Designing Learning Spaces

The session started with a brainstorming exercise to produce a list of "things that you want students to do in a learning space" - it was a long list covering individual and group activities, noisy and quiet, learning and socialising etc. Pretty much the sort of thing you would expect (full list from flip chart at bottom of this blog post!).

We then broke into groups to look at a suggested student survey for getting students views on their experience of how they use spaces and what they want from a space. One group came up with a survey question that just listed things that students could do in a learning space and listed features that you might have and asked the students to rank them or score them as to what they would be most likely to do and use. This is something that I think we could usefully do as part of the design process for the Cambridge development.

However, (as seems to be happening in most sessions I've been to so far!) our group didn't actually do the task we'd been assigned and instead we had a good discussion sharing our experiences of the problems, issues and solutions with designing learning spaces.

Word of wisdom from our group included:

- easily movable furniture, that was well designed. NB: Getting the balance right between sufficiently robust furniture that was going to stand up to wear and tear but was light enough for student to move around.

- Wandering round old spaces and where students are found using hallways or foyers to gather and work (often because there is a power point there!) redesigning those spaces to make them usable even if just putting some a table and some chairs there - sort of student self-selecting spaces!

- making use of pillars by putting circular tables around them and power on them.

- that students wanting physical spaces that reflect how they want to be and what they want to do in on-line spaces - allowing food a drink, flexible furniture, minimum constraints on space usage etc

- Moving all the books out of library open learning spaces and putting them in robotically served warehouse spaces like University of British Columbia

- whiteboard walls (with whiteboard paint) that you can also project onto

- some universities had looked at the desks which are double purpose computer lab and computer-free space and have used the desks where the monitor pulls up and keyboard comes out for use. Experience has been that they do not stand up too well to wear and tear and student use

- Critical importance of selecting AV/Media for classrooms that is totally intuitive so that you don't have teach academic staff how to use it. Common experience that is was difficult to get academic staff to take part in training sessions for av/media technology. Concerns that students seeing academic staff struggling to get classroom technology to work impacted on student experience and views of the quality/credibility of the teaching itself(!).

- very common experience to find students using their own laptops as well as the computers provided within open access space - at the same time. They use their laptops, which are generally lower spec. for internet access and word and then the provided computers for higher spec applications that they cant run on their own laptops.

- Importance of having student produced art in the spaces - experience is that having art out in open spaces impacts behaviour, particularly as it shows trust.

- Lots and lots of issues with supplying power. All the usual sorts of problem with trailing cables, health and safety and inflexibility and lack of robustness of floor power boxes etc. Some designs of floor box where described that were a lot more robust, as well as some other methods of providing power. Photos from a trip yesterday to Denver University were shared by Mal Booth http://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/sets/72157622729274880/ (Mel says to please forgive all the snow photos, but he is from Australia!) They have a lot of these innovative ideas already in use at Denver University, including the different ways of supplying power, and I'm hoping to try and visit before I fly back on Sunday.

During feedback from the group sessions one group asked whether there was any assessment of whether students actually learn better in all these "fancy new spaces" that are provided. Of course, for some Universities the desired primary outcome may well be that student satisfaction goes up. It may be that students are not using the new space for learning at all, but are using it for social activities or non-learning activities and are doing their learning elsewhere - however if they are happy students with high satisfaction levels then they are probably learning better anyway, wherever they are doing it.

As an aside (for those who read my blog yesterday on the parallels between knowledge creation processes and learning processes) - it occurs to me that the brainstorming list the session generated at the beginning (collaborate, explore, search, communicate, et, drink, archive, talk, concentrate, innovate, present, stuy, interact, learn from each other, socialize, build, play, read, watch, practice, write, act, analyze,think, conceptulize, listen, integrate, coach, rehearse, perform, move, grow, show, test etc.) could be mapped onto the different stages in the SECI Knowledge Creation Spiral - essentially all the tools and technologies are all about enabling processes at the different stages of the spiral. To go back to an earlier session, it applies to things like Twitter too:

- Externalisations (tacit -> explicit knowledge) - eg: writing a thought in a tweet
- Socialisation (sharing explicit knowledge) - eg: interacting on a social network
- Combination (combining different explicit knowledge from different sources)- eg: reading different tweets from different people
- Internalisation (explicit -> tacit knowledge) - eg: generating new internal thoughts and ideas as a result of the above process and then ..... back round the spiral to Externalisation ...

.. and you can apply it to everything from Twitter to the design of learning spaces.

Right! - off to find a coffee and then off to "Virtual Desktops: 60% cheaper but are they worth it?" - I am hoping to find out .....