For my last contribution to the Teaching and Learning Commons Journal, I have decided to do a quick year-in-review by highlighting some of KML’s favorite snapshots. Enjoy.

	Teaching E-Portfolio A visually appealing and very informative stitched group in which Shona Ellis’s personality successfully comes through as an integral part of the portfolio. -OT
	TLC Blog Entry The essays on student learning in this journal are highly accessible and relevant to educators coming across this blog. -OT
	Oral History Project Rebecca Dosch concisely documents her experience teaching oral history methods. She includes fidings along with samples of her students’ work.-PWS
	Adult Education Portfolio This stitch group is well organized and includes a number of references to scholarship in adult education. We could learn a lot for Lori Dimmick-Seagars. - PWS
	Victoria Marie, PhD This comprehensive faculty portfolio provides more than a report of courses, as it includes evidence of teaching proficiency. - CRR
	A Fiction Meaning Blood Jack mino’s syllabus-snapshot provides students with clear expectations by including a remixed and media-rich gallery of student work. - OT
	Duncan’s Curriculum Ambassador Experience This is a well organized report of a faculty development project. It includes helpful tips and descriptions. - CRR
	Cassie’s Portfolio The layers and use of font and color in this portfolio are very effective. Cassie integrates both reflections about her learning as well as her activities on campus.-CRR
	Developing an Inquiry Stance Toward Teaching Beverly Falk includes useful information about her context and reflections, making it possible for others to duplicate her efforts. She also skillfully incorporates images and video.-PWS
	Kounai Ken Using video and descriptive text, this snapshot shares the results of 5 years of action research for professional development of Japanese teachers.-CRR
	Merlot Africa Network This lays out the conceptualization of an open content project and offers a very useful example for others to build similar networks.-CRR
	Glendale Community College SPECC project To help us understand the power of a composition technique, this site provides a lesson plan, demonstration and voices of faculty and students. - CRR
	Teacher Immediacy Researcher provides compelling snapshot of a project on cheating.-CRR
	Supporting Personal Development Planning Using multimedia, this snapshot describes PDP and reflective learning for undergraduates. -CRR
	Bridging the Digital Divide Great description of the use of open source software to educate tutors and faculty about educational technology in Rome, IT. -CRR

Academic Commons, the site which seeks to

to form a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals who will help create a comprehensive web resource focused on liberal arts education

has changed its face.  It’s now very easy to add content to this community driven site and to see the latest additions.  Nicely done! - Cheryl R. Richardson

Difficulties faced by advocates of open educational resources are discussed on various websites and in several publications (for example, see OERs). A candid description of one issue is shared by Kevin Carey in “What’s missing in Open Education” (Inside Higher Ed, June 6). He explained a specific conundrum faced by highly selective universities that freely provide access to several courses. Below are some of his points that I found most interesting:

But even as information technology is changing our economy in ways that make exclusive college degrees ever more valuable, it’s also giving institutions like Yale new opportunities to be less exclusive, by educating people at a distance. This creates an ethical dilemma for Yale and its ilk. Hoarding intellectual resources in an era where they can be distributed far and wide at no cost seems selfish and counter to the spirit of higher education. But distributing those resources too far and wide could undermine the exclusivity on which Yale’s fame and fortune are based.

The Open Course Web site is an attempt to split the difference. Yale has clearly thought the implications of this through, which is why the fine print says “Open Yale Courses does not grant degrees or certificates” and “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.” Yale’s approach– free courses, but no credit–is consistent with similar efforts at other universities, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative and the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon.

…

The question is whether Yale and other fantastically wealthy colleges that husband their precious brand names will continue to act on those instincts, or will instead take the new opportunities that technology provides to help as many people as they can.

This particular vein in open educational resources also lacks modes and means for collaboration or re-mixing. The “knowledge” from these universities is bestowed upon others; it’s not meant to be openly built upon. I suppose this kind of knowledge building will continue to happen in peer-reviewed, academic journals. As Carey notes, it’s a hybrid between the completely open and the absolutely opaque. Does it work?
- Cheryl R. Richardson

The Carnegie Teaching and Learning Commons is hosting an ongoing conversation about the idea of the teaching commons. Discussion threads delve into the qualities and promises of the teaching commons, and other threads bring up challenges of building and sustaining it. This is not a new concept. As Mary Huber and Pat Hutchings discuss in their book, The Advancement of Learning, notions of the teaching commons are intellectually connected to the historical enactment of pastoral commons, in which resources (pastures) are shared in public spaces. It’s a simple idea, but it challenges the structures that sustain our current way of life. Writers of the Archipiélago magazine explain:

The serious and reasonable treatment of the commons implies a re-formulation of the human economy of exchange, positioning it closer to the gift economy, and the economy of generosity - to the benefit of the majority, since the circulatity and correspondence of exchanges applies to all of us - than to the economy of private exploitation of the public sector, in detriment to the fundamental principal of life and social co-existence. [from The Commons or New Approaches to the Public Domain]

What might this look like in our current context? One example that gets close might be found in European-style plazas and piazzas, discussed below.

