I’m a little too tired right now to be of much use in the blogosphere. The wrap-up of my NLII report will have to wait until tomorrow. For now, a few highlights from this morning’s sessions:

We had a terrific presentation from a highly-regarded architecture firm on designing learning spaces, followed by an even better presentation from the former chair of the aero/astro dept. at MIT and the shepherd for the curricular and learning space redesign we saw on Wednesday evening. Key principles: define needs before you design space, have a champion and surround the champion with grounded dreamers and try to keep track of all the stakeholders that emerge along the way, think of the entire campus as a learning space and each individual space as part of the overall system of spaces, and wherever possible link curricular redesign with space redesign (and vice-versa). Other lessons: transform your campus’s learning spaces … one room at a time. (Good advice for the cash-strapped.) Expect lots of resistance. Remember that technology is today’s electricity: it’s simply a given.

And … assess.

Then we had breakout sessions in which we chose groups based on what kind of spaces we were interested in thinking about. My choice was instructional computing labs. I was with folks from MIT, Arizona, U ofWashingon, Stanford, and Michigan/Ann Arbor. I felt like the Little Engine That Could, or that Hoped He Could, or that Would Try To Look Like He Was Confident He Could Given The Resources. More on that session tomorrow. My favorite design principle: the design should include ways to capture both informal and formal student work and interaction, and make that work accessible to everyone, easily, at any point on the real or virtual campus.

Great bon mot from the report-back session: We need to design learning spaces to be “technology sockets.”

Big take-aways that I knew before but was cheered to hear again and again: learning is social, contextual, project-based; expertise is difficult to acquire and experts need to “scaffold” knowledge and learning for beginners; and perhaps my favorite (I’m paraphrasing): we don’t know enough about how students learn at a university, so we have to include as many modalities of learning as possible in our designs for learning spaces. (That was Jose from Thursday afternoon’s session.)

More on the morrow.