All 4 entries tagged Inspiration

Seriously Cool Places: The Future of Learning–Centered Built Environments – William Dittoe

Follow-up to Challenging Traditional Assumptions and Rethinking Learning Spaces – Nancy Chism from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

Chapter 2 of the Educause Learning Spaces¹ e-book finds William Dittoe (of Educational Facilities Consultants, LLC) describing an experimental learning space design from the Marianist Hall at the University of Dayton. The facility contains many of the now familiar features (informal and reconfigurable furniture, wifi, screens, whiteboards, cafe). However, it is deployed within the curriculum in quite a radical way. The space is dedicated to a single group of students. Their curriculum is constructed around the capabilities of the space. Other students at Dayton follow more traditional patterns.

As Dittoe explains:

The key, therefore, is to provide a physical space that supports multidisciplinary, team-taught, highly interactive learning unbound by traditional time constraints within a social setting that engages students and faculty and enables rich learning experiences. s.3.9

A day in the life of a student is documented, illustrating just how far the curriculum, teaching and learning methods, and the space are from the norm. The whole day is spent in the space, working with other students and faculty according to a variety of patterns each suited to a particular purpose. The timetable is devised to fit the teaching, rather than the teaching being forced into inappropriate slots. Learning is a continuum of concentrations and movements:

To provide the proper space for teaching and learning, we need more than a single place—educational activities are organic; they ebb and flow. What we really require is a complex of spaces—interconnected and related spaces designed to support learning. s.3.9

This raises a challenging question for all those universities who have rushed headlong into creating new learning spaces. Perhaps without a complimentary redevelopment of the curriculum, organisation, teaching and learning methods, the potential of such spaces is never exploited.

I'm also wondering about what kind of technology is required to support this kind of learning continuum, with an ebb and flow between spaces (offline and online)?
_______

¹Oblinger, D. Learning Spaces, Educause e-book, 2006 (available for download at http://www.educause.edu/learningspaces)

Robert O'Toole : 08 Jul 2009 21:17 |  Tags: Bibliography Chapter Educause Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Challenging Traditional Assumptions and Rethinking Learning Spaces – Nancy Chism

In the opening chapter of the Educause e-book on Learning Spaces¹, Nancy Chism efficiently marshalls the key arguments that underpin the various trends in new learning space design. Evidence from environmental psychology and cognitive theory is only briefly mentioned:

Environments that provide experience, stimulate the senses, encourage the exchange of information, and offer opportunities for rehearsal, feedback, application, and transfer are most likely to support learning. s.2.4

Content-transmission oriented learning spaces (usually those with a rigidly defined single point of focus) are identified as being contrary to and blocking the ambitions of social constructivist pedagogy.

However, Chism is more concerned to demonstrate a conflict between the constraints offered by traditional learning spaces and our new kinds of learners:

The entry of large numbers of previously underrepresented students—students from ethnic cultures that stress social interaction, older students, students blending work and learning—also calls for environments in which social interchange and experiential learning are valued. s.2.5

There is then an impact upon efforts to widen participation. And worse still, more common varieties of student (young, wealthy, gadget loaded) are equally alienated:

The argument doesn’t include just nontraditional students, however. Characterizations of Net Generation students extend similar considerations to current traditional students in reinforcing the need for social space and technology access.

Chism goes on to describe the kinds of learning space in which the Net Gen might feel at home (sounds just like Warwick's Learning Grid), followed by an exploration of the key characteristics if spaces that could be designed to meet these needs: flexibility, comfort, sensory stimulation, technology support, decenteredness, the studio classroom, information-commons/collaboratory, living-learning spaces, corridor niches. "Technology support" refers to the need for a continuum of technology across space and time. "Decenteredness" is a concept deserving of much more attention: do we really mean decentered spaces, or rather spaces in which concentratory spaces can be constituted and dissipated as required? This lends itself to a more sophisticated understanding of space and cognition (cue Deleuze and Guattari).

The closing sections of the chapter consider practical and strategic concerns: given the massive investment in existing learning infrastructure, how might change be possible?

The cultural change required in thinking of space in a new way should not be underestimated. s.2.9

Chism gives some good basic advice. The trick is to start exploiting whatever small opportunities present themselves. The current refurbishments of Humanities Building seminar rooms are a good example of this opportunism.

