Stu, Stu, Studio

The Humanities presentation in The Studio on Thursday were interesting. Funny enough, a space that was designed to be so conducive to small group dynamics is not the best "lecture hall". Not only does the narrow nature of the room force the audience to distance themselves from the speaker in almost exponential leaps. but the room set up almost prohibits anyone leaving early or leaving the room without disturbing a bunch of people. It really brought home for me designing a space to be great for small group collaboration sacrifices the ability to reach masses when needed.

This has a huge impact on the kind of classrooms communities can afford to produce. I am sure that will work into my research somewhere.

The New American Workplace - James O'Toole & Edward Lawler

Inventing Better Schools - Phillip Schlechty

Teaching with Technology: Creating Student Centered Classrooms - Judith Haymore

The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom - Todd Oppenheimer

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paolo Friere

I also plan to interview many primary sources to identify the virtues and skills upon which employers place high value today and expect to desire over the coming decades. These would include at least one person in all the major sectors of the economy: Medical Care, Technology, Government, Education, Manufacturing, and Service.

What are the major influences on a students (school) education, and how does space affect these influences?
-Is there a balance between physical and virtual learning spaces?
-What environmental factors can motivate students to learn?
-What factors distract students from learning?

1.)The importance of physical space in creating supportive learning environments
-This book explores how spaces can be designed to effectively embrace both physical and
virtual learning spaces, and the implications of learning at the intersection of these two
worlds.
2.)Space, objects, minds, and brains
-Spatial based attention and reference frames are addressed here as well as how space
can be utilized to effectively direct the attention of students.
3.)Designing places for learning
-Using cultural information to create schools that work is the goal of this book. It examines
the relationship between school achievement and building conditions. All types of students,
including the disabled, are taken into account when designing learning spaces in this book.
4.)Advances in web-based education : personalized learning environments
-Covers the array of factors that play a part in actually designing personalized learning
spaces.
5.)Learning & behavior
-Psychology journal that may provide insight into the factors involved in learning on a
physiological and perceptual level.
6.)Academic ability, motivation and feedback : a predictor of learning performance
-Examines the personal aspects of learning.
7.)Environment and behavior
-Studies how personality traits can manifast as well as directly effect how a student learns.
Using this knowledge schools can be designed with a greater body of knowledge about its
pupils in mind.

I found a few more sources that might be good to look at-

1. Exploring Socio-Cultural Themes in Education
Some Key themes are: "What are the relationships between culture, society, and education?, What are the dynamics of daily life in schools as institutions in particular organizational and community contexts? IN what ways are gender, language, race, social class, and the relationship between schoo and work important in our education?, and what orientations and stategies can teachers adopt that will enable them to become more transformative educators"

2. Schools and Society: A sociological approach to Education
This book looks at topics like the social construction of knowledge, the social stratification of schools, the relationship between the public and schools, and educational reform and change, and many others.

3. The Age of MIssing Information
I have actually read this one already and it is one of the most interesting books I have because McKidden suggests that in this new information age, there is also a great deal of information that is lost to us: "vital knowledge that humans have always possesed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach" Maybe we can look at ways education can bring some of this 'information' back, or at least make students aware of its absence.

4. The children are watching: How the Media teach about Diversity
This book suggests that the mass media frames diversity issues and contribute to its consumers values, stereotypes ect. This is an example of the kind of education that is recieved outside the classroom that I want to research.

5. Sustainable Small Schools
This book looks at the advantages and the disadvantages that a small school has as well as unusual set ups like multigrade classrooms, consolidation, ect.

6. Literacy in Multimedia America: Integratting Media Education Across the Curriculum
This discusses the need for media literacy as well as how it can be integrated in schools

7/8/9. Plato's Cave, Impact of Mass Media, and Media LIteracy in the Information Age
These three books are simply interesting analyses of the mass media and its affect on its consumers touching on endless tpics like violence, warfare, women, ethics, the family, ect. The last also looks at the international impact of American mass media as well as the need for media literacy in future educational reform.

1. Fabricating Europe: The Formation of an Education Space: We can look at this book's discussion of how the European educational "space" (they use the same terminology we are using) is limited by politics and historical precident.

