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And whilst we are looking at new resources on the web, came across the Learning Spaces Collaboratory recently, based in Washington DC. Looks like an organisation well worth watching.....




Image taken from the Learning Spaces Collaboratory website: http://www.pkallsc.org/Who-We-Are

More projects

Following a visit to the University of Brighton from Cathrine Schmidt and Hanne Airo from the Danish Ministry of Science, who are developing a new learning spaces briefing for science spaces in universities across Denmark (more to tell you soon I hope), they kindly also put us in touch with Jonas Nordquist, the manager for a project called Future Learning Environments - How Space Impacts on Learning run by Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm County Council. See their web site at ki.se/learningspaces. 


This feels like a really integrated, (relatively) large-scale project across both formal and informal learning environments, across three sites related to medical education; aiming to "develop and deliver a range of prototype environments to support new pedagogies within Karolinska Institutet s medical education programmes."


Working with White architecture practice, they have already developed a Concept Manual to act as a design guide. Interestingly this work was also supported by an ethnographic study of students responses to their environment which is - unfortunately - currently only in Swedish. The next phase is to build prototypes and then to do a comparative evaluation. 


I may be wrong, but this is the first large scale, multi-space prototyping and evaluation research project that I have heard of. Of course the University of Melbourne has been developing a series of innovative learning spaces over several years; but as yet has no funds for evaluation, so the lessons for others are still difficult to learn.

Central Saint Martins move into their new home

In the early days of the CETL Learning Spaces research project, we were invited to be involved in early discussions/events at the University of the Arts, London - partly instigated to enable staff to participate in thinking what kinds of learning spaces were needed for art and design in the new facility being built at Kings Cross.

Well the students and staff have just moved in and here is  Jonathan Jones/Guardian's take on the space.

So, all comments welcome from actual participants in this new environment. Would be a great opportunity to do a before/after evaluation of students/staff experiences of their learning spaces - but assume that, as usual, no-one will have the time, energy or resources.....

Photo taken from Guardian website. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris

Design and Management of Learning Spaces conference

This one day conference in mid-June was sub-titled Changing Minds and offered an interestingly eclectic set of speakers across architecture, education and estates.

The person who stood out for me though was Simon Austin from Loughborough, one of the partners in the recent HEFCE -funded project on Academic Workspace. As he summarises:

"Many universities have tried to create new types of academic office environments that foster collaboration and knowledge flow between occupants, in a bid to increase creativity and innovation in teaching and research. However, core aspects of academic work also require privacy and opportunity for quiet reflection. A common strategy to address this tension is the provision of multiple work settings, which provide occupants with a mixture of private and social/shared environments. This presentation introduces the concept of default location and, with reference to two in-depth case studies, argues that this plays a critical role in the success of multi-setting office environments."

So, through rigorous comparative study, the research was able to show real qualitative differences in the experiences of academic staff/usability of space between having private offices with a shared area; and sharing an open-plan office with bookable 'seminar/private' spaces off. Most importantly this was not just a matter of functionality; it was how they felt they might be perceived by others if 'took up' space in particular ways.

Just great to see a well evidenced study, with clear and usable outcomes.

Talking spaces

Just back from the Learning Landscapes conference at Queen Mary's College London, which was to launch their final HEFCE-funded report and tools. I gave a paper (called "where is the theory?") and also listened to an interesting and varied range of other speakers. Very full day - 10 speakers in total - so not much audience participation possible, but good in that the speakers were selected to open up debate, rather than merely describe the project report.

Left with a mixture of optimism about the vital potential of bringing together estate managers, architects and educationalists perspectives on learning spaces; and frustrated that we still have - despite the work of the groups like Learning Landscapes at the University of Lincoln - very few approaches or methods which offer a firm purchase on relationships between architectural design, teaching and learning encounters, and space/resource development and management. Or rather we have several, but which are being generated piecemeal across the sector, from across both academic and commercial locations.

So we are left to choose between - if we can even find the work - say, the LL approach based on a better understanding of the history of universities as a building type, or (from the Institute of Education in London) Paul Temple's ideas about thinking 'place' rather than 'space'; or even my own argument which is that we need to build better conceptual frameworks and research methods, preferrably on the best contemporary theoretical work across architecture, education and the social sciences.... the core argument behind the Towards Creative Learning Spaces book.

As the two main CETLD learning spaces researchers, Hilary and I have been talking a lot recently about what is already available, in terms of appropriate conceptual frameworks, research methods and taxonomies. Hilary has been reviewing the many good practice case studies of contemporary learning spaces in post-compulsory education. There are lots of interesting examples but also some on-going problems: potential citation distortion (where the same examples are referenced again and again without much checking on the validity of the data proffered); difficulties of finding out what is happening across the sector, intersecting with varying degrees of promotion by individual universities and projects; and – because of the recent focus on technology-rich and informal learning spaces – a tendency to ignore (or fail to effectively classify/compare and contrast) the range of developments taking place across the variety of learning spaces from lecture theatres, to labs, to studios to research centres.

