In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons.

Today's library is still at the heart of all university activities, helping students and faculty become better learners, teachers, and researchers. In recent years there has emerged the formalizing of one or more of these activities into an Academic Commons. These centers of information have been labeled variously but they all share a commonality: the empowerment of students and teachers. In Creating the Academic Commons: Guidelines for Learning, Teaching, and Research, Thomas Gould gives a detailed outline of the various roles and activities that take place in commons located within the administrative umbrella of the library. Gould provides a roadmap for libraries seeking to establish their own Academic Commons, complete with suggestions regarding physical structure and software/hardware options. And to ensure new ideas are examined, evaluated, and adopted broadly, Gould shows how the Millennial Librarian can be at the center of this evolutionary library. Including information regarding the latest technological advances, this book will be an invaluable guide for librarians.

This simple guide provides valuable insights for transforming an out-of-date public, school, or academic library into a thriving, user-centric learning commons. The goal of the learning-commons strategy is to provide a centralized, "go-to" location for all users seeking help on the complex issues of teaching, researching, and being a global citizen in our changing world. A library organized around the learning-commons construct fosters collaborative work and social interaction between users during research and learning. This paradigm also encourages use of innovative technologies and information resources. Transforming a traditional library into a thriving learning commons does take some planning and effort, however. Each of the seven chapters in this book explains a simple step that a librarian can take to improve their facility. Photographs and concrete examples of the suggested strategies are included; checklists at the end of each chapter serve as indicators for measuring progress. This text is useful for library administrators in school settings (both public and private, K-12) as well as academic, public, and special libraries.

This book examines successfully planned and implemented learning commons at several different academic institutions around the world. These case studies provide a methodology for effective planning, implementation and assessment. Practical information is provided on how to collaborate with campus stakeholders, estimate budgeting and staffing and determine the equipment, hardware and software needs. Also provided are memoranda of understandings (MOUs), planning checklists and assessment tools. This book reflects a unifying focus on both the evolution of learning commons to learning spaces and the collaborative aspect of co-creating learning spaces. - Unique case studies representing very different types of Information Commons, Learning Commons, Faculty Commons and other Learning Spaces - International breadth and depth is assured through inclusion of case studies from Canadian, New Zealand, Australian and European institutions in addition to six in the United States - Practical checklists of planning and implantation considerations, as well as memorandum of understanding (MOU) templates, form the appendices

The whole landscape of space use is undergoing a radical transformation. In the workplace a period of unprecedented change has created a mix of responses with one overriding outcome observable worldwide: the rise of distributed space. In the learning environment the social, political, economic and technological changes responsible for this shift have been further compounded by constantly developing theories of learning and teaching, and a wide acceptance of the importance of learning as the core of the community, resulting in the blending of all aspects of learning into one seamless experience. This book attempts to look at all the forces driving the provision and pedagogic performance of the many spaces, real and virtual, that now accommodate the experience of learning and provide pointers towards the creation and design of learning-centred communities. Part 1 looks at the entire learning universe as it now stands, tracks the way in which its constituent parts came to occupy their role, assesses how they have responded to a complex of drivers and gauges their success in dealing with renewed pressures to perform. It shows that what is required is innovation within the spaces and integration between them. Part 2 finds many examples of innovation in evidence across the world – in schools, the higher and further education campus and in business and cultural spaces – but an almost total absence of integration. Part 3 offers a model that redefines the learning landscape in terms of learning outcomes, mapping spatial requirements and activities into a detailed mechanism that will achieve the best outcome at the most appropriate scale. By encouraging stakeholders to creating an events-based rather than space-based identity, the book hopes to point the way to a fully-integrated learning landscape: a learning community.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, academic libraries responded to rapid changes in their environment by acquiring and making accessible a host of new information resources, developing innovative new services and collaborative partnerships, and building new kinds of technology-equipped spaces to support changing user behaviors and emerging patterns of learning. The “Information Commons” or “InfoCommons” blossomed in a relatively short amount of time in libraries across North America, and around the world, particularly in Europe and the British Commonwealth. This book is more than a second edition of the 2009 book A Field Guide to the Information Commons which documented the emergence of a range of facilities and service programs that called themselves “Information Commons.” This new book updates this review of current practice in the Information Commons and other new kinds of facilities inspired by the same needs and intents, but goes beyond that by describing the continued evolution. This new book is an attempt to answer the question: “What might be the next emerging concept for a technology-enabled, user-responsive, mission-driven form of the academic library?” Like its predecessor, Beyond the Information Commons is structured in two parts. First, a brief series of essays explore the Information Commons from historical, organizational, technological, and architectural perspectives. The second part is a field guide composed of more than two dozen representative entries describing various Information Commons using a consistent format that provides both perspective on issues and useful details about actual implementations. Each of these includes photos and other graphics.

