How might we merge a culture of inquiry into teaching and learning with a culture of experimentation around new media technologies? In this issue of Academic Commons we look at the possibilities for building knowledge around teaching and learning in a rapidly changing technological landscape. We take these questions up in the context of a dual challenge: to understand better the changing nature of learning with new media, and the potential of new media environments to make learning--and faculty insights into teaching--visible and usable.

This is a portrait of the new shape of learning with digital media, drawn around three core concepts: adaptive expertise, embodied learning, and socially situated pedagogies. These findings emerge from the classroom case studies of the Visible Knowledge Project, a six-year project engaging almost 70 faculty from 21 different institutions across higher education. Examining the scholarly work of VKP faculty across practices and technologies, it highlights key conceptual findings and their implications for pedagogical design.  Where any single classroom case study yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a framework that bridges from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 technologies, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been undervalued if not invisible in higher education.

“This is a social revolution, not a technological one,” says Michael Wesch, “and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.” Looking at higher education as a whole, as well as his own teaching, Michael Wesch argues that we have had our "why's," "what's" and "how's" of teaching and learning turned upside down, and that the most compelling consequence of this moment is that it has sent us into a new "question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment." 

It was a logical step for Cathy Davidson to move from a commitment to the public Humanities, in the tradition of John Hope Franklin (after whom the Center for the Humanities she directs is named) to a fascination with the potential of the new Web to transform the very nature of work we do in the Humanities. Intrigued by the success of participatory projects like Wikipedia, Cathy Davidson wonders “why this isn’t the most exciting time for all of us in our profession. Why aren’t we figuring out ways that we can use this exciting intellectual moment to bolster our mission in the world, our methods in the world, our reach in the world, our understanding of what we do and what we have to offer our students in the world?”

What impact are electronic portfolios having in higher education? In Electronic Portfolio 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact, contributors from diverse institutions of higher education in sites across two continents share their research on electronic portfolios. In an excerpt from the conclusion to that volume, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Barbara Cambridge, and Darren Cambridge consider how electronic portfolios provide a vehicle for a transition into the future of higher education.

Over the past ten years, hundreds of colleges and universities around the world have begun utilizing electronic student portfolios to advance learning, teaching, and assessment. Theory and practice in the field are changing rapidly, even as new technologies emerge and the landscape of higher education shifts. In 2008, six hundred educators from seventy universities came to LaGuardia Community College for an international conference entitled “Making Connections: ePortfolios, Integrative Learning and Assessment.” In one key session, national experts such as Trent Batson and Helen Barret joined LaGuardia faculty leaders for a roundtable on "The Future of ePortfolio," exploring the challenges and opportunities offered by a new era.

In their new book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (MIT Press, 2008), editors Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar bring together a diverse group of scholars of teaching and learning to address this question:  “How can open educational tools, resources and knowledge of practice improve the quality of education?” That is, how can educators take advantage of new knowledge-sharing tools in order to make their own learning visible, enhancing the collective understanding of how best to use these same tools in the classroom? By bringing together excerpts from the book’s diverse group of contributors, this article presents a snapshot of open education that sits at the intersection of innovation and the imperative for an expanding knowledge base on teaching and learning.

How can faculty from diverse disciplines cultivate and share knowledge about teaching practice?   In these essays, Tom Carey and Jennifer Meta Robinson explore the challenges of creating a digital repository for teaching resources, envision what a SOTL repository might look like, and discuss how such a repository would influence the emerging field of SOTL and its growing community of practitioners. The pieces are introduced by John Rakestraw, who reflects on the distinctive nature of SOTL as a field and points out further questions to consider in the process of developing a SOTL repository.

Faculty often fear that “assessment” will have a reductive effect, either by reducing the rich complexity of teaching and learning to simplistic metrics, or by limiting what’s being measured. Student learning in new media environments seems particularly difficult to reconcile with traditional assessment tools.

In this interview, Terrel Rhodes, director of the VALUE project, describes the process of creating metarubrics that provide flexible criteria for making valid judgments about student work, resulting in frameworks tailored to local contexts but calibrated to “Essential Learning Outcomes.”