December 2007 — Features
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A Movable Feast
The key is to think about how the technology will support your teaching goals, Johnson says, but you also want a physical space that supports the technology. That includes things like flexible furniture and easy access to power and networking outlets. The pedagogy, technology, and architecture revolve around each other, he says, but always with the educational issues at the center.
"Let's assume that you are trying to create K-12 learners that are problem solvers," Johnson explains. "You want them to be able to take in information, assess it, digest it, and assemble it to solve problems as a team. If your students are sitting at tiny desks in rows facing the front of a rectangular classroom, it's going to be difficult to achieve that goal."
Beyond Borders
But even with the teaching mission front and center in the classroom design process, in some ways the technology is still defining the learning space, observes Diana Oblinger, vice president of Educause, a Raleigh, NC-based nonprofit association that promotes the intelligent use of information technology. The good news is, Oblinger adds, rather than forcing students to face the walls, technology is knocking those walls down.
"Now that you have wireless connectivity, any place can become a learning space," she says. "We're no longer thinking about learning as something that is contained in a traditional classroom. Consequently, the design emphasis is shifting to focus on what you want students to do, rather than what the space is all about. Schools can, and in many cases will, evolve into spaces that resemble learning complexes, where some students are in classes, some are in groups in the library, and others are gathered outdoors."
Oblinger is responsible for Educause's teaching and learning activities and is director of the group's Learning Initiative. She also serves as an adjunct professor of adult and higher education at North Carolina State University. And she is the co-editor of six books, including The Learning Revolution: The Challenge of Information Technology in the Academy (Anker Publishing, 1987) and Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005). Educause focuses on colleges and universities, but Oblinger says that much of her work on the design of the modern classroom is applicable to K-12 learning environments.
"It's important to remember that the pedagogy and the people come first," Oblinger says. "It's not about the technology; it's not about the design. These are spaces designed for learning. That said, you want to look at the activities the technology might enable in a classroom setting. You want to provide students with direct access to resources, so that if you are asking them to work on a problem they can go to the web to look things up. You want to make all the things that people might need to do in class—from accessing information to collaborating with other students, drafting documents to doing calculations— available through the integration of the technology."
While classroom designers are rearranging the desks and moving the power outlets in real space, the phenomenon known as Web 2.0 is transforming cyberspace, and in the process, Oblinger says, challenging long-held notions of how students study. As the web evolves from a collection of HTML web pages into a multimedia computing platform, it is fast becoming a world rife with collaborative technologies— wikis, blogs, social networking sites—all of which are widely used by students to share an enormous range of information and experiences. Oblinger says this revolution has to be accounted for in a classroom layout.
