Fall is in the air, and as we all try to ignore the red & green holiday decor that is already on the shelves in some stores, I do have a holiday in the front of my mind — Halloween. It’s such a fun holiday. I mean, you get candy from strangers and get to dress up in silly outfits. Awesome. So when one of the dates for the Informal Group on Learning Spaces meetings came on October 25th, I knew it needed to be a fun Halloween-inspired meeting. I wish I could have everyone come to the meeting for a costume contest, but it’s just a few days too early for that. So, the next best thing? Making a Haunted Building tour of the campus! I am really excited about it. That is, until I realized I don’t really know many ghost stories about campus hauntings. Whoops. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Thankfully, the fabulous group of people that gather for the Learning Spaces meetings are at my rescue. At this morning’s meeting, I already gathered the back stories on 2 different haunted locations. There’s half our tour! 😉 I still need to hear about some other haunted campus locations, so if you’ve got the story, comment here! We’ll visit the haunting and have a good storyteller share the tale. Too bad we can’t do the tour at night and do some amateur ghost hunting. You know, capturing EVPs with the sophisticated lecture capture equipment in the classrooms and borrowing thermal scanners from a lab to look for heat signatures, etc, etc . . . I am sure this sort of investigating would really help us move our classrooms into the future. We might get some good advice. Ha ha.

So, the schedule for our fall meetings is online on our Informal Group on Learning Spaces page, so check there for all that info. Contact Leslie Hammersmith if you want to be added to a calendar invite and get reminder emails. I want to take up some of this post to share with you some of the great ideas that came up for some future meetings. I tell you, this group has some of the best ideas that keep our meetings from becoming stale and boring. I think my favorite idea came from Peter Mortensen, who said, “I think every semester should have a hard hat tour!” Inspired by the number of capital improvement projects going on (that means new buildings for you non-administrative types), someone offered to give the group a tour of a building before it is finished. I already have my next series of “fun” tours to plan with the added bonus that now I can come up with a logo for the Informal Group to put on our personalized hard hats. Yeah. Right.

Some of the other ideas for future meetings included talking about Outdoor Learning (informal learning spaces in the “field”), finding and using Swing Spaces (those temporary classrooms and offices when buildings are under construction), learning more about how our classrooms are scheduled and utilized, and updates on classroom governance and surveys.

Hope to see you this semester!