The Knowledge Media Laboratory was a program at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching headed by Toru Iiyoshi. The KML worked to create a future in which communities of teachers, faculty, programs, and institutions collectively advance teaching and learning by exchanging their educational knowledge, experiences, ideas, and reflections by taking advantage of various technologies and resources. I was one of the core members of KML from 2006 up until its closure in 2009. Over those three years we created a great deal of ground breaking work. Even though these projects are sunsetting, they a part of my portfolio that I am very proud of. I have begun archiving them here.

The Teaching and Learning Commons (Decommissioned in 2009)
The KEEP Toolkit (No Longer developed internally, 2009)
The Gallery of Teaching and Learning (Continuing)

The Goals of the The Knowledge Media Lab:

• To develop digital (or electronic) tools and resources that help to make knowledge of effective teaching practices and educational transformation efforts visible, shareable and reusable.
• To explore synergy among various technologies to better support the scholarship of teaching and learning.
• To build the capacity for faculty and teachers independently to take advantage of information and communications technologies that enable them to re-examine, rethink and represent teaching and student learning, and to share the outcomes in an effective and efficient way.
• To sustain communities of practice engaged in collaboratively improving teaching and student learning by building common areas to exchange knowledge and by building repositories for the representation of effective practice.

This analytics map of users from 2007 shows visitors to The Teaching & Learning Commons (orange) from over 800 cities across the globe. Similarly, The Gallery of Teaching & Learning (purple) has global visitors from over 700 cities and the KEEP Toolkit (green) receives visitors who represent 750 cities from around the world.

The Open Knowledge News was a seasonal newsletter published by the KML. I was Editor-in-Chief from winter of 2006 until its final issue in the summer of 2008. The article below is a heartfelt farewell I wrote for our final issue.

Archived issues:
Summer 2008
Spring 2008
Fall 2007
Summer 2007
Winter 2006/2007 (KEEP Newsletter)

A Look Back at the History of the Knowledge Media Laboratory

We've Come a Long Way
- By John Bruneau, Open Knowledge News, Summer Issue 2008

After a decade's worth of work, the Knowledge Media Laboratory would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the past and celebrate its many milestones. Over the past 10 years, many tools and technologies that further teaching and learning have been developed and utilized by the KML.

It all began with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Workspace. The site allowed the CASTL scholars to collect and discuss materials, and create snapshots for their scholarship of teaching and learning projects. In the early days (1998-2001), their multimedia representations of teaching and learning were built by hand. The Gallery of Teaching & Learning was then created to display these works on the World Wide Web.

The KML knew that the process for creating online representations could be easier, less cumbersome, and more engaging. In 2002, the Snapshot Tool was first developed to facilitate the creation of online content. The tool grew rapidly, becoming more intuitive and flexible; and overtime, it became a collection of tools. The Knowledge Exchange Exhibition Presentation Toolkit (KEEP Toolkit), has continued to grow and evolve, with new users joining daily. Now a fully open source project, other institutions have begun running and developing their own instances of the KEEP Toolkit.

As the KEEP Toolkit was advancing, more inspiring work was being produced, and The Gallery of Teaching & Learning continued to grow with new submissions by Carnegie Foundation program participants. At the same time, individual teachers and educators took to the KEEP Toolkit. It became apparent that this vibrant and growing community needed a place to...well, commune.

In early 2008, The Teaching and Learning Commonswent live and the IdeaBank was added to the arsenal of tools that help make teaching and learning public. Educators and students could mix and re-mix pedagogical resources, thoughts and ideas by creating their own collections of public snapshots, stitched groups and galleries. The Knowledge Media Lab had gone meta. Our original community has grown to the tens of thousands, and our humble projects have taken on a life of their own.

This fall, the much anticipated KEEP Toolkit 2.5 will hit SourceForge. This will be our final major version of the KEEP Toolkit produced in-house. Over the last 10 years there have been many changes at the KML, we have changed location and hardware, and many of our crew have come and gone, but we hope our colleagues around the world will continue to build upon and extend what our global education community has created. Thank you.


With Warmest Regards,
The Knowledge Media Laboratory Team