Tag Archives: libraries

Dissolving Campus Edge

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Campuses traditionally had physical edges.  Boundaries marked by walls, gates and signs defined ownership and identity.  While these markers remain, many institutions have made their boundaries less distinct. Students and faculty move seamlessly back and forth from physical to digital, from the campus to its digital doppelgänger.

Projects across the country point to hybridization – a morphing of building types and fluid patterns of use.  These are not just nearby storefront classrooms or branch campuses; nor are they whole new campus projects 10 time zones away. These are different.  Retail enterprises dealt with this phenomenon as their brick and mortar stores encountered Amazon and its ilk.  The buzzword of choice was phygital.

Innovative programmer/planner of campus environments, Elliot Felix has used the term phygital to describe his firm’s academic library projects.  The Hunt Library at North Carolina State is an early example.  The library and its resources are first digital and then physical, reversing the conventional understanding.  Libraries organized around this inversion, are better suited to meet the needs of faculty members and students living in the flow of digital/physical life and learning. Continue reading →

Remaking the OR’s of Higher Ed: LSC and FLEXspace

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Learning spaces are strategic assets of higher education, just as operating rooms are for
healthcare. These rooms support events that are synchronous and personal; where teaching and learning is face to face; individually and in small groups.  These are the spaces where memory is tethered to place.  Campus does matter when this happens.  Otherwise why be there?  Why not be online?

The Learning Spaces Collaboratory and FLEXspace both do heavy lifting in the difficult work of improving learning spaces.  These two organizations are helping to make change room-by-room, building-by-building, campus-by-campus.

Most existing classrooms are pedagogies in steel and concrete, formed in the pre-digital age of tablet-arm chairs.  Some have been clumsily re-fitted with splashy HD screens, but few are designed for the physical/digital, both/and world of active learning and flipped classes.

The Collaboratory focuses on tools and participatory processes for campuses to create effective learning environments.  LSC is hosting its first virtual roundtable on November 3, 2018. Faculty and designers from across the country will share their experience in interactive sessions with folks just beginning the process.

While LSC works in the planning and design phases, FLEXspace documents learning spaces, makerspaces, libraries and the places in between.  They have just added mobile-friendly diagnostic tools for existing spaces.  An accessible inventory of innovative spaces includes thousands of examples in more than 50 countries.  You can search by a host of variables to find comparable settings and comparable projects.  Here is a link to the leaders of FLEXspace on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum.

LSC has been a consistent catalyst for all to think of learning spaces as strategic assets rather than capital costs to be managed.  Jeanne Narum and her team have empowered teachers and administrators to act as if effective learning spaces are essential to the core mission, rather than the latest fad in edu.talk

Improving learning spaces, the operating rooms of higher education, will be part of the strategic vision of campuses that survive and thrive in a competitive digital world.  FLEXspace and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory have seen it this way for a long time.

Academic Libraries – Lee Van Orsdel

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Academic libraries have long shown the signs of digital transformation. The card catalogue was the first old friend to leave the building. Online resources have grown exponentially.  Millions of unused books are being removed from active holdings.  A wave of construction is transforming academic libraries into vibrant hubs of campus activity and community – no longer cul-de-sacs of paper.

Often lost in the glitzy stories of architecture, trendy furniture and high tech gadgetry are the leaders and the ideas that are at the heart of the transformation. Now on the stage are Lee Van Orsel and a generation of academic librarians leading and sometimes pulling their organizations and institutions into a future that is both physical and digital.  They share a passion for the reinvention of libraries for people not paper, for access not control.

Lee and I talked at the Re-think It: Libraries for a New Age Conference at Grand Valley State University. Hers is a story of mission before place, changing academic culture before changing architecture and throughout serving to the needs of students and faculty. There are lessons here for all campus planners and designers.

Academic Libraries: Making Place for Goog-azon-bucks

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Pew InteriorIf the student is at the center of the higher education business model, the library is where she is sitting. The library is changing around her and her colleagues. Library leaders are transforming academic libraries into 21st century agoras – open meeting and working places – rather than gated cul-de-sacs for storing paper.

This transformation was explored at the Re-think It: Libraries for a New Age Conference at Grand Valley State University. Hundreds of public and academic librarians from across the country met to share ideas on the reinvention of libraries about people not paper, about access not control. Speakers included Elliot Felix, Lee Van Orsdel and Lennie Scott-Webber.   Continue reading →

Future of the Campus in a Digital World

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2 by 1 by 3As the need for synchronous place and time evaporates, the physical campus must provide values that are not available by other means. Campuses need to be transformed as if their survival were at stake.

Future of the Campus in a Digital World. is my assessment of the state of the campus at the close of 2014.  It is in the form of a 10 page pdf.  I hope you will share it with your colleagues and let me know your thoughts.

Digital Visible

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Hunt Library Int.2.wcThe physical implications of the digital transformation of higher education are becoming visible. Classrooms and libraries are being retooled in response to changes in basic assumptions that have guided campus development for more than a century. Student housing and campuses are evolving in response to social media and the changing use patterns of members of the campus community.  From classrooms to libraries to residence halls, digital transformation is changing the physical presence and requirements of each institution.

Continue reading →