Handbook of Design in Educational Technology

At long last, the release of The Handbook of Design in Educational Technology, Chapter 2 of which is by Mike Keppell and me about the evaluation of learning spaces.  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this book myself! Here’s the blurb:

The Handbook of Design in Educational Technology provides up-to-date, comprehensive summaries and syntheses of recent research pertinent to the design of information and communication technologies to support learning. Readers can turn to this handbook for expert advice about each stage in the process of designing systems for use in educational settings; from theoretical foundations to the challenges of implementation, the process of evaluating the impact of the design and the manner in which it might be further developed and disseminated.

The volume is organized into the following four sections: Theory, Design, Implementation, and Evaluation.

Using student perspectives in learning space design

For the last few years I have become interested in finding meaningful ways to reintroduce student perspectives into the way we think about university teaching and learning.  It may seem totally obvious that we should think about how students experience their daily lives when we plan for and design curriculum, student support, educational technology and learning environments.  However after working in universities for a long time, I have noticed that important decisions are frequently made by senior management, administrators and teaching staff who are all prone to making one simple mistake.  They (and I include myself here) extrapolate their own experience as a learner — often decades in the past.  Not only are student lives different now than they were before.  Student experiences are very different depending on discipline, course load, cultural and social background, and all kinds of other factors that are very difficult to summarise.

In other words, while we think we understand the broad issues, at the level of an individual student the picture is complex, unpredictable and highly contingent.  What typically happens in the face of this is to survey students once in a while and pool all the data.  Of course this can help, but we end up with a lot of assumptions. I think we need much better ways to describe the everyday experiences of students.  One of those ways is to get students to work as co-researchers, giving us richer and deeper descriptions of their daily lives, providing more detailed evidence alongside what we already know (for example the Day Experience Method that Mike Arnold and I developed).

Since getting involved in the Spaces for Knowledge Generation project, I have started to work on ways to take some of the lessons we can learn from these methods and use them in the design of physical and virtual learning spaces.  This week an article I wrote with Kay Souter on this approach was published in the Journal of Learning Spaces, here:
Designing informal learning spaces using student perspectives

This is a brand new journal and I submitted the article there because I want to encourage more scholarly work in this area and there was previously no journal like it.  If you’re interested in learning spaces design, I hope you enjoy reading it.

Learning Spaces book available for pre-order

I’m very excited that our new edited book on learning spaces is finally available for pre-order. There are more details including the preface on the IGI Global website:

Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Learning Environment documents real-world experiences of innovators in higher education who have redesigned spaces for learning and teaching. The redefined spaces encompass a broader range of physical, virtual, formal, informal, blended, flexible, and time sensitive factors.

You can order it on Amazon.com.

A new book on learning space design

On the 17th February, 2009 a book contract was signed with IGI Global to publish Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Classroom.

The editors of the book are: Professor Mike Keppell, Charles Sturt University, Associate Professor Kay Souter and Matthew Riddle from La Trobe University.

We are in the process of inviting experts to become part of our editorial board and organizing a call for chapters for the book. The Full Paper Submission Deadline is September 15, 2009

For more information, see the book website:
Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Classroom