ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

AT YALE University in the 1960s, where I first worked as a researcher and teacher, the mainframe computers of the day were huge and expensive. The sole point of access to this scarce and precious resource was the university’s computer centre. As the focus for so many people’s work, this access point became a lively public space. It concentrated the expertise of an intellectual community in one area that became a place of intense, round-the-clock, peer-to-peer learning. You came to rely on seeing other computer users there and it became a place to be seen, a place where you could exchange news and gossip.

This was just the first stage in a long evolution of learning spaces. Nearly four decades later, the most significant developments are now emerging on the campus where I teach today, and I believe the consequences for the future of learning are far-reaching.

When I first saw the Arpanet, the forerunner to the internet, sputtering into life at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the late 1960s, I knew that networking would transform the shape and culture of learning communities. The function of any network is to distribute a resource, and when this happens, the social patterns associated with that resource change too. The consequences can be mixed, however. Replace the family hearth with networks of electric lights and central heating and you make more of your domestic space usable on cold, dark nights. But you lose a powerful way of regularly bringing the family together within a small circle of warmth and light.

Sure enough, as the Arpanet evolved into the internet, the consequences for learning spaces and communities were profound. Computer workstations with network connections began to spring up across campuses in the 1970s and 80s. But instead of bringing people together, they encouraged the fragmentation of work areas and made them more private. If academics had access in their offices and students, convenient access in their dorms, why ever come out?

But there were also positive changes. At the Harvard Design School in the 1980s, I convinced my dean to shut down the basement computer labs that had ghettoised computational work, and equip each desk in the design studios with a personal computer connected to the network. This brought together the culture of design and computing. It was like mixing chemicals and waiting for a reaction. The results were hugely productive.

Today, another change is sweeping through the MIT campus where I teach, and this may be the most significant of all. Wireless internet access is spreading fast (see Diagram). My students all have laptop computers with wireless internet access, which they take to every class. Computers no longer create fixed, specialised sites of learning like the old computing centres. Instead, they enhance the potential of every space to support some kind of intellectual activity. And in doing so, they encourage new combinations of research and learning.

This new pattern is changing the demand for space. The students are discovering that a laptop-friendly cafe is just the place for a brainstorming session, and that a shady spot under a tree serves as a quiet place to hack code on a sunny afternoon. That means there is less need for formal work areas with fixed desktop computers, and a growing demand for pleasant, flexible spaces that can be appropriated as needed. The campus is being used in a new way.

The wireless networks are also having a profound influence on the way learning happens. In the class I’m teaching right now – which happens to focus on radically rethinking the automobile and designing a concept car – my students and I meet when and where it suits our purposes, and our meetings are coordinated on the fly by email and instant messaging. We have our wireless computers augmented by video cameras, projectors, and conferencing to remote participants as necessary.

Whenever a topic emerges in the course of conversation, the students instantly google it and introduce any interesting results into the discussion. As we accumulate data, references, web links, ideas, sketches, computer-aided design models, and other relevant material, we record it in a blog-like website that represents our small community’s evolving, intellectual capital. The blog is accessible to any of us, at any time, from anywhere in the world.

This sort of creative practice may not seem very disciplined. It may even horrify those who think of teaching as the structured, authoritative dispensation of knowledge. But it is thrillingly intense and it enables us to make astonishingly rapid progress. It works, and I bet that this style of collaborative teaching will catch on.