Group items tagged

The introduction of information technologies into higher education added new dimensions to the educational enterprise and led to investigations into how the design of learning spaces affects teaching and learning. The time has come to broaden the scope of that inquiry and consider factors beyond space, including learning culture and the changing roles of instructors, students, and other people involved in teaching and learning. The effort to understand and develop effective learning environments includes more individuals and more roles than have generally been involved in the discussion about teaching and learning, and the factors at issue include, but go beyond, technology.

Abstract: On March 3 and 4, 2010, the ELI community gathered for an online focus session on mobile learning. This white paper is a synthesis of the key ideas, themes, and concepts that emerged from those sessions. The white paper also includes links to relevant focus session materials, recordings, and archives. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we as a teaching and learning community need to keep in mind as we work to integrate mobile technology into teaching and learning in higher education. It is clear that while the application of mobile technology to learning is just now getting under way, the potential is enormous and we can expect that the rate of development will be very rapid indeed.

"Looking back over the past 18 months, we have four observations. First, we have learned the critical importance of clearly defining the Sherman Centre's scope and purpose for the campus community. Understanding of digital scholarship's boundaries is still relatively low on all of our campuses. Work in the center falls outside traditional norms for how research is done - the norm being that research is a solitary activity, with no "bumping around" required. In terms of libraries, it is definitely outside the norm. Libraries are traditionally very transaction-based: we count the number of people who enter our doors, ask us research help questions, and attend instruction sessions. We have no mental model for tracking activity within a digital scholarship center, which is inherently more relationship-based. Second, we've learned that the relentless demand for physical space on campus creates pressure on our new center. Faculty members and graduate students are always looking for a place to run their experiments and relocate their staff. We often find ourselves having to turn people away when their work is not advancing the digital scholarship agenda. Saying no is not easy, but it must be done to protect the center's integrity. Third, we've learned of the vital need for patience - both individual and organizational. Digital scholarship centers are not created in a day or even in 18 months. Building a good center requires patience on the part of our senior university administrators, faculty, and staff. A digital scholarship program is built on relationships, as well as on the careers of its scholars. Centers evolve as junior faculty members incorporate digital scholarship into their research and then rise to become senior scholars. Finally, we've discovered the strong need for training and mentorship opportunities on our campus. Our graduate students (like any other graduate students) do not enter their programs with deep digital scholarship skills, but they are e

"What does the "classroom of the future" look like? In contrast to the traditional lecture-oriented room, this increasingly popular kind of space, known as a "studio classroom," emphasizes group learning and collaboration. But designers might not always get it right. AV expert Michael Leiboff shares 14 distinct characteristics of a successful studio classroom design."

Nothing earth-shatteringly original here, but a good summary of basic ideas for a studio learning environment.

wondering what we can learn from this area and apply in our current (or future?) student engagement?

"It's also not the only way to build institutional unity. What if instead of devoting time and resources to making analogies about customer service, we put learning first? What if the conversations, the trainings, the memos, and even the job descriptions emphasized this simple question: How does what I do make this a better place for students to learn and develop?"

what the humanities could learn from computer programmers

New journal on learning spaces...

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals. Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research. Most students used library resources, especially scholarly databases for course-related research and far fewer, in comparison, used library services that required interacting with librarians. The findings suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy which leverages the wide range of resources available to them in the digital age.

"a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals interested in two interlocking questions: how do creative uses of new technology and networked information support the current project of liberal education, and, perhaps more interestingly, how do they force us to re-think what it means to be liberally educated?"