QUESTION: Does anybody have ideas/suggestions for interesting space partitions
to create "private" work spaces within a large open space?   this
would be for a large, open classroom used by lots of people that could
convert into or contain group work areas easily.

Ideally, there'd be some visual transparency and less sound transparency.
e.g. glass sliding walls, the white foam with hole cut outs at the d.school, etc

ANSWERS:

MAKE (INEXPENSIVELY):

-  old house windows with paned glass, where you set a bunch of them up with spraypaint frost to make them opaque.

- PVC pipe frames (or similar) and stretching cloth over them. Lots of color options, and if it's thin/light enough material, light can still pass through.

- A neat hack is transparent/lucent vinyl on a "shower curtain" rod. Of course actual shower curtains work too or fabrics. Analogous situations include shared hospital rooms, walk in refrigerator doors, and Daniel Laruso's Halloween costume in 'Karate Kid'.

BUY/MAKE (INEXPENSIVELY):

- Coroplast - It's like corrugated cardboard, only in plastic (they have some translucent colors). I friend on mine made some cubicle dividers with it and it looked nice. http://www.coroplast.com/catalog/coroplast

I've bought 4 x 8' sheets of white ~10-12mm thick at http://www.portplastics.com/signGraphics/signProducts/index.html  in San Jose. I cut a slot into 2 x 4" wood (router or table saw with dado blades) and slid the coroplast in for a quick way to frame it.

BUY (EXPENSIVELY):

- 3Form: http://www.3-form.com/

- Molo in Canada makes some neat pop-up accordian-style stuff for seating and partitioning. Cool videos on their site too.
- Herman Miller and Steelcase each offer  fixed and collapsible options -- from mini-blind format to more rigid 3form kinds of options.