Launching a new Masters: Designing Spaces for Learning #inf536

July 13, 2014

When most people find out that they are in line to create a new physical or virtual environment for their school, few have really driven deep into what the research says, and how it might pan out in practice. And, with deadlines in place, and architects producing their "masterplans" based on what they have been able to squeeze out of school communities, the clock is ticking too fast in most cases to begin that learning journey in a timely fashion.

School principals, deputies, librarians and innovator educators can base multi-million dollar decisions on hearsay, gurus' say-so, and what the Joneses have done with their school. For the initial cohort of students on our inaugural Masters subject on Designing Spaces for Learning at CSU (Charles Sturt University), the story will be very different.

Today marks the opening of this special Masters course that I've been writing for the past eight months for CSU, along with my boss/mentor Judy O'Connell. I'm not an academic by nature, so it's been a learning experience for me to get into the lecturer mode, and work out how to turn a significant body of research into tangible activities that our Masters students can undertake to explore and discover for themselves how research might translate into new practices.

I have high hopes that these students will make some headway into moving the education community away from a few, high profile conferences, speakers and coffee table books on "cool" or "audacious" learning spaces, to new understandings borne of a wide body of research into space design, the processes we can use to co-design, and why we say we want the kind of learning we do.

Above is my introduction video welcoming students. It's a welcome to you, too, to dip into as much of the material that leaks out of this Masters as possible. Students will have private forums and blogs where they can work out prototypes of thinking they might not yet be prepared to share with the wider world, but there are public spaces where students are being encouraged over the next 16 weeks to share what their insights might be.

There is a Flickr group, and a Google+ group where most of their more polished thinking will eventually end up, linking to their individual blogs where we can. In addition, the Twitter hashtag #inf536 is beginning to get moving, too.

Join the fray where you can - and feel free to disagree with this initial provocation, armed with your research and practice, of course! Share examples of schools which have been built on research and practice that you know, and feel free to point out examples which did not work out as expected too.