Virtual Tattoos in Learning Spaces

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Virtual Tattoos in Learning Spaces

10/6/2004

By Terry Calhoun

--"Yeah, that's my virtual tattoo up there on the wall. Cool, huh?"

I've never been one for memorizing things. I need to see entire patterns and understand how things fit together and interact before they enter my long-term memory. I'm as good, or better, than anyone else at quick, party-game memorization of lists. But 20 minutes later it's all gone from my head. At a professional meeting, like the recent NLII Focus Workshop on the Design Principles of Learning Space, I collect cards or make notes and spend time in my hotel room that night frantically recollecting as much as I can about each person I met. If I reach a sufficient threshold of knowledge about where the person is from, what they had to say, and maybe something about their personal life--then they're in my long-term memory. If not, they're gone. Sorry, I really did like you!

When I was teaching--mostly anthropology courses at several universities in the mid-1970s--I would at my own expense take Polaroid photographs of each student and keep a sheet of those shots in front of me during class. Some of the many stimulating ideas that cropped up at that NLII workshop have me thinking about identity and identification in a learning space of the future.

I'm not going to steal the NLII's thunder and report complete list of basic principles of learning space design, but a few of the proposed principles brought up by some of the very talented people in attendance have been percolating in my mind, bouncing up against each other, and giving me ideas. Specifically:

· The space should have an identity that among other things positions it in the larger constellation of spaces, learning and otherwise, throughout campus and beyond;
· The space should be comfortable;
· The technology in the space should be as transparent as possible; and
· The learning space should accommodate what the students bring with them.

The space should have an identity.

When we visited a language lab at MIT, the smaller breakout rooms (labs, I guess) had been given some identity by the placement on desks, shelves, and walls of objects of ethnic art, photographs, maps, and the like. That kind of thing helps a learner identify immediately with the space. Conversations about this at the workshop often turned to observations about elementary schools where teachers occupy the same classroom all day long and how much more of an identity those classrooms develop over time.

We can't expect that kind of thing to happen in higher education, though, where we often have difficulty finding space for faculty to have an office, much less enabling each instructor to own their own classroom. It's much harder to create that sense of identity, of course, in larger shared teaching spaces. Objects left on shelves or walls in such spaces might disappear. Faculty who cared about such things might fight over the available display space. Some suggestions, though, were to perhaps have faculty locker space where such objects could be stored locally and brought out as desired. Or, display cabinets for each class taught, so that students taking Philosophy in Room 411 could get a feel for the fact that at some other point in the week other students are taking Algebra II in the same space.