This website offers an overview of using digitized audio commentary to respond to student writing.  Features include

·benefits for students and faculty  

·articles on audio commentary

·samples of MP3 audio commentaries

·research on student attitudes including student interviews

·recording options (how-to instructions)

The Voluntary System of Accountability is a joint project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC). Responding to the challenges of the Spellings Commission, the VSA aims to make publicly available information about a wide variety of factors, ranging from accurate tuition costs to institutional performance in meeting core learning outcomes.

Of particular interest is the "Core Educational Outcomes Task Force," which has "decided on a preliminary set of learning outcomes tests that, at a minimum, measure critical thinking, analytic reasoning and written communication, and that also can be used in a value added format. Those tests are: C-Base, CLA, CAAP, MAPP, GRE and ACT WorkKeys." The Task Force is currently evaluating these tests for possible piloting.

Jeffrey R. Young has a brief piece in the Chronicle highlighting some efforts to keep track of academic blogs, noting Academicblogs.org, which grows out of the blogrolls at Crooked Timber and a few other lists. It uses Mediawiki for its platform and, since launching in September, has accumulated a substantial list. Young marvels at the growing number of blogs out there--he counts at least 470 listed for the humanities alone. He quotes Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, who maintained the Crooked Timber list until it ported over to Academicblogs. Farrell acknowledges that there is no way to insure quality control: "The only policing is to make sure that anybody who's there is an academic," he said.

Devoted to the encouragement and exploration of the digital humanities in all its forms, ADHO's activities encompass the publication of

peer reviewed journals:

AAC&U organizes its work around four broad goals:

ARTstor is a non-profit organization created with several aims:  

1) To aid in the transformation of education in the arts and humanities through the innovative use of digital technology;

2) To achieve economies of scale and reduce costs for the community by providing digital images for teaching and scholarship;

3) To facilitate efficient dissemination of content from a broad range of time periods, cultures and disciplines, making accessible large portions of our cultural record scattered across libraries, museums, archives, galleries and private collections around the world; and

4) To work with the community to find answers to commonly shared problems, including the development of standards and best practices for the creation of useful visual materials.  

As of July 2007, 750 colleges, universities, schools and museums have access to ARTstor's evolving library of close to 600,000 images and its accompanying software tools.

ARTstor seeks to play a role in the international network connecting educational institutions with content contributors, ranging from artists (such as the Roy Lichtenstein Estate) and photographers to museums (such as the Getty) and libraries (such as the Harvard College Libraries). In doing so, we work with the community to develop policies around sharing image collections, as well as to develop and enhance harvesting software and schema that promote interoperability (such as the Open Archives Initiative and CDWA-Lite), leading to the aggregation for users of images from disparate sources. We believe the coming years will bring continued expansion of an ever more decentralized environment. ARTstor's role in such an environment will not be that of the single source of image content, but rather that of a value-adding node in this increasingly networked environment. Toward this aim, much of our time has been spent creating or improving upon existing inter-relationships and networks, building bridges across the community and demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of facilitating the use of digital images. 

After this summer's Chronicle article "Bloggers Need Not Apply," which discussed the dangers of such a "public display of a [job] applicant's personal eccentricities,"  Slate's "Attack of the Killer Blogs" points out yet another pitfall -- "Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?"