Daily Archives: December 17, 2008

2 posts

New ‘Learning Commons’ Defies Commonplace

Chelmsford Library Revamped: In the place formerly known as the library, students perch on long-legged chairs and huddle in purple and black booths. Once a week, they drink coffee and discuss books in the Java Room. They watch a history lesson, school news, and CNN on a 58-inch flat-panel “digital kiosk.” Just don’t call it the library. The new Learning Commons was born from the old Chelmsford High School library, until recently an area so notoriously shabby that school officials conspired to keep superintendent candidates from glimpsing its electric yellow walls and duct-tape-scarred floors. But the school district’s head of […]

Library 2.0 In A Blink: A TTW Guest Post from Chris Oien

In Michael’s Library 2.0 class, I had the opportunity to read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and I wrote up the lessons I thought libraries could take from it as they seek to better themselves in a Library 2.0 world. Here’s the condensed, bloggy version of what I took away. Lesson one: The Aeron chair. This chair was break aesthetically from how office chairs had always looked, but despite some initial outside skepticism, the design team persevered because they knew they had created a great project; the chair came to be the company’s biggest seller. Similarly for libraries, it is important […]