to the
Lego table.
Before anyone can say “collaboration,”
it will be happening. As students from all five groups
gather ’round the IKEA table in the bright red
room, they’ll ever so naturally turn to topics
of mutual interest: weblogs, marketing ideas and technological
fixes for organizational problems.
That’s the purpose of the Blender, a suite of
10 brightly painted rooms—purple, red, green,
yellow, blue—on the first and second floors of
the Old Union’s Nitery building. “It’s
like a student-activities version of the Clark Center,”
says project manager Mojan Movassate, ’06, referring
to the interdisciplinary biosciences building. The Blender,
which also includes meeting rooms that any group may
use, is a joint effort of the ASSU, Innovative Student
Information Services and the Office of Student Activities.
Five groups have been allotted office space for the
spring-quarter debut of the Blender; come fall, another
round of applicants will compete for—or should
we say collaborate on?—using the rooms.
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