Welcome to Open Knowledge News

Welcome to the second issue of Open Knowledge News. For those of us at the Knowledge Media Lab, summer just flew by. We've been busy working to further teaching and learning through outreach to the community and by developing resources that help community members engage with each other and our sites. Below we highlight a few of these newly developed features for the Teaching & Learning Commons, and present to you the redesigned Gallery of Teaching & Learning. Enjoy!

The Gallery of Teaching & Learning's New Look

The Gallery Grows Greener

The Gallery of Teaching & Learning renovation is now complete. You'll notice a more unified look and feel, as its pages now don the traditional "Carnegie Green." Also, the Higher Ed and K-12 collections of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning have more distinguished program pages. We hope through renovating the KML sites and more closely uniting our resources, we can facilitate greater knowledge exchange among teachers, learners, and researchers. (Next remodel: KEEP Toolkit!)

Featured Work is OUR New Feature

We're proud of the work produced for the Gallery of Teaching & Learning, which includes collections created by Carnegie Foundation programs, exhibitions and case studies. To help users find the Gallery's hidden gems, we will begin highlighting outstanding collections of work on its home page. It is our hope that as more notable work is collectively created, our collection will continue to grow.

Enhancing the Commons

The New and Improved Community Favorites

Do you want to know what other visitors to the Commons are looking for and viewing? The Community Favorites page reflects the most widely used search terms, most visited and bookmarked pages, and the Carnegie Signature Tags in the KEEP Toolkit. You can also view recent changes to these lists by looking at the "more..." pages, which display the most popular queries or pages from the last 30 or 60 days. The lists include published KEEP snapshots and stitched groups, as well as pages in the Gallery of Teaching & Learning and the Commons itself.

Open Knowledge World Wide

We enjoy seeing how people around the world connect to the KML's sites. To share this information with you, we've created the map above to show the distribution of our sites' users. While the number and distribution of U.S. views is fairly similar across the three sites, The Gallery of Teaching & Learning and the KEEP Toolkit show a slightly different distribution around the world.

You will note that the map shows visitors to The Teaching & Learning Commons (orange) from over 800 cities across the globe. Similarly, The Gallery of Teaching & Learning (purple) has global visitors from over 700 cities and the KEEP Toolkit (green) receives visitors who represent 750 cities from around the world.

New Ways of Using the KEEP Toolkit

Showing Subject Matter Competency at SFSU

San Francisco State University English majors who plan to enter teacher credential programs have begun to assemble their reflections and work using the KEEP Toolkit. In order to meet California state requirements, they have created snapshots and stitched groups to display subject matter competence. To learn more about their pilot project, continue reading ...

Linking Teaching & Learning by Linking Community Members

Since the spring of 2007, faculty members of the Writing Across the Curriculum project at the College of San Mateo have helped students build their eportfolios using the KEEP Toolkit. In the process, faculty have found effective ways to collaboratively assess students' eportfolios. The Toolkit also allows faculty and students to link their projects to Institutional Student Learning Outcomes. To learn more about their work with students, assessment, and integrative learning, continue reading...

Hot Tip

Publish Your Work With The KEEP Toolkit!

You can make your KEEP Toolkit snapshots, stitched groups, and galleries public and searchable by choosing to "publish" them from your Dashboard. When you publish, you can choose a license provided by Creative Commons, or a traditional copyright and a short URL. These simple steps will make it easier for you to share educational projects, portfolios, or your ideas for improving teaching and learning in our Teaching & Learning Commons.

Featured Snapshot

Life Science in Polk County

Ms. Allsbrook's stitched-group syllabus is comprehensive and well-organized, and must be an invaluable resource to all her students. Arranged by topic, the syllabus includes learning objectives, schedules and related links. Graphically represented concepts for every idea presented in her course are also provided. Her presentation is meticulous—from the consistency of each concept to her image citations—and everything is easy to find and understand.