Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning

With the boundaries of place softened and extended by digital communications technologies, learning in a networked society necessitates new distributions of activity across time, space, media, and people; and this development is no longer exclusive to traditionally designated spaces such as school classrooms, lecture halls, or research laboratories.Place-based Spaces for Networked Learning explores how place and physical space make both formal and informal education in a networked society possible and, through a series of case studies, illuminates the structural composition of complex learning environments.

This book offers a wealth of key design elements and attributes for productive learning that educational designers can reuse in multiple contexts. Case studies examine how places are modified, expanded, or supplemented by networking technologies and practices in order to create spaces in which learners can collaboratively develop new understandings, connections, and capabilities. Utilizing a range of diverse but complementary perspectives such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, psychology, sociology, and urban studies, Place-based Spaces for Networked Learning addresses how material places and digital spaces are understood; how sense can be made of new assemblages and configurations of tasks, tools and people; how the real-time analysis of new flows of data can inform and entertain users of a space; and how the opening up of access to the digital realm changes our experiences with both places and other people.

Lucila Carvalho is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo) at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Peter Goodyear is Professor of Education and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the founding co-director of the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo) and convenes the University’s Sciences and Technologies of Learning research network.

Maarten de Laat is Professor of Professional Development in Social Networks at the Welten Institute: Research Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology, at the Open Universiteit of the Netherlands.