We are exactly one week away from the inaugural LU Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. It will be held on Monday, May 14 at the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The event begins at 2:30 PM with formal presentations being made for each of the four current FLC beginning at 3:00 PM. Judging by the excitement of the FLC members, this promises to be a terrific event. Everyone in the LU community (faculty/staff/students) are welcome to come and enjoy refreshments, fellowship, and to hear about what each of the four FLC have been working on this past academic year. If you are interested in creating a FLC for 2012-13, you can submit your ideas online from now until May 16. The FLC program has enhanced the sense of community among the participants and assisted the formation of networks and research groups. Several of you have asked for suggestions for summer reading. We are still very impressed with Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do which is very much about faculty development. We are just as impressed with Martin Seligman's latest book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, which is more about improving your life in general rather than career development although the ideas can be applied to any situation. Jean Twenge's book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before is a great read and very focused on understanding many of the students enrolled in your courses. You might want to take a look at Skip Downing's On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life. This is the textbook that we will use to teach the LMAR 1101 class this fall. If you are interested in submitting an application to participate in the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) program, you should pan on attending one of the two informational sessions. Both will be held in 622 MJGL. The first session will be on May 10 at 3:30 PM. The second session will be held Wednesday, May 16 at 3:30 PM. You can find more information or download the request for applications on the ACES website. Nik Osborne, the head of Indiana University's e-texts program, lays out how his institution plans to "disrupt" the traditional textbook publishing model with the help of publishers themselves. Five other universities will also be running pilots based on the model developed by IU through a program set up by Internet2's NET+ service. Participating universities will get McGraw-Hill e-texts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their learning management system, and the opportunity to be part of a joint research study of e-text use and perceptions. Are you looking to create a massively open online courses or MOOC? Jim Groom, an instructional technologist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, says his open online courses are not about scale and efficiency but about imagination and anarchy. Groom decided to take his course on digital storytelling, DS106, into the open waters of the Web, inviting anyone, anywhere, to create, submit and comment on assignments. The reins have been slipping from his hands ever since, and Groom says he could not be happier. There is no textbook in DS106 and Groom does not lecture or teach media editing skills. In Groom’s section of the course, in-person attendance is optional. The instructors consult with students about the design of the course and its website. Two of Groom’s students are building out a new section of the DS106 website where students can vote up each other’s work. Levine and his students are in the process of planning another area where students can remix each other’s work. “The students are in many ways running and designing this as it goes,” says Groom. The weekly assignments, which make up 30 percent of the final grade, are created by the students themselves -- the 75 enrolled at Mary Washington and the hundreds of others participating free on the Web -- and aggregated in an assignment bank on DS106's website.