However, to achieve more significant progress requires a deeper and more fundamental shift, which may only be achieved with much sound reasoning and evidence. Chism stresses the need for research (begging the rhetorical question: "you're already making big claims, but you say that real research is needed?"):

...we need more research on the impact of existing and experimental spaces on learning. We need basic research on the influence of the physical environment on creativity, attention, and critical thinking. We need applied research on
the effect of different kinds of lighting and furniture on comfort, satisfaction, and interaction. s.2.10

Taking this as a starting point, I will argue that we need much more than that: the research needs to be founded upon a comprehensive, joined-up, robust theoretical and methodological basis for the representation, design, implementation, observation, testing and comparative evaluation of learning spaces.

________

¹Oblinger, D. Learning Spaces, Educause e-book, 2006 (available for download at http://www.educause.edu/learningspaces)

Robert O'Toole : 07 Jul 2009 22:57 |  Tags: Bibliography Chapter Educause Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Design Thinking – Tim Brown

In this entry I discuss the argument that good design (and problem solving) depends upon the maintainance of three seperate types of activity. I go on to consider how this might apply to teaching, and how learning spaces might be designed and used to support this approach.

Introducing "design thinking"

I've just read the article Design Thinking¹ by Tim Brown of the design company IDEO (available as a PDF), in which the author argues for the adoption of a design attitude and methodology in addressing all kinds of difficult problems (from service design to political and social). From a page on the IDEO web site in which they talk about their methods:

An inherently shared approach, design thinking brings together people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that are more human-centered, that are better able to be executed, and that generate valuable new outcomes.²

The article promotes good design practices, such as prototyping, iteration, storytelling and empathic design, bundled together into the process of design seen as a collective non-linear collaboration of simultaneous acts of experiencing (using, feeling, participating), responding systematically (conceptualizing, creating narratives, prototyping), and manufacturing. It is almost as if these three activities are distinct but interdependent design faculties (and yes I mean that in a quasi Kantian sense). The article contains a nice diagram, with a large impressionistic circle divided unevenly into three blobs connected by bi-directional flows:

• Inspiration
• Ideation
• Implementation (drawn as smaller than the other two)
  

It gets even more interesting when Brown states that:

The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a pre-defined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation.³

A continuum of faculties/spaces, not a process

Consider the three spaces to be three inter-dependent faculties. Inspiration is the essential perceptual apparatus that seeks to experience the world as real people do (rather than as stick people on use case diagrams). But the important message is that the designer must not ever switch their faculty of inspiration off, or allow it to be filled with prejudices coming from ideation and implementation - you may think you have a perfect design, but don't get carried away. And that's why it's important to think of the spaces as being constantly and simultaneously active: not a sequence but a continuum:

...the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestone-based processes typical of other kinds of business activities.³

Implications for teaching

The IDEO approach addresses one of the most common errors encountered in both design projects and independent student led investigative learning: becoming locked into a seemingly adequate solution before the problem domain and the array of possible responses has been thoroughly explored. The message for designers and for students is thus: keep yourself open to new and potentially disruptive experiences (facts, feelings etc), keep coming up with new narratives and prototypes (concepts, arguments, stories, structures), before becoming too locked into producing the final result - and even then be prepared to be agile.

Implications for learning space design

For both designers and for students it is important to sustain all three of these design faculties, even when concentrating upon one more than the others. Brown's argument suggests that separate physical spaces need to be maintained, so that the designer (student) can move from one faculty to another (even though earlier he described the model as "metaphorical"). In his diagram he suggest:

Have a project room where you can share insights, tell stories.⁴

A kind of reflective space for reporting back from the outside world, from the source of all inspiration (a blog could be the online equivalent). If one were to create three such offline or online spaces, one would aim to make them distinct and tailored to each type of activity, not simply for functional reasons, but also to encourage a change of behaviour as students move between the spaces.

Perhaps it would be wise to encourage each student to spend time in each of the spaces? So that, for example, they avoid becoming too deeply embedded in implementation issues, and lose their connection with inspirational experiences.

This now suggests a way to redesign activities that I will be teaching as part of the MA in International Design and Communications Management.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has taught in this way, or experienced such design spaces.

________________

¹ Brown, T. Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review, June 2008.

2 Approach - Thinking - IDEO, http://www.ideo.com/thinking/approach/ [Accessed 29/06/09]

³ Brown, T.  p.88

⁴ Brown, T. p.89

________________

An article on design thinking in education, by Alice Daniel, can be found at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3797/is_200702/ai_n18706046/

Robert O'Toole : 29 Jun 2009 20:56 |  Tags: Article Bibliography Design Methods Inspiration Learning Spaces |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem