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MERLOT and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Put Effective Innovations into Practice
Stanford, CA, August 2004 — MERLOT and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching are pleased to announce that they have formed a collaboration to deliver resources, tools, services and professional development programs to advance teaching and learning.
MERLOT (www.merlot.org), established in 1997, is an international cooperative that provides the academic community of teachers, students, librarians, technology staff, and administrators with an online community library where they can freely share high-quality educational resources that improve learning and teaching. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching shares this mission with MERLOT. The Carnegie Foundation invents new knowledge and develops tools and ideas that foster positive change and enhanced teaching and learning in colleges and schools. Bridging the two organizations' efforts is the Foundation's Knowledge Media Lab that explores innovative ways to apply emerging technologies to transform the knowledge implicit in effective practice and educational transformation efforts into ideas, theories, and resources that can be shared widely to advance teaching and student learning.
"In addition to enabling educators and students to access the wealth of quality educational materials, it is critical to help them effectively share their experience and reflective ideas so that they can build collective knowledge to advance their teaching and learning," said Toru Iiyoshi, Carnegie Senior Scholar and Director of the Knowledge Media Lab (KML). "MERLOT is a vibrant, growing, academic community of educators that can transform innovative practices into widely deployed practices, and we are delighted to share with them the educational tools and resources being developed at the KML to further advance their important work."
The value of open sharing of knowledge, work, and evaluations of the teaching and learning enterprise is a cornerstone of The Carnegie Foundation and MERLOT collaboration.
"Guided and shared reflective practices are hallmarks of productive professional development for teachers. Integrating The Carnegie Foundation's expertise, tools, and on-line resources with MERLOT's community services will enable teachers to put their plans for innovations into practice easily and effectively," added Gerry Hanley, Executive Director of MERLOT. "The expertise that The Carnegie Foundation brings to the MERLOT community is a great benefit and exemplifies how cooperation between higher education organizations can rapidly and effectively provide the shared services we all need."
The joint efforts will initially focus on three projects. In the first, The Carnegie Foundation will catalogue in MERLOT, both their collection of multimedia-enhanced electronic portfolios that document accomplished works of the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as other resources developed at the KML. Using its website services, MERLOT will develop models for "personal collections" of these resources. Second, the Knowledge, Exchange, Exhibition and Presentation (KEEP) Toolkit will be added to the MERLOT services. The free KEEP Toolkit creates "reflective case studies" that enable teachers and students to learn from personal success stories of instructors who have designed effective learning environments. Finally, the Carnegie Foundation's KML and MERLOT will offer professional development workshops in how to use the KEEP Toolkit to document and share pedagogical knowledge and experience, with the first workshop delivered at the MERLOT International Conference, August 4-6, 2004.
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." The improvement of teaching and learning is central to all of the work of the Foundation. The Foundation is located in Stanford, Calif.
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