Hodson Hall, the new academic building that opened in Fall 2002 on the Homewood campus, is 44,200 square feet and $15 million worth of high-tech media and education. It’s all wrapped up in an exterior that complements Homewood’s elegant Georgian architecture. Hodson Hall is wired for sound, video, the Internet, and more. As Civil Engineering major Asher Peltz ’02 puts it, “It’s very plug-and-play.” Part of Homewood’s ongoing campus enhancements, Hodson Hall sets a new standard for the digital learning experience.
“It’s a wonderful place to teach,” says Robert A. Dalrymple, the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Professor of Civil Engineering and chair of the department. “You walk in a room, and the lights come on. Push a button, and the shades go down. The multimedia tools are designed to be dummy-proof. Teaching there, I find myself trying to discover all the ways I can incorporate multimedia into my classroom presentations.”
When Peltz, now a graduate student in coastal engineering at the Whiting School, gave a presentation in one of the smaller rooms, he could have chosen from “overheads, slides, PowerPoint, online access, or any combination.” In the end, he says, “I put all my figures on a web site and projected the pages on a large screen.”
A gift from the Hodson Trust, founded by Clarence Hodson in 1920, Hodson Hall also houses the archives of The Hodson Trust and Beneficial Corp., and has become the meeting place for the Johns Hopkins University trustees and the Hodson trustees. “The opening of Hodson Hall marks another chapter in our more than four-decade partner- ship with the Hodson Trust, whose generosity to Johns Hopkins and three other Maryland colleges has had an enor- mous impact on Maryland higher education and this university,” noted William R. Brody, president of the University. Construction began in June 2001 and was completed just in time for the start of the academic year last fall.
Hodson Hall has eight small classrooms, one with 40 seats, two lecture halls with 60 seats each, a large lecture hall (110 seats), and an auditorium (each of its 500 seats has an Ethernet port). Each classroom comes equipped with a Dell Pentium-4 PC Workstation, a CD/DVD player, a VHS video recorder, a dual audio cassette deck, a document camera, JBL sound system, a slide-to-video converter, and touch screen control system. There are 1,300 active data ports with power. Laptops love it: There’s wireless access everywhere the building can’t be wired.
Visit Hodson Hall online at www.jhu.edu/classrooms/hodsonhall/