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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann draw on their work with student-produced digital stories to explore how the protocols surrounding particular new media technologies shape the ways we think about, practice, and represent work in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The authors describe the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive, an innovative grid they designed to represent their findings, after considering how the technology of delivery could impact practice and interpretation. This project represents an intriguing synthesis of digital humanities and the scholarship of teaching and learning, raising important questions about the possibilities for analyzing and representing student learning in Web 2.0 environments.

Effective habits of research begin early and should be practiced often. Unearthing discoveries, making connections, and evaluating judiciously are research traits valued by Taimi Olsen in her first-year composition course. Not only should these research habits exist in the library, but Olsen advocates the application of these habits in online archives hones students' abilities to become expert researchers.

Clicker technology, often used in large-enrollment science courses, works well when every question has a single right answer. Lynne Adrian wanted to find out whether clickers could be used in disciplines which raise more questions than answers, and how illuminating the gray areas between “right” and “wrong” could help her students think critically about American studies. She found that the technology allowed her to preserve traces of the otherwise ephemeral class discussions, enabling her to analyze the types of questions she was asking in class and to track their effects on students’ written work throughout the semester.

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.