Finding the Right Learning Space for Students Who Are Lost in Space

A good, refreshing read about planning learning spaces:

Conceiving and creating a new learning space could be viewed as an opportunity, or a challenge, or perhaps both. This could be your chance to develop an innovative space to help students learn and to help faculty teach. On the other hand, this “opportunity” could become a mixture of competing interests and ineffective committees complemented by a seemingly endless sea of architects, consultants, contractors, and administrators, all with divergent points of view and visions. . . In the middle of this universe of constituents, you have the task of bringing a team together to create a learning space that is effective, sustainable, and scalable.

What Is a 'Learning Space'

This brief essay on the changes in how we view the definition of "learning space" is worth a quick read:

There are signs of an educational evolution as some institutions have embraced the concept of learning spaces to accommodate the strategic planning and technological innovation that empower people to communicate and collaborate more easily, more often, and more effectively. This widening of scope took place in at least two dimensions. The first dimension is spatial: the redesigning and weaving together of classrooms, libraries, labs, informal spaces, and virtual/mobile spaces to form a coordinated, institutional learning web that offers students and faculty new opportunities before, during, and after class. The second dimension is organizational: the call for campus stakeholders to unite in designing, developing, and sustaining these disparate yet cross-functional spaces and places. Institutions that have created learning spaces, that have adapted internal structures to meet the needs of the digital learner, are now poised to navigate a rapidly changing matrix of factors where people, content, tools, and infrastructure find new combinations and sometimes surprising synergies to foster deep and enduring learning.

Half a Dozen Good Articles on Learning Spaces

The current issue of EDUCAUSE Review is titled "Learning Spaces" and it serves up some very nice knowledge from a number of writers and practitioners, including a number of SCUPers. Betcha can't not read at least one of these:

PAIR-Up - "To create sustainable learning spaces, we must Partner with others for Pedagogy-rich designs, Assess learning in the new spaces, Integrate ideas for Innovation, and Revisit design methodologies." By Linda Jorn, Aimee Whiteside, and Ann Hill Duin

Learning Spaces: Involving Faculty to Improve Pedagogy - "The interplay between focused analysis of the curriculum and pedagogical style, and the implications for the way classrooms are set up and equipped, can have major dividends for both students and faculty." By Joan K. Lippincott

Assessment: The Key to Creating Spaces That Promote Learning - "Without assessment of learning spaces, institutions may miss the important connections between context, institutional culture, students' specific needs, and pedagogical practices that yield optimal learning." By Sawyer Hunley and Molly Schaller

Signposts of the Revolution? What We Talk about When We Talk about Learning Spaces - "Innovative efforts to design new learning environments point to a path for the future; following this path requires using a common language to describe learning environments and their aspirations." By Phillip D. Long and Richard Holeton

Space Strategies for the New Learning Landscape - "Revisiting design methodologies and applying the Learning Landscape approach leads to campuses that are "networks" of places for learning, discovery, and discourse between students, faculty, staff, and the wider community." By Shirley Dugdale

Inversions - "On the basis of constructivist learning theory, networked information technology, and a new kind of student and faculty, the traditional educational layers are inverting—a process nowhere more evident than in learning spaces." By Malcolm Brown

When Worlds Collide

A good one, if brief, from Richard Katz:

The emergence of virtual worlds, synthetic worlds, and immersive worlds is a social and technical movement of great importance. Although personally I have yet to be moved to construct a virtual mini-me, I recognize that these environments will become incredibly rich and nuanced—nearly real, in fact. And I realize that the eventual near-reality of these environments has profound implications for higher education.

Colleges and universities are carbon creatures. If we ask donors to endow ideas, they tell us that they’ll endow buildings. We boast about how many assignable square feet of space we are constructing or where we can place the next building designed by the latest famous architect. Institutional leaders write their legacies in bricks and mortar. And our carbon footprint can be magnificent!

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The time is now to build and to experiment and to learn what it may mean to perform campus master planning when the master plan includes virtual spaces. We need to learn what it means to regulate access to institutional resources when those resources reside in virtual spaces. We need to understand the nature and limits of institutional authority inside the virtual classrooms and the virtual social spaces that bear the institution’s name.

Virtual spaces—like the Internet and the web—will change society profoundly. They will change institutions profoundly. The emergence of virtual, synthetic, and immersive worlds is a revolution, and it will likely arrive sooner than we can assimilate it. Like all revolutions, the emergence of virtual worlds will present opportunities for some and threats for others.

Don’t wait for worlds to collide. Plan, experiment, plan, experiment. Now.

Evaluating Quality in Educational Facilities

The Programme on Educational Building (PEB) of the OECD has had a number of conferences and pursued research on quality in educational building. Many of its reports and findings can be found on this website: “All individuals have a right to a quality educational facility, a physical space that supports multiple and diverse teaching and learning programmes and pedagogies, including current technologies; one that demonstrates optimal, cost-effective building performance and operation over time; one that respects and is in harmony with the environment; and one that encourages social participation, providing a healthy, comfortable, safe, secure and stimulating setting for its occupants.”