Translating physical spaces into digital experiences — from create-hub.com by Sorcha Daly
Cultural institutions have a big challenge on their hands in a digital age. How does the experience of a physical space, of visiting a building housing priceless objects, one-of-a-kind artefacts and engaging exhibitions, translate digitally?

Excerpts:

We’re seeing a huge increase in digital engagement with cultural institutions, with online visitor numbers far outweighing the number of people who make it through the doors. The British Museum, for example, received a whopping 35.3 million online visitors in 2014, compared with an in itself record-breaking 6.8 million physical visitors, the most of any UK museum or gallery. Add to this an impressive social media haul and that’s a lot of people who are engaging with the institution away from the building. This pattern is common to cultural institutions across the board.

So how exactly is digital changing the way people experience cultural institutions and how can they start using these changes as ways to better engage with audiences?

Several galleries have been using iPhone apps as enhanced alternatives to the audio tour guides, complete with additional interviews and comments from curators and personalities. Tate Modern’s London’s guide to last year’s Matisse Cut-Outs exhibition was particularly good, featuring additional images and an audio biography of the artist’s life. The Art Gallery of NSW also introduced a Chinese language guide app after noticing that there were many Chinese visitors to the gallery who would benefit from additional content.

These apps could be really powerful if extended across the entire visit to unlock stories throughout the building. Imagine walking past an unremarkable-seeming sculpture, for instance, and a tap notification appearing on your Apple Watch displaying a fascinating fact about the significance of the object. This could be powered with simple iBeacons technology.

 

From DSC:
Might some of these same ideas and concepts be applied within our libraries? Our art galleries? Other locations?

 

DanielChristian-Combining-Digital-Physical-Worlds-Oct2014

 

As excellently curated by Lugene Schemper, Theological Librarian:
Out at instagram.com/hlrbooks/, you can find an assortment of items from the Hekman Library Rare Book Collection at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. Many of these images are from hundreds of years ago.

 

CalvinRareBooks-LugeneSchemper-2015

 

 

CalvinRareBooks2-LugeneSchemper-2015

 

From DSC:
What applications and implications might this type of setup mean for libraries? For classrooms?


 

PressPad Lounge: new digital press corner that utilizes iBeacon technology — from talkingnewmedia.com by D.B. Hebbard

Excerpt:

The idea behind PressPad Lounge is that the service allows a business to turn a space into a reading zone, allowing those with mobile devices to access digital publications for free.

 

PPLounge-1

 

Also see:
PressPad-April2015

Excerpt:

With PressPad Lounge, people visiting your venue are able to install the magazine app of their choice, and read every issue for free while remaining PHYSICALLY within your venue.

Whether it’s a hotel lobby, a shopping mall, restaurant or a booth, PressPad Lounge enables a slick marriage of digital publishing with location marketing. People located within the range of the reading zone will be able to read magazines on their mobile devices, for free.

 

New from Educause:
Higher Ed IT Buyers Guide

 

HEITBuyersGuideEducauseApril2015

 

Excerpt:

Quickly search 50+ product and service categories, access thousands of IT solutions specific to the higher ed community, and send multiple RFPs—all in one place. This new Buyers Guide provides a central, go-to online resource for supporting your key purchasing decisions as they relate to your campus’s strategic IT initiatives.

Find the Right Vendors for Higher Education’s Top Strategic Technologies

Three of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies identified by the higher education community this year are mobile computing, business intelligence, and business performance analytics.* The new Buyers Guide connects you to many of the IT vendors your campus can partner with in the following categories related to these leading technologies, as well as many more.

View all 50+ product and service categories.

