In my former life as a teacher, I did not think much about learning spaces, as long as I had chairs and tables that could be moved around for group work I was quite happy. Yet I was not totally surprised when at a presentation, by furniture design company Orangebox, it was pointed out that…Continue Reading Reflections on Sticky Campus and the dynamics of Smart Learning
The Drysdale Ground floor is one of the most heavily utlised spaces on the City, University of London campus. With over 200 open access student PC spaces and five PC teaching labs the floor has been completely remodeled, refreshed and updated to meet the needs of our students, and provide new, flexible learning spaces. …Continue Reading New Flexible Learning and Open Access PC Spaces at City, University of London
About five minutes from Northampton Square, nestled above the recently opened CitySport, lie two floors of recently launched City learning spaces. Part of the new Franklin Building, there are eight rooms available for all schools to use for teaching and learning, as well as a meeting room and some social spaces. The space overall…Continue Reading New Learning Spaces at the Franklin Building
To enable collaboration and flexibility; the design of a traditional lecture theatre will alter dramatically to enable working together in groups and for the teacher to move between groups. I envisage future lecture space to be more open, with flexible furniture that will allow for reconfiguration and for students and teachers to move around freely….Continue Reading Rethinking the lecture theatre
I’ve been interested recently in investigating new conference formats, and have found this years Edge conference to be particularly inspiring. Those of us working in Educational Technologies have spent many years standing up in rooms, talking at people for an hour, about how we shouldn’t stand up in rooms and talk at people for an…Continue Reading Conferences: are we getting it wrong?
I was rather pleased to be the keynote speaker at Newcastle University’s Learning Technology event last week. I was asked to present City’s Learning Spaces project, and it was a great opportunity to promote the work we are doing, and share our experiences with the wider academic community. The event was attended by academics, Learning…Continue Reading Learning Spaces, the new frontier…
Moving the furniture has traditionally been a source of frustration for users of our learning spaces in terms of needing more flexible spaces, having time in sessions to move furniture and leaving rooms in a state fit for the next occupants. A number of rooms have been equipped with node chairs. However, in response to very positive…Continue Reading Please move the furniture
BLG07 is the first lecture theatre at City that contains swivel seating. This space enables students to participate in interactive lectures including bringing their own devices to work on, moving between activities and working in groups within the space. Seating in this lecture theatre is alternately fixed and swivelling with two rows of seats…Continue Reading Swivel Seating in New Lecture Theatre
City’s first lecture theatre decked out with vibrant orange swivel seating enabling students to work interactively and in groups during lectures is now available to use. This room comprises a suite of colourful flexible learning spaces and break out areas all containing furniture that can be moved around and walls that can be written on…Continue Reading New Learning Spaces
Thank you to all those that attended and participated in our workshop session at the Learning at City Conference. In our session we introduced a number of techniques and technologies that could be used to enable creative large group teaching. We talked about how education is changing and our learning spaces need to reflect these…Continue Reading Creative Large Group Teaching – the aftermath