Whooooo. We just submitted our draft paper to Frontiers in Education 2012. Here's the abstract of "Work in Progress – From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side: Creating an open compendium of teaching transformation stories, " which is licensed CC-BY-NC unlike the rest of the content on this site. I'm not thrilled with the noncommercial clause because it doesn't allow truly free use, but we're slowly learning how to work the copyright-in-academia game.
After I get some sleep and figure out better ideas for file hosting (upload everything to github?) than my exhausted brain can right now, I'll put the rest of the stuff up now that Sebastian and I have submitted the Author's Addendum that insists that we keep the ability to offer this CC-BY-NC. We also need to make the open data much easier to access. Eventually I'd like to come up with an Author's Addendum that lets us do CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Lots of bugs to fix. But I digress, and here's the abstract, and I'm going to bed.
Many professors are reluctant to transform their teaching practices from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side” for understandable reasons. Facilitating student work in a potentially unfamiliar setting has a steep learning curve and requires professors to relinquish control of their classrooms without assurance their career evaluations will benefit. However, professors who do transform their teaching practices continue to report exactly the same concerns – so how does the shift happen? This work-in-progress paper describes early efforts to address this question through interviews with professors who have involved their classes in open communities, which require such a shift in teaching practices for successful student participation. We have also adopted a “radically transparent research” approach for this project, inspired by the radical realtime transparency practices of the open communities our interviewees work with. This results in public and collaboratively constructed artifacts with the potential to broaden awareness of and participation in engineering education research, while creating a compendium of teaching transformation stories that can be shared with other professors considering similar transformations to their own teaching practices.