Traditionally, academic institutions have segregated multimedia production from disciplinary study. Bernie Cook wondered what his American Studies students would learn from working collaboratively to produce documentary films based on primary sources, and what he in turn might find out about their learning in the process. Students created documentary films on local history, and wrote reflections on their creative and critical process. Not only did students report tremendous engagement with the topics and sources for their projects, they also indicated satisfaction at being able to screen their work for an audience. By allowing his students to become producers of content, Cook enables them to participate fully in the intellectual work of American Studies and Film Studies.

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.

What endures about the work from the Visible Knowledge Project are the insights about teaching and learning that bridge from Web 1.0 technologies to Web 2.0. These insights emerged from the work in VKP by looking across practices and beyond specific technologies and sometimes the technology itself. These insights include findings that are conceptual and bear on pedagogical designs. Where any one of the classroom case studies yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a picture of new learning, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been invisible or undervalued in higher education.  (Part II of III)

What endures about the work from the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) are the insights about teaching and learning that bridge from Web 1.0 technologies to Web 2.0. These insights emerged from the work in VKP by looking across practices and beyond specific technologies and sometimes the technology itself. These insights include findings that are conceptual and bear on pedagogical designs. Where any single classroom case study yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a picture of new learning, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been invisible or undervalued in higher education. (Part III of III)

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.

How can we teach students to slow down their reading process and move beyond surface-level comprehension? Patricia O’Connor’s Appalachian Literature students co-constructed hypertexts which capture the connections readers make among assigned texts, reference documents, and multimedia sources. These hypertexts became more than artifacts of student work; rather, they became collaborative, exploratory spaces where implicit literary associations become explicit.

What happens when the discussion board goes from being just an assignment to a springboard for intellectual community? Foreseeing many benefits to cultivating discussion among his English students, Ed Gallagher worked to develop frameworks to articulate why discussion is not only central to the learning process in the classroom but also beyond its walls. A higher level of critical analysis, reflection, and a synthesis of multiple perspectives turned class discussions into artful conversations.

In this essay Heidi Elemendorf and John Ottenhoff discuss the central role that intellectual communities should play in a liberal education and the value of conversation for our students, and we explore the ways in which web-based conversational forums can be best designed to fully support these ambitious learning goals. Coming from very different fields (Biology and English Literature) and in different course contexts (Microbiology course for non-majors and Shakespeare seminar), they nonetheless discover core values and design issues by looking closely at the discourse produced from online discussions. Centrally, they connect what they identify as expert-like behavior to the complexities of intellectual development in conversational contexts. 

Paula Berggren struggled to engage her students in critical thinking about unfamiliar art forms, until she posed a simple question on the class’s online discussion board: “Why do people dance?” She found that the students’ responses, rather than being just less-polished versions of what they might write in formal essays, warranted close analysis in their own right. In subsequent teaching, Berggren continues to incorporate some version of a middle space for student work, which not only increases students’ engagement but also allows her to observe and document their thought processes.