This is a notice about a new, free, online forum on the role of technology in liberals arts education.
Dear Humanist Friends,
We are pleased to announce the first edition of ACADEMIC COMMONS.
Academic Commons offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources. We strongly believe that classroom teachers–established instructors and tomorrow’s professors–need a genuinely open forum for this discussion and hope that Academic Commons will provide it.
Academic Commons also provides a forum for academic technology projects and groups (the Developer’s Kit) and a link to a new learning object referatory (LoLa). Our library archives all materials we publish and also provides links to allied organizations, mailing lists, blogs, and journals through a Professional Development Center.
Highlights of our First Edition
The first edition of Academic Commons features essays by Richard Lanham (“Copyright 101″), Michael Joyce (“Interspace: Our Commonly Valued Unknowing”), Patricia O’Neill and Janet Simons (“Using Technology in Learning to Speak the Language of Film”), and Michelle Glaros (“The Dangers of Just-In-Time Education”), and an interview with Gerald Graff. The issue also includes two teaching and learning “vignettes,” a good handful of reviews (websites, hardware, and software) and showcases (exemplary academic web projects), and links to a variety of interesting teaching, learning, and technology projects. We’ve already formed a number of groups onsite and look forward to more participation. The complete Table of Contents is at http://academiccommons.org/august2005/.
Contribute!
We are looking for contributions from faculty, librarians, technologists, and other stakeholders in the academic enterprise. We publish original content for which we pay a small honorarium. We also publish selected links to interesting and useful materials published elsewhere, as well as a growing collection of links to professional associations, resources, announcements and conferences organized into a Professional Development Center. As editor of the Center for Teaching and Learning, I would especially encourage you to submit “vignettes” about your experiments with technology in the classroom, “posters” that display exemplary course work or teaching portfolios, or essays about your work with teaching and technology.
Stay Informed!
Receive the Academic Commons’s quarterly newsletter. If you are already a member of www.academiccommons.org, log onto the website and click on “My Account.” Choose the Edit tab, then click on the Professional Information link. Check the box at the top of the page. If you are not already registered, join us at http://academiccommons.org/user/register. An RSS feed is available at http://academiccommons.org/rss.xml. Questions and comments can be sent to editor@academiccommons.org.
John Ottenhoff
Associate Provost
Chair and Professor, Department of English Alma College, Alma, MI 48801
phone: 989.463.7138
Editor, Center for Teaching and Learning Academic Commons http://www.academiccommons.org
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