The Teaching and Learning Commons was a user based community of knowledge sharing. Drawing on the many social and collaborative ideals of the web 2.0 era, the Commons quickly became the new innovative focus of the Knowledge Media Lab. The Teaching and Learning Commons was originally conceived as a community area to bridge the KEEP Toolkit and the Gallery of Teaching and Learning, thus bringing those that are researching our content together with those creating content. However, during development the project scope continued to expand. Social bookmarking, web events, podcasts, and aggregation quickly become part of the equation. This culminated in the birth of a new collaborative tool, The Idea Bank. It was an exciting time, every day I was forced to learn new things about ajax and javascript as well as teamwork and leadership. Because most the project's implementation was front end based, it was in my lap from start to finish. When the Knowledge media lab closed its doors, so too did the doors close on the Teaching and Learning commons. I was sad to see it go.

The CarnegieViews podcasts section lives on, and continues to grow as part of the newly rebuilt Carnegie Foundation website. As for the rest of the Teaching and Learning Commons? All the code is backed up but digital innovations lose their relevance rather quickly. It is the conceptual innovations we achieved that are really worth preserving. However, they are harder to archive. Part of the reason I made this page is to maintain some of the thoughts that went into the creation of the Teaching and Learning Commons. I am hoping every member of our brilliant team keeps their mental backup of the project easily searchable. I know Toru Iiyoshi is.

There are plenty of bibliographic and bookmarking tools for websites, but what about one that promotes introspection and reflection? There is a plethora of great sites created to promote teaching and learning, but what if we could save these sites, comment on them, and share our reflections and insights with our colleagues?

The IdeaBank was created with the goal of allowing educators to share particular resources they discover online, include their own thoughts and reflections, and then organize the sites into lists, called IdeaLists, that can be viewed publicly by members of the Teaching & Learning Commons community. The IdeaBank allows educators to share sites about teaching and learning with collegial insight, recommendations and constructive critique.

The Teaching and Learning Commons is an intellectual community space provided to enrich and encourage exchange of knowledge about teaching and learning.

We acknowledge the growth in representations of educational knowledge from instructors at all levels, increasing numbers of digital learning objects, and large and small efforts at educational transformation. We thus offer this space as a place in which teachers, learners, and institutions can engage in knowledge building and sharing. To participate in this collective effort, you are invited to:

• create representations of effective teaching practice
• share these representations with the community
• read, understand, and comment on others' work
• build on the work of other community members
• and, based on what is learned, re-create new representations to contribute to the commons.

We provide tools, guidance, and models to help users build representations that are reflective, evidenced based, and rooted in the practice of teaching and learning.

We encourage exchange by providing suggestions and means to locate, to comment on, and to re-submit work to the Commons. Means include different modes of search, ways to annotate, and methods for connecting with others.

We envision a categorical structure that grows from the bottom up. While we provide broad categorization in the form of disciplinary boundaries, we hope that community tagging will provide the best map for traversing this space.

We intentionally link this Teaching and Learning Commons to the work of Carnegie Foundation programs and of tens of thousands of the KEEP Toolkit users, imagining the incredible potential for conversations and synergies among Foundation supported work, and a world of teachers and learners.

We want participation in this Commons to grow organically and to be sustained by the deepening knowledge of users. We also hope it is engaging and rewarding.