In the latter area, for example, Woods Bagot have done an interesting ‘study tour’ of advanced learning institutes, aimed at bringing together researchers from different disciplines; of which the MIT Stata Center (pictured above), designed by Frank Gehry Associates, is probably one of the most famous/infamous.

These are very relevant to CETLD because it brings together HE institutions with non-university partners. Who, for example, is analysing and comparing museum education spaces with HE versions? Well, us I hope!

More on evaluation

The final JISC report “Study of effective evaluation models & practices for technology supported physical learning spaces” has now been published, can be accessed here. Undertaken by the LSRI at the University of Nottingham, the research found that existing evaluations were not, to put it politely, much to write home about:

Our initial investigations showed that although institutions were keen to advertise new or innovative learning spaces, the practice of evaluating such spaces was not made readily visible and was thus harder to identify or track. A key finding to emerge from the study was that if evaluations were undertaken they occurred as part of an internal institutional process, typically prompted as part of a student satisfaction survey, of which the outputs were not ordinarily deemed to be for external consumption. This has limited the extent to which knowledge sharing about learning spaces has been promoted across the whole educational community.

The study suggests that HE and FE need to think harder about how to evaluate physical learning spaces, so as to more clearly assess how they satisfy design intentions and teaching and learning needs. They also propose a conceptual Framework for Evaluating Learning Spaces (FELS), aiming to offer a common vocabulary for evaluation which different institutions could test. And they have started a Learning Spaces social networking site at spacesforlearning.ning.com.

Image from student project Minimum Conditions for Creativity LondonMet University

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A creative tension?

One of the comments at the end of UAL's Making Space conference concerned an 'elephant in the room' - the tensions between the desires and needs of art and design tutors/students and the realities of costs and scarce resources.

This tension reveals itself in many ways; in the tendency for estates managers and academics to distrust each other; in the perpetual gap between perceptions that there is never enough space (tutors) and that - at around 20- 25% - occupancy rates are too low (estates); in the problems of rooms being booked and then not used; and in arguments over dedicated spaces for courses, or one-studio space-per-student, or the amount and type of academic offices.

I joined a very interesting workshop run by Sian Kilner, who has been centrally involved in the new Space Management Group (SMG) guidance on planning affordable - and sustainable educational buildings. She has been exploring methods beyond simple space-per-student norms which aim instead to make more transparent and open for debate the intersecting effects of types of space, timetabling, activities and student numbers on costs.

We ended up having a discussion about problems of averages and peakloads. For me, educational courses are more like the bus system than a standard office - there are inherently peaks and troughs through the semester cycle, particularly in the art and design subjects. Another delegate said we have to think about studio space as a service, as something that needs to be offered even if it is not used all the time. (This is much better explained by Han herself on her blog http://evocativethings.blogspot.com/.) I came away thinking that if art and design tutors want to argue their case better, we have to look at methods for space planning which are more complex (that is, can better model the patterns through the academic cycle), but of course not so complex that they are ineffective predictors; and we have to be able to describe more precisely the space/time patterns of learning in art and design in HE to estates and facilities managers.

Image from installation in courtyard, Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL. Millbank, London

What does 'matter' about space?

The participants in the CETLD Does Space Matter? workshop - mentioned below - were first asked to describe (on a postcard) one 'good' and one 'bad' learning space they had personally experienced, either as a tutor or a student. Then groups compared notes and drew/mapped out key terminology and characteristics.

Not suprisingly, some of the most immediate issues were around basic issues of comfort; rooms that were too hot or cold, too noisy, "unwelcoming", the wrong size, shape or badly planned for the activities that went on in them.

But the more we talked, the more it felt like these issues were just first steps; things that should, after all, 'work' in any space. Whilst some participants emphasised the importance of flexibility and informality, others were also interested in trying to tease out the issues for, and value of, many different types of learning spaces. This involved thinking abut the usefulness of more complex and potentially contradictory terms - beyond simple oppositions (formal/informal, rigid/flexible, single-directional/multi-directional) - such as territory, authority, situation and safety. As one group wrote - "there is no such thing as a good or bad space, it's all contingent."

Evaluating Learning Spaces

One of the key problems - of course - about making better learning spaces, is how to evaluate 'success'. As someone said at our first CETLD Learning Spaces seminar at the University of Brighton last week (Does Space Matter?) a lot of developments seem to be about making spaces 'nicer'; brighter colours, better lighting, more informality, better integrated technologies. But students liking a space is not the same as it enhancing their learning (although it might overlap).

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), who are reponsible for developing UK unniversity and college technology services, have recently funded a study by LSRI at the University of Nottingham to build a compendium of evaluation techniques for learning spaces. This follows on from the JISC Learner Experiences research which is currently offering workshops across the country about evaluation methods (see sidebar). Called JELS, the new work aims to bring together and review the range of methods currently used to investigate the effectiveness of learning spaces: visit their website to find out more and to participate.

Note: The Does Space Matter seminar was the first of 3: for details of the others (and to register) go to the CETLD website.