Today I returned to Inventio online and read a very good paper: Hugh Sockett's essay, "Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching", from Spring 2000. Sockett essentially looks at the purpose of the scholarship of teaching, which is to engage with a community and not simply expand the boundaries of knowledge. Following Pat Hutchings & Lee Shulman's point that good teaching is not necessarily produced by scholarship in and of itself, Sockett writes that the scholarship of teaching -- like all good scholarship -- should be:

a) public "community property"
b) open to critique and evaluation
c) in a form others can build on

What strikes me about this simple criteria is that this is everything that a weblog makes possible. This is everything that the Pedablogue should be, and what the community of edublogs out there are in a position to become, even as they function as a sort of teacher's memoirs. As Hutchings and Shulman put it: "A scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. It requires a kind of 'going meta,' in which faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning." To this end, I want to renew my invitation to both students and teachers reading this to continue to "build on" this page with comments below the essays (which might "critique and evaluate" what I say, as well as by discussing these topics in your own blogs.