In a recent vote, members of the EDUCAUSE community selected the "Top Teaching and Learning Challenges" for 2009. The overlap among these challenges testifies to an emerging consensus in the thinking about learning environments in higher education. On the other hand, the fact that they remain "challenges" hints at a larger failure to transcend the industrial model of education, the model that characterizes the vast majority of students' experience on contemporary college and university campuses. For the #1 challenge--"Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation"--signs of progress proliferate. In this article, the authors look at a few efforts that have resulted in such environments. These individual projects, possible signposts of the revolution, may show the way to replacing the industrial model with a model of inquiry. Unfortunately, they may also go almost unrecognized by the cultures in which they're found, because of a collective inability to achieve a common language with which to describe learning environments and their aspirations. To be transformative, the inquiry model must be embedded in a "discourse" and "culture" of inquiry--in language and practice that marry the needs of the twenty-first-century learner to the pedagogies of engagement and that connect those needs to actual learning environments. The question is: To what extent is the recent spate of learning space dialogue and construction also building a language that effectively makes these connections? What do we talk about when we talk about learning spaces? (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures and 20 notes.)