| Final Report | Participants | Portfolios | Meeting Schedule | Sessions | Documents | Resources | Presentations |
The Disciplinary Commons is a new project funded by the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges and the University of Washington, Tacoma, having two primary objectives.
The mechanism for achieving the project goals is via the shared production of course portfolios. This mechanism will be instantiated through a series of monthly seminars involving 8 - 10 Computer Science faculty members at community colleges and baccalaureate-degree granting universities in the South Puget Sound region of Washington State. Participants will have an initial, full-day meeting in September 2005 and will then meet one afternoon per month over the 2005-6 academic year at locations that rotate among the participant home institutions. At these meetings, participants will learn how to construct a course portfolio, skills of classroom assessment and peer review, and will critically evaluate one another's work-in-progress.
The course portfolio, well known as a method for advancing teaching practice and improving student learning, is a set of documents that "focuses on the unfolding of a single course, from conception to results" (Hutchings, 1998). Course portfolios typically include a course's learning objectives, its contents and structure, a rationale for how this course design meets its objectives, and the course's role in a larger degree program. Importantly, the portfolio also includes evaluations of student work throughout the term, indicating the extent to which students are meeting course objectives and the type and quantity of feedback they are receiving. Each participant in the project will construct a course portfolio for a course that they teach that is on the path for a baccalaureate degree in a Computer Science program.
The power of the portfolio approach is multiplied when there are several examples available for a single disciplinary aspect: the Commons would act as a public and peer-reviewed portfolio repository and archive, charting and calibrating excellence over time. Further, by linking educators between community colleges and universities, a regional network of educators within a single discipline will be strengthened for future collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
The leader for this project and workshop facilitator is Josh Tenenberg, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator in Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington, Tacoma's Institute of Technology. Most recently, Josh has collaborated with Sally Fincher from the University of Kent at Canterbury and Marian Petre, from the Open University (UK), on research that centers on bringing practitioners and expert researchers together in order to initiate principled, large-scale teaching and learning research in Computer Science. As part of this effort, he is Principal Investigator in two grants from the National Science Foundation, (known as Bootstrapping and Scaffolding) that use a workshop format to provide Computer Science faculty with a 'way in' to high-quality CS Education research.
The Disciplinary Commons project has been co-developed with Sally Fincher who will be running a parallel series of workshops in the UK.