Group items tagged

Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces Virtual Campus To supplement our Flickr Photo Library of technology-rich learning spaces we've also created a Virtual Campus composed of spaces we find inspiring from a range of different places. You can take a walk through the campus and see 360° images of a variety of types of learning space. The floor plan indicates which places you can visit. To take the tour you will need to download some free software onto your PC. The tour is quite intuitive once you've used it but we've provided some instructions to get you started.

This applied infoKit includes a rich layer of associated resources, navigation points for which you can find throughout the material. This section brings all these resources together in a 'quick find' directory, and includes guidance notes on use where applicable.

Learning space design and development is a hot topic as our colleges and universities not only seek to provide 21st-century learning facilities, but look to optimise space to best effect and respond to learner expectations. Technology has a vital role to play in this.

Social Software Introduction When the web was originally introduced to the world it was seen as a means of dramatically improving the way in which people communicate and socialise. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, saw it as a place where people could share information through a series of hyperlinked pages. "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute." (Tim Berners Lee, 2005) Unfortunately, although the web became an excellent repository of information, it became a place where only technically adept users and organisations would author content. The arrival of new services (often referred to as 'Web 2.0') has helped to remove many of the barriers preventing users from participating. Thanks to this wave of new services we have seen a massive rise in the uptake of web authoring and collaboration. The term this new wave of social activity has been given varies i.e. Social Software, Social Media and Social Computing. The key word is 'Social'! Social software tools, such as blogs, wikis and bookmark sharing services, offer exciting new ways to communicate and collaborate online. Their potential is already being keenly explored in teaching and learning, but they also offer considerable possibilities for research and the business and community engagement (BCE) sectors within higher and further education, since their flexibility and ease of use are particularly well-suited to collaboration across different sectors. As a recent article explained, "The advent of social software has brought a new culture of sharing, and this time around, people are willing to give up some of their knowledge..." (Tebbutt, 2007). Furthermore, social software's increased emphasis on multimedia, as well as text-based content, means that universities can find new ways of harnessing and making their knowledge and research accessible, thus creating what has been described as "a new form of acade