Group items tagged

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.

"I'm delivering the opening keynote for Edinburgh University's IT Futures Conference today and was asked to deliver an expanded version of the work I've been doing on the physical spaces of learning, and how they transgress virtual learning spaces, too. The theme of the conference is fascinating, and a conversation I'd like to see happening more regularly in more schools: It will look at both the staff and student perspective of what the working space is, and is becoming. Where does technology fit in, and how do we work and study in this increasingly mobile world?"

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.

Designing Spaces for Effective Learning was launched at the JISC Conference 2006. A visually-rich publication, it is designed to promote better understanding of what makes an effective design for the 21st century and to summarise the key points to consider when approaching a refurbishment or new-build project.  This publication takes the reader on a 'walk through' of an educational institution, exploring the relationship between learning technologies and innovative examples of physical space design at each stage of the journey. Discussion of the key points is illustrated by 10 case studies from further and higher education, and floor plans from AMA Alexi Marmot Associates, architects and space planners, which provide up-to-date guidelines on the integration of technologies into teaching and learning accommodation.

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.

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.

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.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs Sarah Hurlburt Assistant Professor Department of Foreign Languages and Literature Whitman College Walla Walla, WA USA hurlbuse@whitman.edu Abstract This paper uses specific issues surrounding course blogging to provide a series of reflections regarding the articulation between pedagogy and technology in creating a next generation learning space and discourse community. It investigates the underlying structure and necessary constituent elements of a successful blog assignment and examines the notion of natural and unnatural virtual environments and the roles of the reader and the writer-reader. It suggests that blog assignments may not succeed equally well in all subject areas and gives a number of possible reasons. Furthermore, it posits a more nuanced criterion for the definition of goals and the evaluation of the success of a blog assignment as a learning community beyond the presence or absence of comments. Keywords: Web 2.0, learning communities, reader anxiety, constructivist learning, discourse communities, comments

Participatory media may be the future, but a look at most comment threads shows that technology hasn't figured out a good way to force humans to act like citizens instead of fifth graders. UC Berkeley's Center for New Media hopes it has a way to fix that mess in its Opinion Space visualization tool, which provides a planetarium view of users opinions. Opinion Space, which launched Wednesday, is quite pretty, mildly addictive and full of rich possibilities for visualizing a community's opinions. Wired.com would love to have such a tool at its disposal, though its almost certainly going to be an addition to, rather than an substitute for, traditional comment systems. The center built the tool as a response to President Barack Obama's call for greater civic participation, which it says is "designed to go beyond one-dimensional polarities such as left/right, blue/red to actively encourage dialogue between people with differing viewpoints."

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.

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.

"There has been lots of discussion this week about whether Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or Personal Learning Network (PLN) are the right terms to describe what this is all about and some recognition that this a semantics issue. According to Rita Kop PLE is a UK term and PLN an American term. Dave Cormier questions whether the term personal should be used at all. Stephen Downes points out that personal is an OK term if you think about [Personal Learning] Network as opposed to [Personal] Learning Network - and similarly for PLE. I like that - but for me, the words are not as important as the process - although I can see that the process needs nominalising for ease of reference. If I am going to think about introducing the idea of PLEs/PLNs to my colleagues or students then I will be talking about the process and the implications of this process for learning rather than what we should call it, i.e. why it might be preferable for students to learn in environments/spaces of their own choice rather than be confined to an institutions VLE/LMS."

"As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a "market in transition." In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what's happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and "open source." Has "open source" (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market? If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts1 are writing, you may see the claim that "open source" is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what's happening in the market, so I'm going to try to explain what we know about what's really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I'll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate our options. In the second post, I'll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break."

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

In the late 90's there was a lot of energy around "virtual communities." They were touted as the ultimate web deployment, the key to online commerce and later online education. Early adopters swarmed sites and racked up web hits in the millions. But then there was a deafening silence. Commerce and media sites began closing down their discussion boards. Even busy boards like CNN's were shuttered. Was the online community movement dead? No, it was just transforming itself, settling down and maturing into a space where it had real value and applicability. The bottom line is that online community or online interaction is not the goal. It's one means for helping groups achieve their goals. It is not necessarily about "online community" but what conditions and process are needed to enable communities to use the online environment.

Understanding Member Roles and Behaviors We all know that humans will be, well, humans. Just as in offline community spaces, there are a range of behaviors that community hosts will encounter. These mirror offline behaviors, but manifest differently in the text only environment. Without the non-verbal cues, we can misinterpret a person's actions online. Likewise, one voice can be very loud. Good stuff really is great, and difficult stuff can be awful. It helps to understand some of the roles that members take on so you can anticipate and appropriately respond to different situations.

Community Member Roles and Types By Nancy White Updated 1/12/01 Every community and online group is different. The purposes vary, the structures are different -- and the people are different. But there are some common participation styles or patterns that have been observed. These can be helpful when you are trying to understand participation patterns in an online interaction space. Take note that for each style, there are attributes that can be seen as both positive and negative. That said, be careful of stereotyping people.

Engagement Streams As Course Portals April 18th, 2009 This podcast comes from a presentation Chip German and I did at the ELI 2009 Annual Meeting earlier this year. Here's the session abstract: What if course portals, typically little more than gateways to course activities and materials, became instead course catalysts: open, dynamic representations of "engagement streams" that demonstrate and encourage deep learning? The session will begin with case studies in enabling and designing such course portals, from both administrative and faculty perspectives. Participants will then form groups to imagine and design their own catalytic course portals. Finally, the presenters will discuss action steps that can lead to effective innovation at participants' home institutions. Presentation resources, including a record of the participants' design work, will be posted to an online collaborative space for continued discussion after the session.

The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) conducts scholarly research to advance the science, technology and practice of learning and teaching. The Center brings together teachers, scholars and students from around the world to study how to improve formal and informal learning across cultural boundaries. Established in 2002 as an independent center of excellence at Stanford University, SCIL is housed in the new Wallenberg Hall, a state-of-the-art testing ground for technology applications in the classroom.