Our lab is still virtual. But now we are fairly certain that it will once again be a physical place when the semester starts in early September.
And I can see how that knowledge is changing everyone’s mindset, day by day. As we near that critical date, the idea of going from virtual to physically co-present stops being an abstraction, and starts becoming a practical reality.
People are rethinking where they will be geographically. It is now important once again to think about how we will move our bodies through space and time every day.
Even after our lab and in-person classes reopen in September, I am going to try to hold on to some aspects of the virtual. It is not clear to me that meeting in person every day is categorically better, or that we should hold our classes in a physical room every time, even if we can.
Maybe some new mix of real and virtual, enabled by ever better software, is closer to the ideal. At any rate, it’s certainly worth exploring.