Public space functions quite well, it’s a very active area of the city. The secret to its success is the mix of private, community and public initiatives which take place on the Square. To be lively a square needs bars and there are plenty of bars here. There is also some space for people to self-organize and develop freely their own activities in a way that neither a bar nor a shopping mall can provide. The other requirement is some entity to think and design the whole experience and to create some urban furniture and other elements susceptible to foster all those activities. [From From The Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces.]

However, plazas with bars do not necessarily respond to the need to provide public goods, like education, but they do offer a vision of how public, private, commercial, and social can interact.  This description also does not reveal a 21st century space with a well-integrated digital reality. We need to consider a few more elements.

The internet has a role to play. Juan Freire, the author of From The Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Space, quotes Stephen Downes, emphasizing the use of the internet in helping information flow and not capturing and trapping it. To do this, we must complement spectacular architecture (beautiful masterpieces) with structures that promote interaction. He also advocates the availability of free electromagnetic space and digital skin overlayed on physical spaces (imagine the plaza in which physical and digital interaction happen simultaneously; see the wikiplaza project). These all point to an exciting, modern version of the commons. Knowledge is open, free, and flowing. Public, private, and government bodies interact physically and digitally, and architects help design spaces to make it all possible. Utopian? What does this look like in education? Given our current infrastructure, how do we consider what this means at the level of department, school, district, university, national system? How do we go beyond these structures or re-shape them?

–Cheryl R. Richardson

Collaborative learning is an umbrella term that generally refers to educational approaches involving the joint intellectual effort of learners who work together toward a common goal. Educators and researchers often note the benefits of this method of instruction, citing such things as students sharing their strengths, developing weaker skills, dealing with conflict, being actively involved with material, and having more opportunities for feedback. And when collaborative learning happens, the success of one learner usually leads to the success of others. Everyone gains.

Learning collaboratively has the same benefits for those dedicated to improving our teaching. For example, Yahoo! Teachers helps teachers share and co-create lesson plans. And through its CASTL, SPECC, and Quest projects, the Carnegie Foundation provided space and guidance for faculty and instructors to collaborate over issues of teaching and learning.

The Carnegie Teaching and Learning Commons also is based on this premise–i.e., that instructors and faculty will improve their teaching practice as they work together toward a common goal of improved student learning. Toward this end, the T&L Commons supports a few different areas meant to promote collaboration among educators. The IdeaBank helps educators find, save, and build on each other’s ideas. The KEEP Toolkit provides a set of tools that allow several people to contribute to web-representations of teaching or to share separate ideas with colleagues. Most recently, we added an asynchronous discussion section called the Commons Forum. Here, any person dedicated to improved teaching and learning can engage others in a conversation about relevant issues.

We opened Commons Forum with a four-day webevent, in which five scholars of teaching and learning posed questions and jump-started conversations. Their threads of discussion are focused on the idea of a “commons” (What is a commons? How and why does it work? What do we need to build to sustain one?) and are supplemented by a recorded interview to further spark one’s imagination. This set of online discussions are particularly interesting to those who want to find and structure ways to engage their colleagues in conversations of teaching and learning. There are 53 posts surrounding these ideas so far. What are yours? Join the conversation and share your thoughts, general queries and links. We all will benefit.

–Cheryl R. Richardson

Knowledge is created when we find new ways to approach (or solve) problems that current theories fall short of addressing. Knowledge is built upon when given knowledge chunks are understood, commented upon, tested, mixed with other ideas, assimilated, adjusted to fit new situations, and extended. Understanding this about knowledge creation and building, the Knowledge Media Lab designed the IdeaBank to help users collect, reflect, and share new configurations of ideas. Every time a user creates a new annotated list of sites, she has the potential of contributing an augmented knowledge piece that may respond to someone else’s efforts to improve teaching and learning. Knowledge grows and so do networks.

Over the last 8 years the KML has developed tools and processes that help educators document and share their knowledge of teaching practice. These KML resources also have been used by institutions and departments to document and share their innovations and transformation processes and by students to document their learning. Offline, we know that others have learned and built upon the snapshots of practice, knowledge, and innovation created and displayed by the KML on the internet.

The IdeaBank is a step toward moving the process of knowledge building online, where we can all see and grow from what our colleagues do.

