With Academic Commons, we seek 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. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. If successful, this site will advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.

Academic Commons Editors
Bryan Alexander
David Bogen
John Ottenhoff
Michael Roy
Peter Schilling
Rachel Smith
M. Claire Stewart

Managing Editor:
Lisa Gates

Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons shares these principles with the Center's exploration of liberal arts education: (1) Free exchange: open source technology and the free and open exchange of ideas, intellectual and creative work; (2) Heterogeneity: an understanding of, and sensitivity to, different modes of inquiry and their value for the larger academic enterprise; (3) Rational evaluation: a respect for evaluative processes that are anchored within professional expertise and are based on practices of open and rational deliberation.

History

Academic Commons arises from meetings sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College. Participants wrestled with the complex and evolving relationships among technology, new media, and liberal arts education and articulated a gap in the resources available to the community concerned with these issues. Sharing the Center of Inquiry's desire to be a "catalyst for reshaping liberal arts education in the 21st century," Academic Commons also assumes that definitions of liberal arts education are changing. Technology, especially, challenges higher education professionals to think beyond conventional notions of the liberal arts and to broaden their understanding of what it means to be "liberally educated."

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Current Board Members
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Current Editors
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