Spaces fit for thinking: designing technological spaces for open–space learning

Here is a brief description of my presentation for the forthcoming University of Warwick Learning & Teaching Showcase day:

The open-space learning pedagogy has much in common with Donald Schön’s reflective practicum. But it goes further, or perhaps in a different direction. Schön’s important aim was to rescue professional education from a reduction to technical rationality and optimization, a reduction that would eliminate the individual hand and mind of the designer/creator/artist. Open-space learning aims to rescue academia from a similar fate, to discover/design a reflective practicum appropriate to creative, original academic activity (theorizing, experimenting, thinking, writing etc). But that’s quite a challenge. Higher education, even after significant investment in new facilities, is largely dominated by rigid forms and determined by legacy architecture, methods and organisation. Students spend much of their time in lecture theatres passively receiving transmissions of knowledge and then repeating back with varying degrees of inaccuracy. Designing new spaces fit for thinking presents a significant design challenge, requiring a new way of looking at learning space.

I will investigate this challenge, outlining a set of key design considerations.

I will then present a series of imaginative but feasible design experiments.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Jun 2010 10:17 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem