Home News Local Atlantic City News Atlantic City News South Jersey high school librarians teaching students how to use high technology in their research

Diane D’Amico looks at the changes since a loss of state aid forced libraries to rethink, close or re-evolve.  Whilst they still have books, the increased interest in using different technologies for searching has its challenges and opportunities

“Research is done differently now,” she said. “Everything is more electronic, using databases. But students still need guidance. They may be digital natives with technology, but they don’t always know how to search effectively or responsibly. They believe if they find it on the Internet, it must be true.”

The libraries are being used as learning and social hubs with the increased physical spaces providing opportunities for spreading out beyond the classroom.  She interviews a range of different librarians who are exploring different ideas.

In full

 

Pedagogy and Space: Empirical Research on New Learning Environments

By J. D. Walker, D. Christopher Brooks, and Paul Baepler, in Educause Quarterly

In a previous EDUCAUSE Quarterly article,¹ we reported the results of quasi-experimental research on the University of Minnesota’s new, technology-enhanced learning spaces called Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs). That investigation found — after controlling for potentially confounding factors such as instructor, instructional methods, assessments, and student demographics — that teaching in an ALC contributed significantly to student learning outcomes. In addition, our findings indicated that the type of space in which a class is taught influences instructor and student behavior in ways that likely moderate the effects of space on learning. Finally, we found significant cross-sectional differences between different subsets of our student sample in terms of how they perceived the ALC’s contribution to their learning experience.

Here, we report on the next phase of learning-spaces research at the University of Minnesota (UMN), which had two components. First, to ensure that our earlier results were not simply fortuitous, we replicated the original investigation with a different instructor, student sample, and subject matter. Second, having shown that the type of learning space matters, we turned our attention to the pedagogy employed within the room. Using another quasi-experimental design, we investigated whether or not having our instructor adapt her instructional approach to fit the space would influence student learning outcomes and student perceptions of their learning experience.

Two specific research questions guided this phase of our research:

• Holding the pedagogical approach constant, what is the relationship between the type of learning space and (1) student learning outcomes, (2) instructor and student behavior, and (3) student perceptions of the learning experience?
• Holding the learning space constant, what is the relationship between the type of pedagogical approach and (1) student learning outcomes and (2) student perceptions of the learning experience?

Full article

J. D. Walker, D. Christopher Brooks, and Paul Baepler. The text of this EQ article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

Sweden debuts first classroom-less school

via Smart Planet

Vittra, an education company in Sweden have removed the classroom completely – being interested in

“breakdown of physical and metaphorical class divisions as a fundamental step to promoting intellectual curiosity, self-confidence, and communally responsible behavior”

The students are able to wander around using laptops and other technologies in their own learning spaces. With some wonderful photos too:

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/sweden-debuts-first-classroom-less-school/21558

Google’s offices around the world are also legendary in experimenting with physical spaces, this is their Stockholm office from 2009