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!