Welcome to the New KML Newsletter

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Open Knowledge News! This newsletter, brought to you by the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, brings you the news about our newly created educational knowledge exchange space called the Teaching and Learning Commons, the Knowledge Exchange Exhibition Presentation (KEEP) Toolkit, and other related efforts.

The Teaching and Learning Commons

As some of you know, since we launched the KEEP Toolkit website in 2004, over 20,000 educators and students from all over the world have created over 100,000 online representations and collections that documented their efforts in educational transformation, course and curricular improvement, and experience in effective teaching and learning. Building upon this remarkable collective work, we have developed the Teaching and Learning Commons to further promote and support knowledge building and sharing in education. We would like to invite you to participate in this global effort with your experience in and passion for good and more effective teaching and learning, and hope this newsletter will stimulate and guide you in doing so. Be a part of the greater community at: commons.carnegiefoundation.org

Find KEEP Toolkit Work in the Teaching & Learning Commons

In addition to having a KEEP Toolkit page associated with your user alias, simple URLs for snapshots, stitched groups, and galleries, as well as the ability to share them within the KEEP Toolkit, the new publishing function enables our Google appliance to index and make your published work searchable by others in the Teaching & Learning Commons. This creates a new venue for you to share and exhibit your work. Yet another exciting area to check out here is the Community Favorites where the most popular items and a tag cloud from the KEEP Toolkit are featured.

Social Bookmarking

In a true Web 2.0 fashion, we now offer visitors to our new T&L Commons the ability to use other Web services such as social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, and more. We are working to continually enhance your experience of this exciting space with the interaction of services like Digg and educational playlist tools like H2O.

New Features in KEEP Toolkit 2.0

The KEEP Toolkit Version 2.0 is Here!

New Dashboard functions allow KEEP Toolkit users to license their work with Creative Commons licenses, and to share and make them searchable with easy to remember URLs. Viewers can now see published KEEP account pages without the need to login. To learn more about this, please read our Splash page >>

Publishing

Now you can publish your work! This function announces the work to Google and T&L Commons. This makes the work more easy to find by others! Select a number of snapshots, stitched groups, and galleries from your Dashboard and click "Publish." As a bonus, for each item you publish, you may choose a short URL. The short URL is easy to remember and send to colleagues. For example:
http://www.cfkeep.org/users/youralias/portfolio (using a short title) or http://www.cfkeep.org/users/ youralias/tags/yourtag (using a tag)
For more information, see the help files.

Licensing

We have included Creative Commons licensing that you may select for your work when you publish it with the KEEP Toolkit. There are six licenses, in addition to traditional copyright, available for use if you publish snapshots. The selected license will appear at the bottom of your pages. Learn more about the Creative Commons licenses >>

User Alias & Simple URL

In order to more easily view your published work, we ask you to select a user alias. This will enable you to browse your Dashboard. For example: http://www.cfkeep.org/users/youralias.
This link only shows your published work and is viewable by anyone. View our new tutorial on publishing and licensing >>

New Templates

We have added two new Case Study templates for our KEEP Toolkit users: HP Technology for Teaching and the Goldman-Carnegie Quest project templates. To find and use these as well as other templates offered in the KEEP Toolkit, visit our template gallery >>

New Ways of Using the KEEP Toolkit

Integrating Learning and Sharing Widely

Teams of faculty from Carnegie's Integrative Learning Project's (ILP) 10 campuses used the KEEP Toolkit to compile their ongoing documentation of pedagogies, programs, faculty work, and campus-wide initiatives that promote integrative learning. At the end of the 3 year project, ILP staff created their final report using the KEEP Toolkit in order to have an easy-to-compile and share document.

The KEEP Toolkit as a New Academic Genre in Teacher Education

Over the last several years, Tomás Galguera of Mills College has experimented with various uses of the KEEP Toolkit - from documenting his Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects, to sharing pedagogies of working with multimedia records of teaching. In this case study, he shares his ways he has used the KEEP Toolkit to support his preservice teachers' language awareness. His innovative use has helped his students collaborate, consider the environment needed for language development, and record their teaching practice.

Jack Mino:
Making Interdisciplinary Connections

Jack Mino, of Holyoke Community College, used the Toolkit to capture and make interdisciplinary student learning visible to himself and his colleagues. By carefully creating a format called a "Link Aloud," Mino has been able to see and understand some of the connections that students in the College's Learning Communities Program made between courses, disciplines, and subject matter.

Cultivating the KML Community

Learning to Learn, Learning to Teach

On May 29th 2007, KML Director Toru Iiyoshi and former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation John Seely Brown took part in the Carnegie Foundation’s Community Event Series for a community conversation on "Engaged Technology-empowered Communities of Practice: Learning to Learn, Learning to Teach." The discussion focused on how knowledge sharing and social networking technology enables communities of students and instructors to better learn and teach by harnessing a growing number of open educational tools and resources. Enthusiastic audience participation and a general discussion on technology-enabled open education and new cultures of learning and teaching followed the presentation.

Community Showcase

COPPER: A Multi-institutional Community of Practice

The Knowledge Media Lab would like to highlight this exceptional KEEP stitched group created by COPPER, entitled, "Pooling Educational Resources to Support the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning." COPPER is a leadership cluster participant of the Carnegie Foundation’s CASTL program, with eight diverse institutions that have partnered to create an evolving interdisciplinary community of practice focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Their mission is to create communities of practice that are vital, collaborative, connective, and communicative within and across institutions.

The Keep Toolkit Development Community

One of the goals of the KML has been to cultivate interest in further developing the KEEP Toolkit.  Recently, Sonya Zhang and Steve Curtis used the 1.9.8 version of the KEEP Toolkit as the basis for a research project. After a pilot study and prototyping, three months of coding, and two rounds of usability tests, Sonya Zhang of Claremont Graduate University (CGU) and Steve Curtis of Curtiscomp.com proudly announced the KEEP Social Learning Suite (SLS) version 1.0 on the KEEP Toolkit community forum on May 22, 2007. New features were added to the KEEP Toolkit to enable users to easily search and browse public snapshots and stitched groups, comment on snapshots, connect to external blogs, and collaborate in groups.

"In June, the School of IS & Technology at Claremont Graduate University has recommended KEEP SLS to all its doctoral student to create a required doctoral qualifying portfolio. As of June 20th, there are 61 registered users at the KEEP SLS site, of which 46 are CGU students. Users can testdrive the software at our site, keep.curtiscomp.com."
The KML team would like to congratulate Zhang and Curtis on a wonderful extension of the KEEP Toolkit, and encourage our users to take the testdrive. We are currently investigating the possibility of including some of Zhang and Curtis' new features in future KEEP Toolkit releases.