 
 

“Learning Spaces – Lernwelten”. New database to view global trends for the first time! — by Professor/Dr. Richard Stang for the Learning Research Center at Media University Stuttgart; the database is curated by Stefan Volkmann

Excerpt:

Database structure:
1   Facet between introductory, visually inspiring, and theory & research materials
2   Physical Spaces & Institutions – schools, universities, libraries, adult education, etc.
3   Digital & Hybrid Spaces
4   Design and Architectual Aspects
4.2.4   Information Technology Integration
4.2.4.2   Mobile Devices
4.5   Service Design
5   Organizational, practical and methodic aspects
5.1   Policy & Strategy
5.2 / 5.3 organisational & cooperation structures
5.4   Project Cycle & -Management
5.5   Stakeholder-driven Innovation
6   Learning types and demographic change
7   Stakeholders – Learners of all ages, teachers, practitioners, designer, and decision makers
8   Languages – especially English, German, and Scandinavian
9   Countries and Regions

 


LearningSpaces-Lernwelten-Feb2015

 


Also see:

  • Learning Spaces database released — from designinglibraries.org.uk
    Media University Stuttgart, Germany, has released the largest international database on learning space development.
    Excerpt:
    From academic to public libraries, from schools to adult education – digital environments fuse with physical learning landscapes, and offer learners, as well as institutions themselves, unforeseen possibilities. However, realising this very potential requires radically new measures in project management, organisational structures and stakeholder interaction. The database will address all these issues by providing the most current and comprehensive range of resources on learning spaces, visions and trends. 

 


 

Addendum 2/13/15:

CampusTech-April2014-LearningSpaces

 

The article therein mentions:

 

Future of the Campus in a Digital World — from campusmatters.net by Michael Haggans | November 2014

Excerpts from PDF (emphasis DSC):

In the digitally driven future of higher education, three-dimensional classroom spaces still will be needed. They won’t be used in the traditional manner and they won’t be the traditional kind. They will be bigger, flatter, faster and there will need to be fewer classrooms for the same number of students.

Classes that meet on campus will need additional area per student to accommodate interactive configurations, such as those allowing group work in the flow of the traditional class period. Typically these will be flat floors allowing easy configuration changes. At the same time, these rooms must be faster, with access to robust bandwidth.

Both physical and administrative adaptations will be required. While there will be more floor area per student when in class, the number of classroom hours per degree will drop, and all the while the expectation for digital transmission capability will continue to rise. To justify the required investment, institutions will have to rethink the administration of classroom scheduling to maximize effectiveness for students and faculty, and to achieve increased utilization. These are not new or easily managed issues for higher education. The accelerating move to online instruction will expose existing weaknesses of current systems and the benefits of more strategic investments and scheduling.

Digital Visible
From an institutional perspective, many of the implications of digital transformation are difficult to see, lost in a thicket of business issues presenting themselves with increasing urgency. Moreover, the changes induced by digital transformation are difficult to address through traditional facilities development and capital funding processes. These transformations are not about the need for a single new – or better – building, a campus student recreation center or teaching laboratory. 

This is about adjusting the performance of the whole campus to support a digitally transformed pedagogy and academic community.


Libraries have never been about books. They have always been about access to and use of information.

Make campus matter
With so much of higher education available in digital and largely asynchronous forms, the justification for a campus must derive from something more than “we have always done it this way.” Even at the most traditional institutions “on-campus time per degree” will decrease. This change in convention will make the support of increasingly limited face-to-face time of
strategic value, rather than an assumed byproduct of traditional campus life.

 
 

Does Studying Fine Art = Unemployment? Introducing LinkedIn’s Field of Study Explorer — from LinkedIn.com by Kathy Hwang

Excerpt:

[On July 28, 2014], we are pleased to announce a new product – Field of Study Explorer – designed to help students like Candice explore the wide range of careers LinkedIn members have pursued based on what they studied in school.

So let’s explore the validity of this assumption: studying fine art = unemployment by looking at the careers of members who studied Fine & Studio Arts at Universities around the world. Are they all starving artists who live in their parents’ basements?

