Dear Academic Commons Advisory Board Member,
                                   
In this exciting first year in the life of the Academic Commons, we regret that we have not been sufficiently organized to create more opportunities for you, our Advisory Board, to actually offer guidance and advice. While we have no plans to deluge you with constant demands and deadlines, we have finally devised a useful activity that requires your attention. Your response is very important to us and to the future of Academic Commons!
                                   
At a January meeting of the editorial board, we decided to make several changes in the structure of Academic Commons. First, we're making a strong effort to increase traffic on the site, instituting a number of features that make the site more interactive and blog-like. Each of us is doing our best to read and report on the daily flow (or torrent!) of information about teaching and technology. We'd love to get your help in keeping Academic Commons fresh, relevant, and up-to-date with brief contributions in the form of comments, blog posts, and other  external linkings. If it is not clear to you how to do so on the site, please let us know! We can show you how. 
                                   
The editorial group also decided that it would be better to move to a bi-annual rather than quarterly schedule for our journal issues. And we think the best way to organize those issues is to create themes for each one. The benefits of "themed" issues are two-fold: it will allow us to be more specific about what sort of work we are looking for from our contributors; and our readers will then enjoy a more coherent collection of  materials.
                                    
To that end, we have identified six themes that we think are interesting and important. They are:
                                    
        * Open source/Open access
        * Educational Gaming
        * New Media and Higher Ed
        * Emerging Literacies and Pedagogies
        * So What? The Unbearable Burden of Assessing Technology in the Classroom
        * Social Software (aka web 2.0):  Challenges and Possibilities
                                   
We have created brief descriptions of each, which can be found at
http://www.academiccommons.org/themes06.
                                   
Since we can't pursue all of these themes at the same time, we are writing to ask for your advice. Which of these seems most interesting and/or useful to you? Which ones are less so, or have already received sufficient coverage elsewhere? For those that are most interesting, do you know of specific  projects/works that we might review? Of people we might interview? Of faculty work in the classroom that we might document? Of colleagues who might want to contribute materials?
                                    
We'd like to decide on the themes for the next two issues (August and December) soon, so please send your suggestions by Friday, April 7. We'll then issue a Call for Papers and circulate information about the special issues at the upcoming AAC&U Technology Conference (Seattle, April 20-22), the CLAC Conference (Hamilton College, June 13-15), and at upcoming NERCOMP sigs. We'll revisit the themes for the year each spring. Thanks for your help on this.
                                                     
                                     
Jennifer Curran, Managing Editor
John Ottenhoff & Michael Roy, Founding Editors