Updates from the KEEP Toolkit eNewsletter

Below is an excerpt from the Autumn 2006 KEEP Toolkit eNewsletter:

New Ways of Using the KEEP Toolkit
College Lesson Study Project by Bill Cerbin & Bryan Kopp

The process of Lesson Study is a unique form of collaborative classroom inquiry, frequently practiced in Japanese elementary schools, in which a small team of instructors designs, teaches, studies and refines a single class lesson. In the Spring of 2006, Bill Cerbin, professor of psychology and the Director, and Bryan Kopp, professor of English and the Associate Director of the College Lesson Study Project located at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, used the KEEP Toolkit to develop a procedure for documenting and publishing lesson studies by college instructors.

Seeing Student Thinking and Building a Space for Collaborative Faculty Curriculum Development by Whitney Schlegel

Whitney Schlegel is an Associate Professor of Biology and Director of Human Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is interested in collaborative student learning, pedagogies (such as case-based teaching), and exploring how students learn in teams. As a Carnegie Scholar (2003-2004), she carefully documented evidence of student learning in a team-based and case-based human physiology course.

Distributable KEEP
At the Knowledge Media Laboratory we are currently developing a distributable version of the KEEP Toolkit that will be available for download free of charge (GNU license). We are asking you, as a partner institution, to help us expedite this process by beta testing Distributable KEEP. We can provide you with installation instructions, as well as the source code to the KEEP Toolkit. In return, we ask that you become an active member in our development community by participating in our new developer’s forum.

KEEP Toolkit is now integrated with Sakai!
KEEP Toolkit can now be fully integrated with Sakai, an online open source Collaboration and Learning Environment, used by a wide range of institutions to support teaching and learning, portfolios and research collaboration. A plug-in for Sakai 2.1 or later enables one-stop authentication for easy access of KEEP Toolkit from within a Sakai instance through the use of web services. (The plug-in package is available for the distributable version of KEEP 1.9).

The New Gallery of Teaching and Learning
The Knowledge Media Laboratory is pleased to announce the launch of our new Gallery of Teaching & Learning. The Gallery has received an extensive makeover, which includes:

• A more intuitive design
• Features that allow us to receive feedback from visitors
• Sorting tools to help you find your information faster
• Integrated Google search within the Gallery and collections

More details: Autumn 2006 KEEP Toolkit eNewsletter