A group met on April 6, 2004 to discuss the proposed Information Commons at UMass Amherst.

Charlena Seymour spoke: Introduce our vision of a "Learning Commons": Creating a place to attract students with services and resources, including good food and coffee, technology help, writing program, and learning support tutoring.

Glenn Cafferty: Learning surrounded by support, innovation, resources, and community. Metaphor: country store -- a one-stop place to get what you need. Support: give a face to services, single point of access, just-in-time support, writing, research, technology, and disciplinary, help counters, peer tutors, TA cubicles, Vendor-sponsored support resources. Resources: library collection, technology, digital course content. Community: cafe, 224/7 meeting place, faculty/student interaction, furniture and spaces designed for collaboration, IM groups by course or major, student's helping students. Innovation: New ways to learn, assess performance, deliver services and resources, collaborate, diffuse successful pedagogy, and instructional technology, make connections to the community. (Proctoring of electronic exams, TAs and digital content available to subsequent courses, supportive environment to support group work and undergraduate research, platform for data collection and assessment). Toward environment of ubiquitous computing, collaboration, and access to resources.

Joan Lippincott: Overview of successful efforts at other institutions. scenario: how are users meeting their information and technology needs. Cyberinfrastructure: what do we need, besides the facility. Integrated facilities: what kinds of services of incorporated. Collaboration. Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) http://www.cni.org/ Scenario: after beginning project in traditional classroom, they need a space to work together. Oregon State, University of Arizona, Emory, Leavey all have information commons areas, with workspaces for groups. Cyberinfrastructure: seamless, teaching, learning and infromation environment that is user centered, not "silo-centered". NSF Blue Ribbon Advisory panel: use cyberinstructure to build more ubiquitous comprehensive digital environment that become interactive and functionally complete for research communities in terms of people, data, information, tools, and instruments. Elements: digital content (customization, personalization, portals); People (collaboration, new types of information professionals, training, information literacy); Technology (network infrastructure, middleware, last mile); Physical spaces (wired classrooms, wired social spaces, information commons, multi-media production studies, experimental spaces). Planning should encompass, all types of spaces, support, information resources, technology infrastructure. Large scale integrative projects: University of Arizona (tutoring/advising, instructional areas, information commons/computer classroom -- different styles of classrooms, discussion rooms, media resource center, courtyard), Indiana University (fall, 2003, created with no major new funding. Many services, including career services), University of Georgia (classrooms, advanced learning labs, reference service poinnts, group study rooms, coffee shops), USC (Leavey Library, workstations with more than one chair, visited 6 or 7 service points: asked what they did -- they couldn't tell), Dartmouth (many services). Common threads: support student learning, individuals and groups, user centered, information retrieval, creation, and synthesis. What is the reality of working together cross sectors? Colocation (adjacent service points for the convenience of the user, informal cross-sector staff contact), cooperation (joint planning, minimize overlap, discuss overall services and fill gaps, learn about other's expertise), collaboration (develop shared mission and goals, shared governance, pool expertise). Think clearly about what you want to accomplish. Well your facility be: a glorified computing lab or a collaborative learning space? A reference area with computers or a place to access information? Fiefdoms of service points or a place where people can get stuff done? What is your vision? http://www.dartmouth.edu/collab/

Mike Williams: math emporium. Anybody with a userid can use the facility. We have a check-in system. We have infinite statistics on everything that happens. Couldn't get space on campus: old five and dime store. Avoided choice that commit you to doing things one way: avoided walls. The enemy is turfism, parochialism. Hexagonal pods, 550 computers (Macs!). Proctored area reserved for testing. Students welcome to use the computer as they want (IM, Internet, etc). The emporium is not about synchronous activities, but there is an area for presentations and orientation sessions, used informally and for special events. Dire financial straits, math dept has lost 1/3 of tenure track faculty, 11,000 student registrations of which 7000 is in the first two years (intro courses), one course with 1600 students in 40 person sections. Lectures don't scale. If what you're interested in is "learning", then it happens when you "do it". Students are motivated by the bottom line: succeeding on exams. They wrote a testing system that invokes new versions of each kind of question. Students are not required to attend at any particular time: just to take weekly quizzes and periodic exams. The math emporium is simply there, available. They tried to use commercial software: didn't work. Less focus on materials: very basic and utilitarian. Testing system, high capacity. Student perspective is mixed. The number one complaint: they're off campus. The second complaint: I have to work too hard. Hard to measure success in terms of learning outcomes.

Fred Zinn and Copper Giloth put together a "place mat" for people to scribble on and write about their ideas for the learning commons. Nifty.

For each LC goal (support, resources, community, innovation) what have you heard you particularly like?, What concerns you?, whom should we talk to that we might have missed? What opportunities might we be overlooking? I particularly liked the co-located services, informal spaces for collaboration -- especially facilities for projection or large screens for groups to use to organize. I'm concerned about the lack of coordinated infrastructure on campus -- this is improving, but still has a long way to go. I'm also concerned about how this will affect my role and the facility I manage. The opportunity I think that has been missed is the idea of building a community wireless network that could transform all of Amherst into a "learning commons." Rather than trying to change the destinations that students are choosing, to support them at the destinations they've already chosen.