Worker\’s Playtime!

I found this great clip on YouTube from Charles Leadbeater about the intersection of innovation and community and how one nourishes the other. While creativity and new ideas can certainly happen in isolation it’s not until people come together as a group and allow themselves to think big, listen, and think differently that innovation and change will occur.

I watched this video through my higher education lens and thought about how this idea of community, creativity, and innovation could really blossom if we made it a part of what we do. What do I mean? Here’s an example: we have many talented faculty on our campus and many are doing amazing things with technology but few know about it. We have faculty using www.nationalatlas.gov, Google Earth, Google Pages, PBWiki, Word Press, Flickr, Ning, Windows Movie Maker, etc. as a part of their curriculum but there is no entity to bring these innovators together to talk, to share and to *innovate. Is an online community a way to connect people not only from our campus but from other campuses and with other creative technology users? An online community would also provide a space to anyone passionate about technology a forum in which to be heard. It’s structure and purpose would allow people to pipe-in and add ideas to the conversation or lurk if that would grease the thinking process.

I don’t pretend to have an answer but the video really did force me to think more about connections and the role of the connector.

*Innovation = includes not only research and bleeding edge but also experience and practice.

I just had a 50 minute phone conversation with Dan Gilbert of Stanford University about the design of new and flexible learning spaces. Dan is an academic technologist at Stanford and is well versed in how to promote excellent teaching through innovative classroom design. I came away from the call energized and enthusiastic about what I had learned.

While we’ve given student learning, teaching and technology our full attention we’ve been lax when it comes to physical learning space. Sure we want to know if the classroom is technology enhanced, if it gets hot on a sunny day (hey, is there AC in the building?) and the number of footsteps it takes to reach our office. The problem with this focus is that our classroom blueprints are still being designed for teaching delivery of the last century. What we need are spaces that are flexible and can be configured to meet the needs of students and 21^st century curriculum.

A room that can be configured for yoga class, lectures, collaboration, movement, and community use would be a first step in revolutionizing classroom space. An empty room with adaptable furniture, flexible and responsive technology that can meet a variety of needs, walls that can be written on for mind-mapping and brainstormng exercises. The classroom wouldn’t have to dictate how curriculum is taught - instead it would be responsive and adapt to the multitude of ways learners learn and teachers teach.

This isn’t a new idea but it is however, becoming a topic of local conversation. Franklin Pierce University’s new arts and humanities building will house an experimental classroom wired for technology and ‘arranged to foster collaborative learning and close engagement between students and faculty’. On our campus we’re having conversations about the 21st century student, teaching and innovative learning space and how the three intersect.

So what is it that quality learning space is trying to address? “Rethinking the Classroom: Spaces designed for active and engaged learning and teaching” does a good job of summarizing why we need to include facilities and architects in our plans. Read the paper and then visit the Wallenberg Hall web site. You’ll see that’s it’s not such a radical idea after all.