Why a Knowledge Loom?
A loom metaphor suggests a work in progress, a workspace where threads of thought and experience can be drawn from many sources to craft a cohesive and useful body of wisdom.

An education-focused Knowledge Loom* suggests education-minded users accessing a workspace where they can weave distributed threads of information together in such a way as to create a fabric that wears well on their own conditions, needs, and visions for excellence in teaching and learning.

The Loom is available for all its users to continually add their own threads of wisdom and experience to the content.

* The name Knowledge Loom is used with permission from the Kellogg Foundation.

Where does the content come from?
The content comes from many places.

• Our technical assistance partner organizations
• Private educational products and services developers/providers
• Individual schools and districts
• You!

On a regular basis, theme-based collections of promising practices are developed and spotlighted. The Knowledge Loom grows as we regularly add information about many areas that concern educators today. These include literacy and math instruction, equity, education technology, school organization, community involvement, and others.

What are The Knowledge Loom policies?
The content and discussions on the Knowledge Loom are public and open for anyone to read. Anyone may also join the Knowledge Loom community as a registered user. Registered users obtain a log-in account with password and may post messages to discussion areas. Registered users also have the option of receiving e-mail updates (at most twice a month) announcing new discussions and events taking place on The Knowledge Loom.

For registration purposes we request minimal contact information, including name, e-mail address (if you have one), and a few other details designed to give others in the community a general sense of your role and location. Registration carries no obligation beyond the observance of basic courtesy in interactions with the Knowledge Loom community. We may occasionally send registered users brief e-mail surveys requesting feedback about the site in order to make improvements to The Knowledge Loom. However, we will not share your registration information without your permission in any other way than by inclusion in the headers of messages you post.

This site contains links to other Web sites. The Knowledge Loom is not responsible for the practices or the content of these other Web sites.

How should I cite information from The Knowledge Loom?
The Knowledge Loom is a publication of The Education Alliance at Brown University. Please give credit to The Education Alliance whenever you use Knowledge Loom materials or cite the Loom in a paper or other publication. If you use links from the Loom to access other Web sites, please give proper credit to the publishers of those Web sites.

If you plan to cite The Knowledge Loom using APA format, we would suggest that you single out the particular spotlight you've used (e.g., "Adolescent Literacy in the Content Areas") and cite it as follows:

How did we get started?
In October, 1998 the United States Department of Education (U.S. ED) assigned resources to the Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University to develop a "...sustainable, customer-driven, distributed repository/database of information on best practices in teaching and learning."

After talking to many educators, we realized that a "repository" was not enough. Our vision was The Knowledge Loom -- a comprehensive electronic environment that moves from information delivery to information creation, from data to people, from a learning library to a learning community.

What are we?

The Education Alliance at Brown University develops educational products and services for school administrators, policymakers, teachers, and parents in New England, New York, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Central to our efforts is a commitment to equity and excellence.