Re-thinking School Architecture in the Age of ICT

SUBMITTED BY MICHAEL TRUCANO ON THU, 08/30/2012 – 09:44

What will the school of the future look like?

Most likely, it will largely look like the school of today — but that doesn’t mean it should. Few will deny that it will most likely, and increasingly, contain lots of technology. Some may celebrate this fact, others may decry it, but this trend appears inexorable. To what extent will, or should, considerations around technology use influence the design of learning spaces going forward?

Of course, with the continued rise of online ‘virtual’ education, some schools don’t (or won’t) look like traditional ‘schools’ at all. Various types of structured or semi-structured learning already take place as part of things that we consider to be ‘courses’, even if sometimes such things don’t conform to some traditional conceptions of what a ‘course’ is or should be.  The massive online open course (or MOOC) in artificial intelligence offered by Stanford has received much recent attention, but the phenomenon is not necessarily new (even if its current exemplars are marked by many characteristics thatare indeed new, or much more developed, than those previously to be found in, for example, large ‘distance learning’ courses).

Let’s leave aside the case of the ‘virtual school’ for a moment and assume that there will continue to be a need for a physical space at which students and educators will gather and interact. (Such places may be access points to virtual education, or featured various types of so-called ‘blended learning’, where face-to-face interactions are complemented by interactions in the virtual world — or vice versa.)  Indeed, let’s assume, for our purposes here, that the school as a concept will presumably be along for many decades to come, and that it will have a physical representation of some sort. What might such a school look like, especially in the era of ICTs?