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The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University undertook a project to find out what a classroom would look like if it were designed by faculty and students-and then to build that classroom. The goal was to promote innovation in learning space design and to advance instructors' understanding of how classroom design impacts teaching and learning. Classroom.NEXT initiated a campus-wide dialogue on the design of informal and formal learning spaces, and faculty, students, and administrators identified flexibility and interactivity as key attributes to be promoted in all Texas Wesleyan learning spaces. Collaboration, particularly student-faculty collaboration, was a central component of the success of Classroom.NEXT. Faculty participants commented that they learned as much from their students about learning space design and technology as they did from the research.

PDF or Epub: "Service design is a process that examines the relationship between those who use a service and the service environment. By focusing on and making improvements to the points at which users interact with other people or the environment, service design enables an organization to run smoothly, provide the best service to its users, and reduce the kind of situations that that can generate complaints. It has been effective in traditional customer-centric industries like retail and hospitality and is now seeing use in areas like healthcare, public services, and educational services. Even as it leads to improvements in services and spaces, service design maximizes limited resources and increases accountability, and many of these benefits bear directly on the processes and spaces designed for learning."

An interesting opinion piece on the future of the LMS.  Try reading this and replacing "LMS" with "library database" ... what would that look like? 

There is so much potential for museums, galleries and libraries to think more broadly about how their collections can help and inspire anyone who needs them - whether it's artists, designers, business people or academics.

Recommended by a librarian / programmer friend as a good project management and site redesign handbook.

"This guest post comes from Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application Development for NPR. Daniel leads NPR's content management solutions, is the creator of the NPR API and is a frequent contributor to the Inside NPR.org blog." As I look at this beautiful flowchart (beautiful in function) of the NPR web publishing process, I wonder what libraries could learn from this method of information management.  This NPR process is designed to get the content out in a variety of ways, with options for the end user. How are libraries and library systems making this possible for our end users? 

book from d.school at Stanford University "Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play-and innovate. This work is based on years of classes and programs at the d.school including countless prototypes and iterations with d.school students and spaces."

A very well-designed resource for freshmen (and others, no doubt) at Harvard

Completed in 2008 to the plan laid out in 1993, the Archive provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR's work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations. All documents are encoded for structured search and analysis. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.

"North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries and its Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) are partnering with strategic consultants brightspot strategy and DEGW to design, share, and promote an updated model for institutions to plan and support technology-rich informal learning spaces. This Learning Space Toolkit will include a roadmap to guide the process along with tools and techniques for assessing needs, understanding technology, describing spaces, planning and delivering support services, and assembling space, technology, and services to meet needs, even as they change."

"The Canadian Education Association's (CEA) released a report What did you do in school today? - a three-year research and development initiative designed to assess, and mobilize new ideas for enhancing the learning experiences of students. Intellectual challenge was measured by Csikszentmilhalyi's theory of flow."

a new public library in London with an unusual shape

This report presents five recommendations for the library profession: 1. Increase librarians' understanding of library value and impact in relation to various dimensions of student learning and success. 2. Articulate and promote the importance of assessment competencies necessary for documenting and communicating library impact on student learning and success. 3. Create professional development opportunities for librarians to learn how to initiate and design assessment that demonstrates the library's contributions to advancing institutional mission and strategic goals. 4. Expand partnerships for assessment activities with higher education constituent groups and related stakeholders. 5. Integrate the use of existing ACRL resources with library value initiatives.

One of the main conclusions of this research is that students are outsourcing much of the evaluation process to the search tools themselves, and because of this the search algorithms that drive these tools are functioning to determine what resources students use.  Differences in resource use attributable to differences in the design of the discovery tools' search algorithms could be directly observed in the data collected from students.

Free online book (HTML / browser-based) about learning research.  See in particular Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments.

Part One of online ebook about electronic publishing; includes chapters on metadata, DRM, design, and distribution

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it's hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let's think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.

One way to read: Sign up once - and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials - and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it's an intuitive design, that's a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.