Earlier I blogged about the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s modular learning space – the Learning Studio. At a recent Educause conference, some faculty from the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences described a similar setup. (They’ve also produced a short video to give you an idea of what it looks like.) A similar feature to both of these learning space designs is IT being freed up from having to provide the computers; instead, the focus is on creating dynamic, modular spaces that can be adapted to course-specific learning needs and encourage small-group collaboration. Essentially, the space becomes a kind of plug-in-play architecture where the students’ computing devices are plugged into the network and corresponding display screens.
This perhaps plays into what the University of Virginia found, where many students already had their own laptops and presumably preferred to use their own machines rather than the university’s. Now, with the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks and expanding power of mobile handhelds, we could see more universities transitioning traditional computer labs to modular learning spaces.
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[...] me thinking about some previous posts I wrote on some interesting modular design experiments at the University of Minnesota and the University of Missouri-St. Louis where it’s less about the institution providing lots [...]
Posted by iterativelearning » Blog Archive » Spaces not Stacks on December 10th, 2009.
[...] careful research, time, and money, schools such as the University of St. Louis-Missouri and the University of Minnesota are recognizing and acting on this change. And today, there’s a post on a similar effort [...]
Posted by iterativelearning — Altered spaces on January 13th, 2010.