Experts discuss the potential for open education tools, resources, and knowledge to transform the economics and ecology of education. Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available—from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for students, self-learners, faculty, and educational institutions—we have yet to take full advantage of shared knowledge about how these are being used, what local innovations are emerging, and how to learn from and build on the experiences of others. Opening Up Education argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: by providing incentives for faculty to use (and contribute to) open education goods, and by looking beyond institutional boundaries to connect a variety of settings and open source entrepreneurs. These essays by leaders in open education describe successes, challenges, and opportunies they have found in a range of open education initiatives. They approach—from both macro and micro perspectives—the central question of how open education tools, resources, and knowledge can improve the quality of education. The contributors (from leading foundations, academic institutions, associations, and projects) discuss the strategic underpinnings of their efforts first in terms of technology, then content, and finally knowledge. They also address the impact of their projects, and how close they come to achieving a vision of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities that amounts to much more than pervasive technology. Through the support of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an electronic version of this book is openly available under a Creative Commons license at The MIT Press Web site, http://mitpress.mit.edu. Contributors Richard Baraniuk, Randy Bass, Trent Batson, Dan Bernstein, John Seely Brown, Barbara Cambridge, Tom Carey, Catherine Casserly, Bernadine Chuck Fong, Ira Fuchs, Richard Gale, Mia Garlick, Gerard Hanley, Diane Harley, Mary Huber, Pat Hutchings, Toru Iiyoshi, David Kahle, M. S. Vijay Kumar, Andy Lane, Diana Laurillard, Stuart Lee, Steve Lerman, Marilyn Lombardi, Phil Long, Clifford Lynch, Christopher Mackie, Anne Margulies, Owen McGrath, Flora McMartin, Shigeru Miyagawa, Diana Oblinger, Neeru Paharia, Cheryl Richardson, Marshall Smith, Candace Thille, Edward Walker, David Wiley

Writing Centers and Learning Commons presents program administrators, directors, staff, and tutors with theoretical rationales, experiential journeys, and go-to practical designs and strategies for the many questions involved when writing centers find themselves operating in shared environments. The chapters comprehensively examine the ways writing centers make the most of sharing common ground. Directors, coordinators, administrators, and stakeholders draw on past and present attention to writing center studies to help shape the future of the learning commons and narrate their substantial collective experience with collaborative efforts to stay centered while empowering colleagues and student writers at their institutions. The contributors explore what is gained and lost by affiliating writing centers with learning commons, how to create sound pedagogical foundations that include writing center philosophies, how writing center practices evolved or have been altered by learning center affiliations, and more. Writing Centers and Learning Commons is for all stakeholders of writing in and across campuses collaborating on (by choice or edict), or wishing to explore the possibilities of, a learning commons enterprise. Contributors: Alice Batt, Cassandra Book, Charles A. Braman, Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Patricia Egbert, Christopher Giroux, Alexis Hart, Suzanne Julian, Kristen Miller, Robby Nadler, Michele Ostrow, Helen Raica-Klotz, Kathleen Richards, Robyn Rohde, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, David Stock

Reimagining Leadership on the Commons examines leadership approaches derived from an, open, whole systems perspective and a more collaborative paradigm that recognizes that rather than being individualist self-maximizers, people prefer to work together to share benefits and found a society based on equality and justice.