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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.

In this article we describe the planning, creation, use, and initial assessment of our university's first Learning Studio-a space that had to be immediately useful but also unabashedly provocative and experimental. Even with a limited budget, we needed this prototype to guide UMSL in evolving new approaches to learning appropriate to our context. We also needed an efficient process for the project and to demonstrate effectiveness of the resultant space.

PETlab is a joint project of Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. It is a place for testing prototyping methods and the process of collaborative design with organizations interested in using games as a form of public interest engagement. Through our work, we connect with scholars and designers in the field of digital media, practitioners working in the spheres of education and social issues, and people of all ages at play. In the first year, we are working on a number of gaming platforms including Flash, Xbox XNA, and mobile phones. We are also working with a wide range of partners such as MTV, Microsoft, Boys and Girls Clubs, and New York Public Library. Support for PETLab comes from the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative.

SMALLab - Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab Central to our work is the development of the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab [SMALLab]. SMALLab is an environment developed by a collaborative team of media researchers from education, psychology, interactive media, computer science, and the arts. SMALLab is an extensible platform for semi-immersive, mixed-reality learning. By semi-immersive, we mean that the mediated space of SMALLab is physically open on all sides to the larger environment. Participants can freely enter and exit the space without the need for wearing specialized display or sensing devices such as head-mounted displays (HMD) or motion capture markers. Participants seated or standing around SMALLab can see and hear the dynamic media, and they can directly communicate with their peers that are interacting in the space. As such, the semi-immersive framework establishes a porous relationship between SMALLab and the larger physical learning environment. By mixed-reality, we mean that there is an integration of physical manipulation objects, 3D physical gestures, and digitally mediated components. By extensible, we mean that researchers, teachers, and students can create new learning scenarios in SMALLab using a set of custom designed authoring tools and programming interfaces.

Spaces for learning The Council is keen to encourage reflection and discussion about effective learning and the design and use of space. In 2008 we commissioned the Space Collaboration report (from Critical Thinking and Bellevue Consulting), looking at space collaboration between universities and colleges. The report draws on practice and case studies from the UK and internationally. It focuses predominantly on space for pedagogic-related purposes (for example, learning and teaching, libraries and learning support) and where appropriate also considers space collaboration in support services (for example, information and guidance and students' association services and facilities). The purpose is to aid institutions considering collaboration in the use of space, with advice on planning, management and implementation.

Changing Nature of Physical Spaces Each Saturday I meet my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, at a local coffee shop for an hour or so to discuss some emerging research topics we're working towards. Each week we are amazed at the number of people in Saint's sitting on their laptops working - most of them are doing browser based work like google docs, Facebook, and the like. It is rare that I see anyone not using the browser as the primary mode of work. That is a big change from even a year or so ago. The same can typically be observed if you walk onto our campus and into the student union building. You see table after table of students on laptops, living in their browsers - Facebook, gmail, and ANGEL seem to be what I see. Rarely do I observe work happening in "real" applications. I am guessing that will only get more common as the Blogs at PSU gain wider adoption for writing and students begin to weave google docs into their daily workflow.