Online Journals and Journal Articles of Particular Significance

Whitman Takes Manhattan — This article describes a multi-campus online project on “The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman” being led by Matt Gold (who got a start-up grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. )
New Technologies for Essential Learning, We Need R&D for Teaching With Technology, and Still Moving From Teaching to Learning — These three excellent articles were written by Randy Bass and Brett Eynon, who were the Guest Editors for this issue of the journal.

Blending With Purpose: The Multimodal Model — In a recent (April 2009) special issue of JALN devoted to blended learning edited and introduced by Tony Picciano, this excellent article by Tony is the lead-off.
An Administrator’s Guide to the Whys and Hows of Blended Learning — Also in the April :09 special issue, this article by Mary Niemiec and George Otte adumbrates the institutional benefits and the institutional challenges of the integration of online and on-campus instruction.

Faculty as Authors of Online Courses: Support and Mentoring — This useful article explains how to create and revise online courses that provide students with a coherent learning experience.
Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning — Another excellent article by Randy Bass and Brett Eynon, this is a description of “the new shape of learning with digital media” based on 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.

Presence Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning in a 3D Virtual Imersive World’ — The authors describe a pedagogical innovation that capitalizes on what virtual worlds have to offer to social aspects of teaching and learning. They characterize this approach as “Presence Pedagogy (P2), a way of teaching and learning that creates a genuine community of practice. According to the author’s case studies, students engaged in a P2 learning environment become members of a broader community of practice in which everyone in the community is a potential instructor, peer, expert, and novice—all of whom learn with and from one another.

EthicShare Examines Models for Online Communities — McCready and Smith report on a November 2008 seminar sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources entitled “Building Online Communities for Interdisciplinary Scholars”. They examine the the opportunities and challenges in building online communities, in particular such issues as discovery and exploration of resources, aggregation, sustainability, and engagement and collaboration.

The Chemistry of Facebook: Using Social Networking to Create an Online Community for Organic Chemistry — The author reports on case studies of the use of Facebook as a supplement to face-to-face classroom instruction. Students were very familiar with it, and thus, preferred it to Blackboard’s and WebCTs Discussion Board forums as an informal venue for asking questions relating to their laboratory experiences and for find relevance and context for the results they obtained in the lab.

Learning: Doing That Without Being— The author discusses research on asynchronous learning in K-12 and college courses and explores its value and some practical applications.

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