Blog Juice for Educational Technology

From Educause Review, July/August 2005, Volume 40, Number 4

Excerpt of article, “Future of the Learning Space: Breaking Out of the Box”

By Phillip D. Long and Stephen C. Erhmann

Future classrooms should support the activities of effective learning: that is, situated, collaborative, and active learning.

What might such spaces look like? Do any such spaces exist yet?

Buildings That Embody Professional Education

In the late 1990s, the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at MIT confronted the problem of teaching a twenty-first century subject in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century building. As the demand to do something about the decaying physical space increased, so did the need to address a new curriculum for a new age. There is nothing like the threat of self-preservation to motivate change.

In this case, declining enrollments placed pressure on the department to do something different. Fortuitously, but perhaps catalytically, a major demographic bubble led to significant turnover in the composition of the departmental faculty, and a young department chair was appointed to lead the faculty through this difficult transition. The department developed a curriculum model that stressed fundamental tenets of engineering set in an interactive learning framework of Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO) systems and products. Using a structured approach to identify the abilities required for a contemporary engineer, a “requirements document” was generated to provide the CDIO “syllabus.” This became the basis for building the workshoplaboratory-classroom environment.

A critical element in the design of new learning spaces is the need to design for change. Usage patterns measured over the years since the CDIO curriculum spaces were built have demonstrated that students are not always using the new facilities in the ways the faculty originally imagined. The department continues to adapt its spaces in order to best fit the curriculum as it is practiced by the students and faculty.

Buildings and Campuses as Learning Spaces

Architecture is no longer merely a container within which learning happens—buildings themselves can provide several dimensions of support for learning. In fact, the building system elements that work together to support learning are analogous to the functionality sets found in complex computer systems. Together, they form a building operating system (BOS).

The following are some of the technologies and learning activities that these new BOSs will need to support:

■ Capture/replay “think through”: processing real-time recording (ad hoc) without destroying the social comfort of the group and while providing appropriate degrees of privacy; particularly challenging will be capturing audio in small-group conversations that occur when large classes meet in a single room

■ Writeable surfaces—everywhere in the classroom—that capture and store everything written on them

■ Real-time blogging in the classroom—students building collaborative notes on the course site or a wiki

■ Classroom chat rooms—for example, with a teaching assistant (TA) monitoring students’ meta-conversation, including a TA-moderated Instant Messaging “back channel”

■ Dynamically available bandwidth provisioned to and within a room, allowing students to safely access and download rich media objects without choking the local network segment

■ Ubiquitous access to videoconferencing, so simple and intuitive that multisite conversations are “natural” extensions of classroom discussion

■ Video/data-enhanced real-time capture and asynchronous discussion and annotation tools

■ Tools enabling ad hoc guest instructors teaching from a distance to easily use the full set of classroom technologies

Please read the entire article at Educause Review.