At the recent Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference, during one of the workshops, the question was asked:
What skills do your current facilities promote/develop?
A minority of workshop attendees said multidisciplinary collaboration, engagement, and creativity. One university had purposely designed and built a new ecosystem of spaces such that students had different experiences when moving into a variety of setups/rooms. Thus, they viewed this new facility as helping the students adapt to change – which was one of the characteristics and skills they wanted their learning spaces to facilitate in their students.
That said, most of the answers were along the lines of:
- listening
- note-taking
- memorization
- regurgitating knowledge from lectures
Then yesterday, I ran across a tweet from Zeina Chalich (from Sydney, Australia) — and I thought to myself, now THERE’s a great list of skills that our facilities should help develop!
