EDvent Calendar: Day 5 (Campfires, watering holes and caves)

Learning Spaces for the Digital Age
Prakash Nair is one of the great thinkers in the area of innovative learning spaces. One of the great ideas he explores is the notion that in all learning spaces there needs to be:

• Campfire spaces
• Watering hole space, and
• Cave spaces.

Campfires are where stories are shared (presentation spaces), watering hole spaces are where ideas are exchanged and connections are made, and caves are quiret, reflection spaces. Have you got the right mix of these three kinds of spaces in your school?

Nair asks:

"Why do schools look the way they do? Why is there a chasm between widely
acknowledged best practice principles and the actual design of a majority of school
facilities? Why has the disconnect between learning research and learning places been
so difficult to repair?"

If you read nothing else this summer about learning spaces, you should read this:
http://www.designshare.com/images/TheLanguageofSchoolDesigneBooksummaryweb.pdf
(...and if that floats your boat, you'll love Dr Kenn Fisher)