Future learning spaces for learning communities: Perspectives from the learning sciences

Educational technologies play an essential role in supporting the seamless integration between formal and informal, physical and virtual learning spaces (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2010). These characteristics of the networked society demand refined instructional approaches to make the best use of the emerging opportunities that bring together meaningful sociocultural practices and canonical disciplinary knowledge while taking advantage of differences between learners (Collins & Halverson, 2010). These ideas are at the heart of the learning communities approach (Hod, Bielaczyc, & Ben-Zvi, 2018). Centrally concerned with community-driven learning experiences in complex spaces fostered by the use of educational technology, this special section focuses on Future Learning Spaces for Learning Communities. It aims to enhance conceptual frameworks, supported by empirical study, that can guide educational researchers and practitioners on how to design technology-supported learning environments for productive student engagement (Kali, Baram-Tsabari, & Schejter, 2019). Previous research in this area is fragmented and dispersed across different disciplines such as human–computer interaction, architecture, environmental psychology and computer-supported collaborative learning (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016). With an eye on bringing multiple perspectives under one roof, this special section draws on scholarship from the interdisciplinary field of the learning sciences (Sawyer, 2014). These efforts are motivated by the redesign or construction of learning spaces, which is a major, worldwide trend in contemporary education. Currently, financial resources equivalent to billions of dollars are being spent on educational infrastructure in higher education alone (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016; Johnson, Adams Becker, Cummins, Estrada, Freeman, & Hall, 2016). With surges such as makerspaces, virtual reality and other smart, connected communities of learning, the idea of future learning spaces adds a largely unexplored layer of research on educational technology. Future learning spaces are an emerging, and still loosely defined concept that has gained popularity in recent years as a new line of research in education. It responds to contemporary challenges by taking into account societal changes brought out in the age of innovation (Hod et al., 2019; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014; Sutherland & Fischer, 2014), what is known about human learning (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine, 2018), and rapidly advancing networked, digital technologies that are altering the space–time relationship of learning (Eberle, Lund, Tchounikine, & Fischer, 2015; Leander et al., 2010). At the same time, learning communities have been one of the most significant re-conceptualizations of schooling in the past several decades (Hod et al., 2018). Learning communities support the growth of its members in a culture of learning where every learner's contribution is legitimized and plays an important role in advancing the collective knowledge of the community (Bielaczyc & Collins, 1999). Because learning communities necessitate a variety of participation structures and activities, they benefit strongly from the use of educational technologies. Future learning spaces take these affordances into account, allowing for dynamic and flexible implementation of any one or more physical and virtual activities required to support the emerging needs of a learning community. Given these trends and the enormous investments being made to implement future learning spaces and learning communities in educational settings, the combination of both approaches represents a large opportunity for practitioners and researchers interested in educational technologies to help rethink the way schooling and learning is organized in the 21st century (Hod, 2017). This special section brings together international perspectives from a variety of theoretical and methodological orientations. The six papers included provide empirical studies in a range of educational settings, populations and content areas, contributing in three different ways to our understanding about how applications of educational technology systems can be understood and developed. Specifically, this special section provides (1) novel conceptualizations and theoretical approaches to the way we think of future learning spaces for learning communities; (2) explanations as to how physical and digital spaces shape learning experiences and how learners modify these spaces during learning; and (3) insights into how to successfully bring scientific knowledge on future learning spaces for learning communities into real-world educational settings. Damşa, Nerland, and Andreadakis (2019) take a bird's eye view on the topic, sharpening the conceptualization of future learning spaces. Proposing an ecological perspective on learning and technology, the authors propose five defining principles of learning spaces and illustrate them empirically. This ecological perspective cuts across all papers of this special section in that they are neither space-centered nor techno-centered, but consider educational technologies and spaces as part of the ecology to foster robust learning communities. The next four papers provide empirical findings on the question of how specific elements of future learning spaces can shape interactions and participation in computer-supported learning communities and how learners shape learning spaces in reverse. Two of these papers examine how designed aspects of technology-enhanced physical spaces affect social dynamics and attention. Specifically, Yeoman and Wilson (2019) investigated intended and unintended effects of different setups of technology-enhanced spaces on emergent learning activities. The authors emphasize that the physical environment needs to enable and support physical activities, related to human sense-making and social interaction, as this is their strength in comparison to virtual spaces. Along similar lines, Sopher, Fisher, Gewirtzman, and Kalay (2019) aggregated the multiple design decisions of students in a dual-space architectural learning community, creating development graphs about students' knowledge construction activities. Their careful focus on a cutting-edge, immersive space in this context sheds light on the different types of learning trajectories that high-tech spaces can afford. The following two contributions center on virtual spaces and how they can mediate collective knowledge building processes. Hod, Yaari, and Eberle (2019) assume that technologically created spaces are part of community life that must be nurtured and cared for. Their paper elucidates the interconnectedness between responsibility-taking over learning spaces and knowledge building processes by showing how they are entangled in one another. Yuan and Zhang (2019) examined how a particular educational technology, the Idea Thread Mapper, can be used to support cross-space interactions by connecting multiple knowledge building communities working across different classrooms. Finally, Kali, Sagy, Benichou, Atias, and Levin-Peled (2019) propose a way to help educational practitioners meaningfully integrate new technologies and pedagogies into their teaching practices. By proposing the TPeCS framework, this paper widens previous conceptions of teachers' knowing that consider pedagogies, content knowledge and educational technologies together. The additional dimension of space adds a new, relevant facet regarding what it takes to foster productive learning environments in the networked society. To sum, the six papers in this BJET special section present empirical findings and conceptual frameworks rooted in the design of future learning spaces for learning communities. The contribution of this international research effort can not only be a guide for academic scholarship, but can be a valuable resource for educational practitioners on how to conceptualize, design and best make use of this growing worldwide phenomenon.