Learning Spaces Creating Opportunities For Knowledge Creation In Academic Life

This book sets out to (re)capture learning spaces within academic life. By challenging the notion that academic thinking must take place in cramped, busy working spaces, it re-introduces the reader to the importance of spaces for reflecting, thinking and writing.

There is a comforting tale that heads of higher education institutions (HEIs) like to tell each other. "Go around your university or college," they say, "and ask the first ten people who you meet how their morale is. The response will always be 'rock-bottom.' Then ask them what they are working on. The responses will be full of life, of optimism and of enthusiasm for the task in hand." The moral of the story is that the two sets of responses don't compute; that the first is somehow unthinking and ideological, and the second unguarded and sincere. The thesis of this book is that the contradictory answers may well compute more effectively than is acknowledged: that the culture of higher education and the mesh of psychological contracts, or "deals," that make it up make much of the current discourse about happiness and unhappiness in contemporary life look simplistic and banal. In particular, the much-vaunted "science of happiness" may not have much to say to us. There is also a potential link between the Manichean discourse about morale and our wider culture's approach to happiness. Both normally deal in extremes, and much more rarely in graduations. Why is so much discourse about contemporary higher education structured around (real and imagined) unhappiness? How does this connect with the realities of life within (and just outside) the institutions? Does it matter, and, if so, what should we be doing about it? Based on historical, sociological and philosophical analysis, this book offers some answers to these questions.

Problem-based learning (PBL) has excited interest among educators around the world for several decades. Among the most notable applications of PBL is the approach taken at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life sciences (FHML) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Starting in 1974 as a medical school, the faculty embarked on the innovative pathway of problem-based learning, trying to establish a medical training program which applied recent insights of education which would be better adapted to the needs of the modem physician. The medical school, currently part of the FHML, can be considered as an 'established' school, where original innovations and educational changes have become part of a routine. The first book to bring this wealth of information together, Lessons from Problem-based Learning documents those findings and shares the experiences of those involved, to encourage further debate and refinement of problem-based learning in specific applications elsewhere and in general educational discussion and thought. Each chapter provides a description of why and what has been done in the Maastricht program, followed by reflection on the benefits and issues that have arisen for these developments. The final section of the book examines the application of PBL in the future, and how it is likely to develop further.

Learning Spaces is an emerging field, fuelled by a growing interest in the relationships between learning and spaces in which it takes place, whether conceptual, personal, social, physical and/or virtual. It is concerned with making learning spaces that can better meet the needs of 21st century learners, academics and other related publics. In post-compulsory education this has opened up many interesting and important issues. There remains a lack of any theoretical understanding as to how such spaces should be conceived or designed; and hardly any critical discussion about effective frameworks for either the development of contemporary learning spaces or for assessing their impact on learning, teaching and research. At the same time, there is much debate about what the purposes of post-compulsory education should be, as well as concerns about where and by whom it should be provided. We therefore need to urgently improve our understanding of the interactions between learning and space. It is essential that we not only share perspectives, theories and methodologies but also critically reflect on our own different assumptions, and work together to build better models for post-compulsory education in the future. To help in this process this book is designed as a ‘critical reader’ that can enable researchers, academics, students and managers involved in Learning Spaces to share and engage with some key ideas, issues and texts. A central aim is to bring together some of the best research from across the many different disciplines concerned with learning spaces, including education, architecture, anthropology, human-computer interaction, estate planning and museum studies. Reshaping Learning is thus intended for anyone interested in, and wanting to think more about, learning spaces whether as users, clients or managers; or who are want to better understand interactions between the social and the spatial.

Provides an authoritative reference collection on leading international insights into the integration of technology tools and applications with adult and vocational instruction.

With the paradigm shift to student-centered learning, the physical teaching space is being examined The configuration of classrooms, the technology within them, and the behaviors they encourage are frequently represented as a barrier to enacting student-centered teaching methods, because traditionally designed rooms typically lack flexibility in seating arrangement, are configured to privilege a speaker at the front of the room, and lack technology to facilitate student collaboration. But many colleges and universities are redesigning the spaces in which students learn, collapsing traditional lecture halls and labs to create new, hybrid spaces—large technology-enriched studios—with the flexibility to support active and collaborative learning in larger class sizes. With this change, our classrooms are coming to embody the 21st-century pedagogy which many educators accept, and research and teaching practice are beginning to help us to understand the educational implications of thoughtfully engineered classrooms—in particular, that space and how we use it affects what, how, and how much students learn. This is the 137th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education series. It offers a comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers.

El espacio, ya sea físico o virtual, puede tener un impacto significativo en el aprendizaje. Learning Spaces se centra en la forma en que las expectativas de los alumnos influyen en dichos espacios, en los principios y actividades que facilitan el aprendizaje y en el papel de la tecnología desde la perspectiva de quienes crean los entornos de aprendizaje: profesores, tecnólogos del aprendizaje, bibliotecarios y administradores. La tecnología de la información ha aportado capacidades únicas a los espacios de aprendizaje, ya sea estimulando una mayor interacción mediante el uso de herramientas de colaboración, videoconferencias con expertos internacionales o abriendo mundos virtuales para la exploración. Este libro representa una exploración continua a medida que unimos el espacio, la tecnología y la pedagogía para asegurar el éxito de los estudiantes.

This book focuses on key elements of learning, teaching, professional development and design. The book addresses the compelling questions of the decade in an effort to help senior university managers think beyond the pedagogies of yesterday in order to maximize the use and design of physical learning spaces for the future.