The IdeaBank allows users to collect and save useful and/or inspiring representations of innovations and practices. But more than that, it encourages users to think about what they’ve found, to write what makes items particularly useful and in which situations. Users do this as they add reflections on particular items and provide titles for collections. Once created, IdeaLists should be published so that anyone who enters the Teaching and Learning Commons can find, learn from, and build upon them. Publishing also allows a creators to email links to colleagues.

Carnegie Foundation president Lee S. Shulman has reminded us severally that teaching should be community property–we learn from good practice when we all can see it, understand it, and value it. The IdeaBank is the latest in a suite of tools geared toward helping any educator or student do just this–to engage in the communal endeavor of improving teaching and learning across time and space.

– Cheryl R. Richardson

The Teaching and Leaning Commons has a new feature, The IdeaBank, which is a place to save and grow ideas about teaching and learning. Users can collect, comment on, extend, and share new configurations of ideas they find using the Commons search tool.

Here’s how it works:
1- After users save various items found using the Commons search the fun begins. The search will yield published KEEP Toolkit sites and Gallery of Teaching and Learning entries.

2- Faculty, students, administrators–anyone–provide reflections on the items they found. Their reflections might be responses to: How is this piece useful to my work? What did I learn from it?….

3- Next, users group specific items and copy them into specialized lists that they want to build upon and share. Users title the list and write a description so others know what is contained. Titles may emerge from asking: How are these four items related? How can my department use this collection in our next meeting? What’s the next step for extending this kind of thinking?….

4- Once a new list is named and described, users publish it to send to colleagues and to make it visible in the Commons Here’s a list about seeing student learning.

Faculty, students, administrators, and anyone committed to knowledge building around teaching and learning can contribute to the bank by creating and publishing lists. It’s also important to know that we all create the currency used in the bank by creating and publishing multimedia, KEEP Toolkit sites.

After a one year experiment, Indiana Professor Jason Baird Jackson, has made the Museum Anthropology Review, a peer-reviewed journal, open and free online. This publication makes anthropological scholarship freely available to scholars and the public while preserving the quality granted in the review process. Here’s to another step in the direction of truly opening education.

From InsideHigherEd.com:

“A professor at Indiana University who is editor of an anthropology journal published traditionally has started a new journal — online and free — using tools made available by the library. After a one-year experiment, the journal is now officially launched and is already attracting many more readers than the establishment print model ever did.

There are hundreds of scholarly journals published online, plenty of them free. But what makes Museum Anthropology Review’s launch notable is that it is being led by the same editor as the traditional journal, Museum Anthropology, using the exact same peer review system.”

Harvard University’s decision to deposit scholarly articles in an open access repository is invigorating.  Harvard is using the Internet to widely disseminate knowledge and research, giving access to those who cannot or do not subscribe to specific journals.

Some fear the demise of scholarly journals, as more universities opt for free access.   Publishers and scholars should begin to look for ways to move peer review and publication to the Internet and reduce their print costs.  According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 21) “About a dozen institutions worldwide, including in Asia, Australia, and Europe, have required free access to faculty members’ articles.”  I wonder what the impact on publication has been in these places?

I look forward to seeng how this and other open access initiatives encourage interaction.  So far the conversation has been about dissemination; it will be interesting to see how open access plans begin to include web-based interactive tools to learn when, how, who, and for what purposes users access free, academic knowledge.

The Open Society Institute and Shuttleworth Foundation are actively drawing attention and resources to create more free and adaptable on-line materials. On January 22, 2008 the Open Society Institute announced The Capetown Open Education Declaration, which brought together the call of teachers, students, web gurus, and foundations to make more education materials free and open. The declaration encourages publishers and governments to make curriculum materials available, accessible, and adaptable, thereby creating the potential for affordable textbooks for developing and emerging economies. It also encourages all educators to contribute their adaptations and pedagogical knowledge, ensuring that local forms of knowledge become a part of the larger internet pool of ideas.

This development is a part of the growing Open Content/Open Education movement spreading on the internet, and it contributes the exciting call to a diverse group of nations to participate. In the English speaking world, the majority of Open Education initiatives house contributions from the US and UK. MIT’s OpenCourseware, Rice University’s Connexions, Foothill College’s Sophia Project, OER Commons, and Open University’s Open Learn and collaborations such as MERLOT have collected and disseminated high quality materials for some time (Rice University’s Connexions began in 1999). These projects have thrived with the support of philanthropies like the Hewlett Foundation, whose contributions have facilitated testing of the concept and development tools and methods that encourage open exchange of educational materials among educators. They have helped create a transferable model now being adapated worldwide. This is open knowledge exchange at its best–once created, the ideas have been shared, now adapted and eventually will be shared again.