I picked up quite an interesting blog post here, responding to JISC’s “Designing Spaces for Effective Learning – A guide to 21st century learning space design” and making a point I’ve been banging on about for ages which is that we still haven’t got away from the traditional paradigm of the teacher standing in front of the class. There are certainly attempts to get away from that, not least at Lincoln, but I wonder how far people are actually buying into it.  It would be interesting to evaluate how the new rooms are actually being used once people have got used to them.

I think there will be experimentation at first, but when the pressures to respond to student expectations start to bite I wonder if people will settle down into a more conventional form of delivery despite the physical environment.  Things like the NSS, and other accountability measures, do, I think have a very powerful effect on academic practice, but I think it’s too early to say what that will be yet.  What the blog post picks up on, and I confess I’m not sure about, is how far those teachers who will be using the rooms have been involved in the process of designing them.  But then, how do you involve a whole University? Now, there’s a challenge for an Educational Development Unit.

Actually, I think we can meet it. The research I’ve been doing shows that staff in EDUs do tend to hold a very collegial model of the University, even though they are at the same time under considerable pressure to deliver a very instrumental agenda. They’re quite good at picking up some aspects of each of the disciplines they’re working with. (Rather like Flann O’Brien’s atomic theory of the bicycle, they do slowly exchange characteristics with their clients,  but you’ll have to read the Third Policeman for the details of that theory!)