Next Generation Learning Spaces Conference, Day 1

Pat Boone exhibit

This is my first time at the annual Next Generation Learning Spaces conference, happening this year in Los Angeles.  The first day consisted of three workshops focusing on new ways to think about innovation and entrepreneurship on campus, active learning and faculty development, and change management. In the late afternoon, I was able to visit Pepperdine University's library that just opened after a full-scale renovation of its 1970s space, including a Pat Boone exhibit.

Work with Emerging Technology to Accelerate your Campus Culture

Teggin Sumners, San Francisco State University

The presentation focused on pushing the concept of Makerspaces into its next iteration. Right now, many makerspaces are informal spaces for students to innovate, often not connected to a particular course or curriculum, and thus potentially not giving all students structure to succeed in such spaces.

Focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, many universities are now taking the next steps to create not only spaces for innovation but processes and structures for students to innovate and then turn that innovation into a successful enterprise, turning the students into entrepreneurs.

Such a shift is happening now out of the realization that our work force needs across the globe will be radically changing in the next 20 years or so, making it necessary for us now to rethink the way we are teaching our students.  Some universities create innovation hubs, connected to particular degrees, others are opting for innovation learning communities.  The key components to consider are 

Strategy

Financial and human resources

Support infrastructure

Entrepreneur education

Start-up support

Evaluation approach

Universally designed

Sustainable

before you can think about what that kind of space needs to look like

Meta-Active Learning Can Help Faculty Engagement and Success

Beverly Bondad-Brown, California State University, Los Angeles

This workshop focused on giving faculty opportunities to think about active learning while experiencing it, so the workshop itself was giving us the same opportunities through multiple activities.

As we are already doing a lot of this at Auburn, the most valuable piece was the set of cards they graciously shared that we will be able to use in our future faculty sessions.

Change Management:  Interdisciplinary collaboration amongst faculty, technology providers and site planners

 Maggie Beers, San Franciso State University

In front of yet another scary statistics highlighting how California will be short 3 million workers by 2025 because not enough students are graduating college even though the number that enters has doubled, we learned about the six academic cultures, how they think and what they value, and how we can use this knowledge to create communication plans to talk to these different audiences to push for innovation.

The discussion is based Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy by William Bergquist.

In addition, Maggie also shared a card set with different questions for future planning of learning spaces based on the Learning Spaces Rating System created by Educause. These cards allow for better sorting of where one still needs to do work, especially in a group setting.

She also reminded us of the principles of diffusion of innovation: Compatibility, triability, complexity, advantage, observability, and how we need to consider these for large-scale active learning implementations.