 

 

LinkedInDotCom-July2014-FieldofStudyExplorer

 

 

Also see:

The New Rankings? — from insidehighered.com by Charlie Tyson

Excerpt:

Who majored in Slovak language and literature? At least 14 IBM employees, according to LinkedIn.

Late last month LinkedIn unveiled a “field of study explorer.” Enter a field of study – even one as obscure in the U.S. as Slovak – and you’ll see which companies Slovak majors on LinkedIn work for, which fields they work in and where they went to college. You can also search by college, by industry and by location. You can winnow down, if you desire, to find the employee who majored in Slovak at the Open University and worked in Britain after graduation.

 

 

WorkLab-By-Custer-

 

Excerpt from custerworklab.com:

The floor plan includes 10,000 square feet of co-working space.

  • 13 private offices
  • Two mobile offices
  • One executive office
  • One team room that can accommodate up to four people
  • Seven meeting spaces with seating for four to 35 people

All the meeting spaces include display and switching technology with video conferencing available in three of the rooms. Other features include a work lounge, cafe and a variety of other workstations. Plus more social accessibility, ergonomic furniture and the best technology available.

 

WorkLab2-By-Custer-

 

WorkLab3-By-Custer-

 

 

From DSC:
I recently toured this space and I can tell you that you can quickly get a sense of how much thought and effort went into the design of that collaborative workspace. 

Check out the photo gallery and 360 degree tour to see what I mean.

I think you will agree that each and every thing that you see in that space is approached from a sense of design and functionality.  Everything is there for a reason.  The technology.  The furniture.  The esthetics and accessories.  Everything.  It’s very well done.  If you get a chance to use it or tour it, I would highly recommend it.  Custer’s Worklab lays out so many things that are helpful in a collaborative learning/workspace.

 Also see:

 

 

 

 

Ideas4Libraries-DanielChristian-SpringSummer2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via Anne Whisken’s Library Learning Spaces

 

 

Library at the Dock: Australia’s First Public CLT Building Opens *

Key features:

  • Interactive, high digital learning environment
  • Community multi-purpose meeting rooms
  • Outdoor reading area
  • Culture and exhibitions
  • Technology hub
  • Design conducive to the surrounding waterfront landscape
  • Greater amenities will be available to library visitors with the surrounding shopping, food and beverage, offices and residential neighbourhoods

 

* where CLT stands for cross laminated timber (CLT)

 

 

Also see:

 

 

 

Reinventing libraries for ‘hanging out, messing around and geeking out’ — from CNN.com by Emanuella Grinberg

Excerpt:

The staff takes special pride in its mentor-led activities, offered in partnerships with various community organizations: a spoken word workshop, a video game program and a makerspace, or workshop, where teens create birdcages, duct tape wallets and other art projects.

It might be a library, but for 18-year-old Alexis Woodward, the atmosphere is more like a “family reunion,” she said.

“It’s always packed until it closes. Everybody goes to the library after school,” said Woodward, who began participating in the spoken word program when she was 14.

 

ReinventingLibraries-CNN-June2014

 

 

Egor-Bogomolov---Beautiful-Learning-Spaces--

From DSC:
Egor’s curated collections also include collaborative work spaces, libraries, other.

 

New York Public Library partners with Zola to offer algorithmic book recommendations — from gigaom.com by Laura Hazard Owen
The New York Public Library will offer book recommendations to readers through its website via a new partnership with NYC-based startup Zola Books.

Excerpt:

Visitors to the New York Public Library’s website will have a new way to decide what to read next: The library is partnering with New York-based startup Zola Books to offer algorithm-based recommendations to readers. The technology comes from Bookish, the book discovery site that Zola acquired earlier this year.

 

From DSC:
If the New York Public Library can do this with books, why can’t a smart TV-based service offer this sort of functionality for educationally-related materials?  (Or a second screen-based application?) What if MOOCs integrated this sort of recommendation engine and then accessed/delivered the digitally-based content to you? Some serious personalized/customized micro-learning.

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

 

 

 
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