Learning SpacesUniversities are built as places of education, and the spaces within the campus should therefore be spaces of learning. Researchers and educational theorists explain that spaces afford, or in other words, enable and even invite, particular activities and behaviours. Bond is responding to the use of learning spaces and the different affordances they provide. - At the state-of-the-art Balnaves Foundation Multimedia Learning Centre, students can learn numerous software and hardware technologies. Students can also bring their own laptops, plug in to convenient PowerPoint™ and connect through wireless internet. Bar and booth seating can be chosen for individual or group learning. The glass room situated within the Centre is both learning and meeting space and is available to students and staff.
- Bond’s Pod Room lends itself to problem-based approaches and critical inquiry to learning with the integration of Internet resources and student’s own work accessed from computers. Students work in groups at the individual pods, or kidney-shaped desks, or sit together at the front or side of the room using the flexible seating provided. Lecturers can release new information to the students using the control panel and allow whole class access to the work of individual groups on screens at the front of the room.
- Both the Balnaves Foundation Multimedia Learning Centre and the Pod Room spaces provide affordances beyond the re-arrangement of seating to facilitate small-group work. Both are aimed at furthering student-centred learning and we are only beginning to understand and witness how both areas make different use of open spaces for hands-on, experiential learning.
|
|
|
