The 2005-2007 CTE-Lilly Fellows forged a fellowship steeped in rich conversations about teaching, academic life and what a pedagogy of happiness might look like. To be an effective teacher, the group determined, you must be a happy teacher, teaching with the purpose of helping students find what will, in turn, make them happy.

At the close of two years punctuated with weekly teaching-oriented discussions shared with colleagues from the different walks and disciplines of the University, the Lilly Fellows began to plan their capstone project. For this Socratic cohort nothing recommended itself so much as the wiki; a forum inherently collaborative and dynamic, offering a virtual space for colleagues from across the campus to share reflections and join discussions. With their wiki, the 05-07 CTE-Lilly Fellows hope to build a living document, a space for the concerted production and dissemination of knowledge about teaching and learning, as Sue White explains.

Two years ago, ten faculty members from across the University embarked on a journey. We were newly-selected Lilly Fellows on a mission to improve our own teaching, and, if we could, share with the rest of the campus all that we had learned. Our best meetings were our conversations about teaching, sharing not only specific teaching tips, but also our philosophy about teaching and learning. Our original group of ten declined to seven in our second year as Lilly Fellows as we continued our conversations and looked for ways to be able to share the richness of these conversations past the formal close of the program.

The result of our discussions is a wiki - an online forum - where we, and we hope many more from the University community, can find and share ideas about teaching and learning. We've seeded the wiki by writing down our thoughts regarding the conversations we've had over the past two years, and we will continue to post to the wiki. The original Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit is one of the net's most visited web sites. Corporations are implementing their own wikis, as a way to improve collaboration and to maintain institutional knowledge in one place.

We invite anyone in the University community to post as well. Please go to http://www.otal.umd.edu/wiki/cte/ and check it out – you can look for articles on Teaching as Performance, What Helps Faculty Teach and What Helps Students Learn. Add your own topics, articles or teaching tips that have helped you become a better teacher. The more richness we have on the wiki, the more we will all benefit. The wiki is a way to continue to learn from each other. There is no such thing as too many good ideas.