With VIPEr, a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship. It's all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.

Luke Fernandez reports out from Apple's AcademiX 2009. In current economic climes, it's an inexpensive conference option--thanks to Apple--and as Fernandez discovers, it offers an engaging exploration of digitial technologies and their impact on teaching and learning. For upcoming AcademiX 2009 conferences, see http://www.apple.com/education/academix/  . Normal 0

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.

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.

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 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?”