Page 74 - spaces4learning, Fall 2024

s p a c e s 4 l e a rn i n g
LEARNING SPACE DESIGN
throw them right in the trash, because I don’t need seven-inch
binders that even I am never going to read. If I need to look up
something, I’ll look it up in a PDF and do a search.
It’s all about working with faculty directly. Work through the
Center for Teaching and Learning on your campus, do your open
forums, do your workshops. Find out when the new faculty ori-
entation is going on, force your way into that, and talk to them
about the top five things they need to know about classroom
spaces. Get in front of faculty as much as you can, be out there,
be accessible, do not hide behind locked doors, do not hide behind
helpdesk tickets, be visible and do everything you can to be that
face of technology in their teaching spaces.
Park: I would add if you’re interested in the latest thinking
and the best thinking on user interface, Nielsen Norman Group
is the repository for all of that.
S4L: What are the biggest
considerations for future-proofing
tech-enabled classrooms?
Park: I have a simple three-word answer for that: infrastruc-
ture, infrastructure, infrastructure. That’s all the things in
terms of pathways and conduit and power resources that are
behind the scenes, behind the walls, that allow for future con-
nectivity. A lot of folks say, “Well, we have WiFi, and so we
can connect wirelessly,” but WiFi today still has some limits in
terms of bandwidth and functionality, that wired helps. We’ve
also been moving pretty quickly in the last decade toward AV
over IP, allowing any device to get plugged in either through a
direct network connection or a Power over Ethernet connection,
which allows us to add new components over time.
Much like Chris, I advocate for only putting in what you need—
but make provisions for things you can see might be applicable in the
future. And I’m a big believer in benchmarking—looking at what
other campuses and universities are doing, what’s out in the industry.
It’s really about planning for how we get from A to B in the building
with a piece of network cabling in the easiest fashion. I do think
we’re on the verge of seeing more fiber used as a distribution model.
Craig Park, Director of
Digital Experience Design
and Associate Principal,
Clark & Enersen
Teddy Murphy, Academic
Technology & AV Specialist,
University of Pikeville
74 FALL 2024 | spaces4learning.com
Passive optical networking is becoming more routinely used for a lot
of applications—it has a lot of bandwidth functionality and security
functionality that copper doesn’t have, and it runs for 8 miles, so I
don’t need as many IDF closets in the building—but tradition-based
copper cabling still is the rule. Still, the pathway from A to B or A to
C to B is the same, and we need to plot those out.
Murphy: We have a fairly new building on campus that had
no future planning. We don’t have enough room and conduit
for new cable runs, and they left us with not enough switching
capacity or network switches for some new devices we’re putting
in. Infrastructure—I’ll scream that with Craig all day long.
S4L: All of you are involved with an
organization called FLEXspace, which
is a wonderful repository of classroom
design, contributed by colleges and
universities all over the world. Could
you talk a little bit about that resource?
Park: Lisa Stephens, who’s at SUNY Buffalo, and Rebecca Fra-
zee, who’s at University of California, San Francisco, organized
FLEXspace as, in their own term, the “Pinterest” of the best class-
rooms in the world. The last time I talked to them, they had 6,000
classrooms catalogued. And they’re very much advocates for tying
your classroom experience to the Educause Learning Space Rat-
ing System (LSRS); they have a program called the FLEXspace
Integrated Planning Pathway that ties the two together. Go to
flexspace.org and register—it’s free. It’s a great resource.
FLEXspace recently aligned with HETMA, the Higher Ed-
ucation Technology Managers Alliance, to get those voices into
the classroom design conversation. And another good resource
is the Educational Technology Collaborative, which tends to be
more of the CIO-level members of this conversation. HETMA
in particular has been very vocal about trying to get better stan-
dards, better approaches, and better results from technology
planning, by being included in the conversation.
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief of Spaces4Learning.
Lisle Waldron, Manager,
Multimedia & Audio Visual
Services, The University of
Trinidad and Tobago
Christopher Dechter,
Manager, Instructional
Technology, University of
Wyoming