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Schools, colleges and university are just some of the places where learning takes place but school kids and students can spend a lot of their time in these spaces. There are other places where people learn, some through doing courses at work or online or even learning from others around them in all sorts of situations. The posts here are about learning spaces, writings about learning and technology and thoughts and ideas about all of these.

The Library of the Future

0 comments Posted by Dave Thomson at 22:34

Libraries have been important places for the sharing of text based materials for centuries. There are many famous libraries across the world holding some of the most amazing resources. Trouble is that many of these resources were only available to researchers or academics until the arrival of digital technologies.

In schools the library has also seen changes with the arrival of digital resources with many more school libraries now equipped with computers so that users can carry out research using the web as well as other resources held by the library. In some schools this combination of technology and traditional printed material has been merged to create the Resource Centre or the Media Lab.

The change in use of school libraries has been interesting. Schools now tend not to spend money on expensive resources such as encyclopedia when they can access up to date and low cost resources that do the same job online. The non-fiction resource has become the internet which has allowed some schools to report that they have been able to expand their range of fiction materials and stimulate an increase in reading for pleasure.

So are libraries of the future only places where the balance between the non-fiction and fiction materials will shift further to become more and more digital? If this is the case why bother with a physical space? If it has social aspects (not something I tend to see in libraries) then is not the social networking provided by digital technologies far more powerful than could be achieved simply by meeting in a physical space called a library? Maybe libraries are gradually going to shrink to become the repository for the rare original artifact that you can go and visit....... We need to think more about the function and role of libraries in schools - what sots of things should be available in these places and just what will they mean to the generation that is growing up as avid web users and who often report that they feel agitated when not connected!

This video clip explores some interesting ideas about the potential of the lib. Interesting that the library of the future is a physical space and that there are actually books there - also interesting that it does not look like any library that I have visited..... yet!

 

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Building Quality into School Design

0 comments Posted by Dave Thomson at 21:53


What do we mean by quality indicators when thinking about building a new school.                                                                            

The following information was provided as part of the UK's BECTa Agency work for UK government. Becta was disbanded in 2010. The links below have been updated to archive copies of materials which are still perfectly valid documents


Do we ask about the quality of the school fabric? - what materials have been used etc or are we more concerned about the impact of the design on the people who work there? Designing a new school is fraught with difficulty - the people who work in our schools only encounter a few school buildings in their career and will not have considered or have been exposed to what might be possible. No wonder that they tend to design better versions of what they are used to. Learners are almost never consulted on what they would like to see in a school design and those that are often feel that their views are not really taken seriously. This is not true in all cases but I have come across very few examples of designs that have been influenced to any real degree by learners.

Very often when you ask what is required in a new school design teachers and other stakeholder don't really know or they simply point out the things that they don't like about their current school. This is hardly the basis for establishing the design for a school of the future.

BECTa, the UK government agency for ICT has come up with a novel way of stimulating discussion between students, teachers, governors and others about the role of ICT in a school of the future. BECTa developed a set of ICT Quality Indicators (DQI's) on behalf of the government to encourage a better understanding of what we should strive for in the UK education system.

The original documents can be obtained from the links below:


 The statements in the ICT QI framework relate to one of three sections:

Impact: ICT can make a building a worthwhile place in which to work and learn. It can make an impact on learning and teaching.
Build Quality: ICT performance, scalability, environmental considerations, sustainability and adaptability.
Functionality: meeting the demands of any users and integrating different devices.


BECTa have developed an online tool called 'DesignMyICT' (Now unavailable)  to help draw together the perspectives of various stakeholders and stimulate discussion about just what would need to be done so that a school could make the most of their available technology. The tool is free to use once you have registered and it is then possible to add stakeholders with differing perspectives, manage their interaction with the quality indicators and collect trends and accumulate profiles of opinion.


 

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