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With the decreasing cost of consumer display technologies making it easier for universities to have larger displays in classrooms, and the ubiquitous use of online tools such as collaborative whiteboards for remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, combining the two can be useful in higher education. This is especially true in visually intensive classes, such as data visualization courses, that can benefit from additional "space to teach," coined after the "space to think" sense-making idiom. In this paper, we reflect on our approach to using SAGE3, a collaborative whiteboard with advanced features, in higher education to teach visually intensive classes, provide examples of activities from our own visually-intensive courses, and present student feedback. We gather our observations into usage patterns for using content-rich canvases in education. 

September 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). EVL's introduction of the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment in 1992, the first widely replicated, projection-based, walk-in, virtual-reality (VR) system in the world, put EVL at the forefront of collaborative, immersive data exploration and analytics. However, the journey did not begin then. Since its founding in 1973, EVL has been developing tools and techniques for real-time, interactive visualizations—pillars of VR. But EVL's culture is also relevant to its successes, as it has always been an interdisciplinary lab that fosters teamwork, where each person's expertise contributes to the development of the necessary tools, hardware, system software, applications, and human interface models to solve problems. Over the years, as multidisciplinary collaborations evolved and advanced scientific instruments and data resources were distributed globally, the need to access and share data and visualizations while working with colleagues, local and remote, synchronous and asynchronous, also became important fields of study. This paper is a retrospective of EVL's past 50 years that surveys the many networked, immersive, collaborative visualization and VR systems and applications it developed and deployed, as well as lessons learned and future plans. 

SAGE3 is software to augment the cyberinfrastructure-enhanced research and education enterprise by supporting data-intensive collaboration across a wide range of display devices from high-resolution display walls to laptops. This paper provides insight into SAGE3’s implementation, which significantly improves on prior generations of SAGE by leveraging emerging advancements in Web technologies and Artificial Intelligence. We also provide an overview of new usage patterns that we observed with SAGE3. 

SAGE3 is software to augment the cyberinfrastructure-enhanced research and education enterprise by supporting data-intensive collaboration across a wide range of display devices from high-resolution display walls to laptops. This paper provides insight into SAGE3’s implementation, which significantly improves on prior generations of SAGE by leveraging emerging advancements in Web technologies and Artificial Intelligence. We also provide an overview of new usage patterns that we observed with SAGE3. 

SAGE3 is software to augment the cyberinfrastructure-enhanced research and education enterprise by supporting data-intensive collaboration across a wide range of display devices from high-resolution display walls to laptops. This paper provides insight into SAGE3’s implementation, which significantly improves on prior generations of SAGE by leveraging emerging advancements in Web technologies and Artificial Intelligence. We also provide an overview of new usage patterns that we observed with SAGE3.