2. Inventing Better Schools: An ction Plan for Educational Reform: This book is fairly recent (1997) and discusses educador's need to adapt to a new information economy. This might cover the needs that education is not fulfiling.

3. Children and their Environments: Learning, Using, and Designing Spaces: This seems to talk about the acual designing of spaces that give children optimal learning environments.

4. Creating Effective Learning environments: This book is specifically directed at childhood educators. It suggests the utilization of play time and creativity in a child's education.

5. Researching Children's popular culture: The cultural spaces of childhood: I think we all need to look at this in order to understand the environment that is shaping children's education today, which includes a surplus of information that was not available to children when we were growing up.

6. Studies in Educational Learning Environments: An international perspective. This discusses the "remarkable growth, diversitifcation, and internationalism during the past 30 years" (Fraser)

7. Cyber Spaces/ Social Spaces: Culture Clash in Computerized Classrooms: We can use this when looking at the internet as an educational space.

8. Wired Up (Media, Education, and Culture

9. Media, Education, and America's COunter Culture Revolution: Lost and Found Opportunities for Media Impact on Education, Gender, Race, and the Arts. (Obviously the part that I am interested here is the study of Media's impact on education)

10. Media Reception Studies: This book looks at how different listeners understand certain things about the messages they are recieving. This can be applied to the classroom and how students recieve information there.

11. Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments: David H Jonassen, Susan Land

Here are my sources and a brief description on each:

Websites: There are two websites listed in my last entry. The first provides a directory of one-room schoolhouses throughout the east coast, and can be a handy tool for researching how shool used to be. The second website is a aid for teaching children in a one-room schoolhouse environment. I thought this website was interesting because it is modern,and based on federal code.

Books:
Schools of the Future - this book was published in 1985; it lists some of the chapters as funding and school/business partnerships of today and tommorrow. To compare how our schools of today were viewed in the past would add an additional perspective to this work.

The Problems of American Education - This is another semi-dated book, it was published in 1975. What were the problems in this decade, are they relevant to the problems we are facing today? I thought that Adolescent Meets the Bureacracy as well as The Crisis of Purpose and Identity in Higher Education

Politics, Markets, and America's School: This book was published in 1990, and would be relevant to our discussions of the economy and its influence in the education.

Social History of American Education (Vol.I&II) These books are research books. I want to learn about the facts of American Education. On a side note, one of the practices of my history class was evaluating our sources and their validity. It would be interesting to note when the book was published and how the atmosphere of its time could affect the relaying of information.

Shouting Won't Grow Dendrites 20 Techniques ofr Managing a Brain-Compatible Classroom: This book is an aid for teachers today. What is the media telling our educators? This book would be interesting to browse through and note the common philosophies of today.

1. Deciding on common terms/foci to note (so that at the end, we have something of a common vocabulary that reaches across the individual reports)

2. Begin identifying primary sources you can interview for additional, local information. Once you know who you want to talk to, please post the positions and names so that if other group members have questions for them (or might) they can get them to you before you talk to the person.

3. If you weren't in class, please post your reading lists and summaries by Saturday night (so I can finish the syllabus for you.)

4. Distill a few questions that you need to know the answers to about what is already known (and where the gaps are) that you can use in your literature review. In other words, identify what you will be able to build upon and what you will have to generate through your own research. (You don't have to post this until we discuss it, but you should have good solid questions that you will be asking, in written form (notes) for our discussion.

Are our current and future educational spaces meeting our needs as a society?

• What are the current requirements in the workforce and how will they change over the next 50 years?
• How are current educational spaces meeting the needs of our workforce?
• Is technology integrated into educational spaces in a way refleting what students can expect when they enter the workforce?
• What new educational spaces should be developed to develop skills students will need in 21st Century Business and Industry?
• What educational techniques will be necessary to prepare these students and how can space assist the process?

I will have to look at sources of information in

Workforce trends (Dept. of Labor Data, Census Data, Business and Economic Journals)

Current and future workspaces (Investigating current systems and analyzing new developments)

Current and Future teaching philosophies (Educational Journals, First Hand Observation)

Current and Future educational Spaces (Journals in Education, Architechture, Technology)