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© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
In the working world, people collaborate on projects and are evaluated on their process and results. In schools, however, students typically work individually and are evaluated with tests; they miss the opportunity to learn "real world" skills.
While most teachers recognize the value of collaboration, the barrier to its use in schools is that teachers have difficulty managing team projects and evaluating the students who work in them. Moreover, collaboration is hard to teach, but easier to learn in practice. Collaboration in schools also suffers from lack of pervasive shared space for students and an appropriate set of tools for working on shared projects, both synchronously and asynchronously.
The Collaboratory is a digitally-created project room which a student teams owns and uses to work on a project, much like the way many creative teams in business use a shared project space. It helps students learn to collaborate by embedding tools to facilitate collaboration within the environment itself. It embeds that collaboration within project-based learning so that students learn by doing. Students own the project and their space, and are thus more motivated to learn. Teachers have a palette of tools which provide quantitative and qualitative information for evaluation.
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Figure 1:View of the Collaboratory facing the Management Wall with the
Brainstorming Wall to the right and Communications Wall left.
The Collaboratory is laid out in the form of a room with eight walls arranged in an octagon. Each wall represents a step in a project: brainstorming, organization, planning, research, development, and deliverables. The sequential nature of project steps is represented in the flow of one wall to the next, while the cyclical nature of project steps is represented in the way that walls form an enclosed unit.
Walls typically house whiteboards or applications, while the floor shows the project schedule. Walls can be adapted as needed during a team work session. The Collaboratory also has a robust set of collaboration tools, including avatars, "recipes", various forms of video and voice communication, video "post-its", and whiteboards. Project tools include "teleproxies", a media organizer, a web vortex, applications, and wall mapping. Finally, teachers can make use of various tools, including logs, documents, and trails.
Each student team working on a project has their own Collaboratory which they can customize at any time. Collaboratories for all teams working on a given class assignment are clustered in project neighborhoods. Students can visit other Collaboratories, share resources, and collaborate with other student teams.
The Collaboratory prototype is designed to run on a broadband network or interactive television platform. While it takes advantage of a "next generation", gamepad-like input device, users can use standard input devices. Such a platform would allow students to use the Collaboratory at school or at home, without expensive computers or virtual reality goggles and gloves.
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Figure 2:This behavioral prototype showed the importance of constant voice
communication during "remote" collaboration.
Initial observation was conducted in various classes at Robeson and led to the initial concept of the Collaboratory. A constructivist approach to education emphasizing learning by doing [4] served as a compelling model for introducing the learning concepts. The Collaboratory design also benefited from research in various areas of education theory and collaboration, including [2,3,6].
Students used and evaluated various prototypes, which included both behavioral prototypes in the form of constructed environments and functional prototypes running on a computer with a special input device designed by fellow graduate student Jeff Harris. The video illustrates how observing students throughout the design process led to specific insights and interface enhancements.
Compared to the standard methods of teaching and testing, the Collaboratory offers the advantages of learning by doing, a solid set of real world skills including collaboration and project work, increased motivation and higher productivity through the use of technology, and better results through collaboration.
[2]. Damon, W, & Phelps, E. Critical distinctions among three approaches to peer education, International Journal of Education Research, 13 (1989), 9-19.
[3]. Means, B., Chelemer, C., & Knapp, M. S. (Eds.). Teaching Advanced Skills to At Risk Students: Views from Research and Practice. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco CA, 1991.
[4]. Papert, S. The Childrenšs Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Basic Books, New York NY, 1993.
[5]. Shrage, M. Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. Random House, New York NY, 1990.
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