Our Purpose The Georgetown/Visible Knowledge Project Cluster will provide leadership on the use of networked environments to facilitate collaborative work and knowledge building in the scholarship of teaching and learning. We will improve understanding about what it means to make inquiries into student learning more visible through digital environments. We will explore the impact of this visibility on the ways faculty build and share knowlege about teaching and learning, and on faculty work in general, especially in terms of peer review, roles and rewards.

YEAR ONE ACTIVITIES (2003-04): Goal: Begin mapping the terrain around collaboration and knowledge-building in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Hold a series of conversations and meetings that will lead to a preliminary vision statement on the linkages among knowledge building, collaboration, and technology in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Action: We are holding a series of conversations with scholarship of teaching and learning leaders, centered around an informal meeting in December, jointly held with the Carnegie Foundation (see "early insights" below).

Looking at VKP and beyond, we are exploring how the scholarship of teaching and learning advances through both individual and communal activity, and with different levels of "proto-public" and public representation.

Year One Activities: 2003-04, cont. Goal: Model and document instances of collaborative inquiry in the scholarship of teaching and learning, where groups of faculty are sharing questions, pooling data, and making plans to go public together. Action: Through the development of the mid-project report "VKP@3" we are documenting models of collaborative inquiry within the project, including the Cerritos College faculty participation in an online institute and joint project on "Student development in learning to argue from evidence." Action: We will hold a Winter Institute for the Visible Knowledge Project at Cerritos Community College, Feburary 26-27, 2004, with an emphasis on collaborative practices in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Action: At the March Colloquium, folks from Youngstown State University, Cerritos College, and Georgetown will lead a roundtable discussion on "Networked Inquiry," featuring three different models of collaborative inquiry growing out of the Visible Knowledge Project.

Year One Activities, 2003-04, cont. Goal: Conceptualize and build a digital repository for scholarship of teaching and learning materials. Action: In Spring and Summer 2003 we developed an initial conceptualization for a "digital repository" for scholarship of teaching and learning objects. Now, with the "knowledge building" conversations helping to refine the purpose and shape of the repository, we will begin development on a prototype in Spring 2004. The creation of the repository is a joint project with the Georgetown Digital Library, and closely linked to related work being carried out by the Knowledge Media Lab (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation.

Our Goals 1. Document effective practices of different scholarship of teaching and learning communities, beginning with the Visible Knowledge Project. 2. Develop models of collaborative inquiry, and study the different ways that collaborative inquiry might connect to disciplines and institutions. 3. Build, test, and implement a digital repository for scholarship of teaching and learning materials. Begin to map out some of the relationships between digital scholarship of teaching and learning tools, electronic portfolios, and digital libraries/digital object repositories. 4. Explore and model some ways to advance the peer review of the scholarship of teaching through digital networked environments; begin to map the impact of digital scholarship of teaching and learning tools and publication on faculty recognition and rewards. 5. Engage a national dialogue on some of the political issues associated with the scholarship of teaching, as well as the places where the politics of scholarship of teaching and learning and the politics of using educational technologies converge.

WHO WE ARE: Georgetown University / Visible Knowledge Project (Cluster Leader) California State University--Monterey Bay Cerritos Community College Youngstown State University LaGuardia Community College (pending) University of Kansas VISIBLE KNOWLEDGE PROJECT This leadership cluster grows out of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), a national scholarship of teaching and leraning project on teaching, learning, and technology. Cerritos College VKP Campus Page As a core campus of VKP, Cerritos College is engaged in a collaborative inquiry around the ways that students learn to reason from evidence, as looked at by nine faculty in different disciplines. Modeling and reflecting on their collaborative inquiry is a major focus of their cluster participation. LaGuardia Community College VKP Campus Page LaGuardia Community College, as an institution, is fully engaged in an extensive e-portfolio learning project. One of the LGCC orientations to the cluster is the exploration of the intersections between the scholarship of teaching and learning (and what that means in a community college setting) and electronic portfolios at an institutional level, which in itself is a form of networked inquiry. Youngstown State University VKP Campus Page Closely linked to the Center for Working Class Studies, the Youngstown participation in the cluster is also focused on the political implications of the scholarship of teaching and learning, looking at changing demands on faculty work in environments being transformed by scholarship of teaching and technology simultaneously. University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence KU's VKP relationship brings to the cluster interests in peer review and the course portfolio as ways of creating reflections on learning as a foundation of professional practice. Whether benchmark portfolio or inquiry, representing learning and teaching connects in fundamental ways to issues of the technology infrastructure that supports new practices.

The VKP Cluster is asking questions about how faculty build their own knowledge about student learning, then share and connect it with others. How might networked environments--portfolio tools, representation tools (like this snapshot tool), and collaboration tools--help faculty connect simple and fine-grained evidence of student learning (like the annotated "think aloud" transcript above) with meaningful representations of teaching and learning that can be shared with others?

Some Early Insights The Cluster has begun to map the key issues related to collaborative practice and knowledge building in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and how they might be supported by a "technological infrastructure." We will produce a public vision statement on these issues by the end of the spring. A few of the key insights emerging from these conversations include: Collaboration is fundamental to scholarship of teaching and learning practices at every stage of inquiry and development. Collaboration implies a whole range of practices, from peer audiences for initial reflections, to structured working groups around developing insights, to collaborative teams engaged in structured, common inquiry. Knowledge building in the scholarship of teaching and learning depends on the ability of faculty to work flexibly with the granular materials of teaching and learning; it also depends on the ability of faculty to integrate the practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning (engaging student work, reflecting in new ways on the familiar, sharing insights with others) into everyday professional activities. A technological infrastructure needs to support three broad dimensions of knowledge building: (1) the creation of representations in many different versions for multiple audiences; (2) social interaction where colleagues can exchange knowledge within multiple communities of practice; and (3) the storing and archiving of knowledge, where faculty can access exemplars, search the literature, and locate their own work among research agendas.

LINKAGES TO OTHER CLUSTERS AND PROJECTS Clusters with Closely Related Interests: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in a Research University (Indiana) Mentoring Newer Scholars of Teaching and Learning (Rockhurst) Related Projects: Peer Review of Teaching Project Crossroads Online Institute Georgetown DigitalLibrary Wisconsin "Lesson Study" Project (Bill Cerbin) Knowledge Media Lab(Carnegie Foundation) American Studies Crossroads Project Peer Review of Teaching Project Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at UW LaCrosse Knowledge Media Lab (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) Rockhurst University Summer Institute